A thousand healths: Jean-Luc Nancy and the possibility of democratic biopolitics

Struction: Co-appearance without coordination

The concept of struction emerges in Nancy’s recent work as the culmination of his earlier concerns with the themes of community, plurality, and worldhood. ⁵ The immediate context of its presentation is Nancy’s meditation on technology, whose historical unfolding he analyzes in terms of the dialectic of construction and deconstruction. The “constructive” paradigm that defines modernity is described by Nancy as architectural or architectonic, endowed with a coordinating principle or engineering design that applies to the entire order in question, bringing all its elements into an intelligible unity. However pluralist one’s conception of the world was, it always ultimately referred to some kind of principle of the coordination of this plurality or its construction as a single whole. From the outset, this constructive paradigm was accompanied by its opposite, which Nancy describes as destructive or deconstructive, associating it both with the aesthetics of Mallarme and Baudelaire and the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger. ⁶ Whereas the constructive paradigm endowed the world with the arche and the architect, the principle of order and the subject of its production, deconstruction maintained the contingency of all things, the originary absence of any arche. Evidently, this paradigm did not seek the destruction of all that is, but rather challenged the principle of construction itself, exposing its own destructive force and the illusory character of its claims to coordination. Thus, every claim to the constructibility of natural or social orders would in this dialectic end up challenged and undermined by the insistence on the destructive force or tendency, more often than not emanating from the constructive principle itself (e.g. the nihilism of technology).

Nancy’s diagnosis of contemporary state of affairs, which quickly moves beyond the question of technology to embrace the ontological dimension, posits that both of these paradigms have now become vacuous.

We have come to a point in which architectonics and architecture – understood as the determination of an essential construction or essence as construction – no longer have value. They have worn themselves out by themselves. It is not only a construction that has been destroyed by time. It is the very principle of construction that has been weakened. ⁷

This notion of struction brings together a variety of themes that Nancy has worked on in the last three decades: the inoperative community without any content to be shared aside from sharing itself, the logic of “compearance” of singularities in common without anything common actually appearing in it, the generation of multiple worlds in an “acosmic” multiverse, etc. ¹⁵ The idea of struction affirms being-in-common in the absence of any predicate or principle, even the negative principle of expropriation and the rupture of individual identity that characterizes the notion of community in the thought of Georges Bataille and, later, Roberto Esposito. ¹⁶ The community of struction is not structured around any munus (obligation, debt), since it comprises such disparate and incommensurable entities that no munus could possibly bring or hold them together. Instead of the “breakdown of individual borders and the mutual infection of wounds,” ¹⁷ Nancy affirms contingency, dispersion, errancy and proliferation that expose singular entities to contact and touch without necessarily rupturing or rending them. ¹⁸

While it would be easy to interpret struction in a purely negative sense, Nancy insists that the exhaustion of all principles of construction and coordination

…does not necessarily signify having regressed or degenerated. There may be progress in the passage beyond the processes of construction, instruction and destruction. Struction is the liberation from the obsession that wants to think the real or Being under a schema of construction and that thus exhausts itself in a pointless quest for an architect or mechanic of the world. ¹⁹

Democracy: Politics without affirmation

As an ontological concept, struction is not immediately political. No determinate political position follows from the understanding of the being of beings as “heaping up without putting together.” ²² Nor is the ontology of struction able to provide anything like a stable grounding for a political orientation: “‘Being’ is no longer in itself, but rather continuity, contact, tension, distortion, crossing and assemblage. […] What is given to us only consists in the juxtaposition and simultaneity of a copresence in which the co- does not bear any particular value.” ²³ And yet, it is possible to pose the question of what political regime would be adequate to this ontology of coexistence without a common principle, of presence without an architecture or an architectonic. It is evident that for the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that Nancy analyzed at some length the disorder of struction must give way to the reconstruction of human existence in accordance with a certain principle of construction, be it natural or historical, racial or class-based. Yet, even the forms of politics we would not associate with totalitarianism tend to posit their task in terms of the construction of a certain social, political, or economic order and are hardly content with “heaping up without putting together.” Is there, then, a form of politics that would view struction as legitimate and let it unfold without any relapse into construction, as something that is not merely there, but also ought to be the way it is? This question of legitimizing struction leads us to a reengagement with Nancy’s earlier work, The Truth of Democracy. ²⁴

Nancy’s starting point in rethinking the idea of democracy is the radical pluralism of incommensurable ends, senses, forms of life, or what he calls generically procedures of affirmation. Throughout this text Nancy engages in a somewhat esoteric debate with Alain Badiou, whose “truth procedures” are famously limited to four: politics, science, art, and love. ²⁵ In contrast, Nancy’s procedures of affirmation may well proliferate to infinity and include such banal everyday activities as jogging, yoga, dreaming, gastronomy, or enology. ²⁶ The second difference from Badiou concerns the status assigned to politics among these procedures. While Badiou counts politics among truth procedures, Nancy explicitly removes it from the list of affirmative procedures that set themselves their own ends, and limits its function to opening and guarding the space in which such procedures may unfold. “Power is in place to enable societized human beings to work out their own goals for themselves, goals over which power as such is powerless: the endless ends of meaning, of meanings, of forms, of intensities of desire.” ²⁷ Democracy is the form of government of the incommensurable plurality of struction that prevents it from succumbing to the temptation of construction, the reordering of the society as a whole in accordance with some architectural principle, the totalization of plurality into a new determinate figure, the endowment of being-in-common with a common being.

For Nancy, every affirmative procedure is tempted by the idea of its own totalization, “of a form incorporating all the expressive forms of being-in-common.” ²⁸ Yet, this totalization is manifestly impossible in most of these procedures due to their limited and particularistic character: we may proclaim a particular opera, rapper, steakhouse, or trainers as the “best in the world,” but the world tends to be entirely indifferent to such proclamations and we normally tend to leave it there. It is only politics, which deals with its site in its entirety, that “allows it to be thought that something like totality might be attainable and, for that ‘political’ reason, [is] driven to erase its own boundary by claiming that ‘everything is political’ or that politics takes precedence over any other praxis.” ²⁹ It is this drive of politics to embrace the totality of what is that leads to various forms of “totalitarianism,” which destroy the very possibility of the continuous generation of sense in diverse affirmative procedures. All politics, including ostensibly democratic politics, is always at the risk of collapsing into totalitarianism. Indeed, Nancy argues that one of the reasons for the contemporary disappointment in, or even the crisis of, democracy in the West has to do with the expectation (which is entirely unwarranted in his scheme) that democracy would totalize the people, community, or republic as an actual political subject, produce the demos whose name it invokes in the immanence of social reality. ³⁰

In order to counter this drive for totalization, politics must be held rigorously distinct from the other procedures of setting ends, making sense, or affirming values: while the latter may continue to aspire to the totality they can never attain, politics must rather consist in a movement of “detotalization”: “politics is far from being ‘everything’ – even though everything passes through it and meets up or crosses paths in it. If ‘everything is political’, it is insofar as the ‘everything’ can be neither total nor totalized in any way.” ³¹ In Nancy’s argument, democratic politics “removes from the order of the state – without taking away anything from the functions that belong to it – the assumption of the ends of man, of common and singular existence.” ³² Democracy opens up the possibility for incommensurable or non-equivalent affirmative procedures to unfold, but is itself radically without affirmation.

The condition of nonequivalent affirmation is political inasmuch as politics must prepare a space for it. But the affirmation itself is not political. It can be almost anything you like – existential, artistic, literary, dreamy, amorous, scientific, thoughtful, leisurely, playful, friendly, gastronomic, urban and so on: politics subsumes none of these registers; it only gives them their space and possibility. Politics sketches out nothing more than the contour, or the many contours, of indetermination whose opening might allow these affirmations to take place. Politics does not affirm; it accedes to the claim of affirmation. It does not bear ‘sense’ or ‘value’. Democratic politics renounces giving itself a figure; it allows for a proliferation of figures. ³³

Democracy is thus a construct that deconstructs every principle of construction and thereby is left with affirming nothing but struction itself. For this reason, “politics is in charge of space and of spacing but it is not in charge of figuring.” ³⁵ Democracy is a form of government that only seeks to ensure that the space of struction as such would remain devoid of any principle of construction even as it is filled with a multiplicity of incommensurable figures of construction in the most diverse spheres.

Art, love and thought are entitled every time, at every occurrence, to proclaim themselves accomplished. But at the same time, these fulfillments are only valid in their proper spheres, and have no claim to make either law or politics. [These] registers belong to the order of a ‘finishing off of the infinite’, whereas politics pertains to indefinition. ³⁶

The liberal logic of the market deals with struction by rendering its incommensurable plurality calculable through the general equivalent of money, which permits abstraction from the content and value of individual affirmative procedures. Incommensurable ends or senses thus become equivalent, but only by being stripped of their singularity and subjected to the regime that calculates their “worth” in the terms other than their own. In contrast, Nancy’s democracy of struction is founded “on the order of the unexchangeable, of what is without value because it is outside all measurable value.” ⁴⁰ While the market makes possible the free circulation of singularities by making them commensurable in the mode of the general equivalent, democracy attempts to ensure the same circulation on the basis of the opposite principle of

…nonequivalence of all singularities: those of persons and moments, places, gestures of a person, those of the hours of the day or night, those of words spoken, those of clouds that pass, plants that grow with a knowing slowness. […] Each time it is a question of a particular consideration, of attention and tension, of respect, even of what we can go so far as to call adoration, directed at singularity as such. ⁴¹

Democratic biopolitics: The non-equivalence of bioi

In the remainder of the article we shall elucidate the advantages and the shortcomings of Nancy’s rethinking of democracy by relocating it to the context of biopolitics. Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of debates on the possibility of an “affirmative” biopolitics that would not follow the negative logic of the sacrifice of bare life in the name of its political form, which was traced in various ways by Agamben, Esposito, and other authors. ⁵¹ While Nancy has not taken part in this debate and has generally been quite dismissive of the problematic, ⁵² in The Truth of Democracy he makes one crucial observation on biopolitics that both illuminates his approach to rethinking democracy and connects his thought explicitly to these debates.

This observation takes place in the already familiar context of the separation of politics from the order of ends or procedures of affirmation:

It is not given that the criteria for health should (or could) simply be the duration or length of life or else some physiological equilibrium that would be determined on the basis of an ideal of duration or performance. The meaning of ‘health’ cannot simply be determined in opposition to ‘illness’ or, in general, by what medicine is for us. Medicine, illness and health have values, senses and modalities that depend upon profound choices made by a culture and upon an ethos that is anterior to all ‘ethics’ and to all ‘politics’. A politics of health can only respond to choices and orientations that it itself can scarcely modify. (It is for this reason that the term biopolitics relies upon a confused hypertrophy of the sense and meaning of ‘politics’). A form of ‘health’ is a thought, a grabbing hold of existence; to risk putting it in what will be judged to be a hyperbolic and archaic way – it is a metaphysics not a politics. ⁵³

While for Nancy this seems to disqualify the very term “biopolitics,” in our view this stance rather firmly establishes the possibility of rethinking biopolitics in a pluralistic and democratic fashion, that is, no longer as the domination of (bare) life by its privileged form but as the coexistence of forms of life without a coordinating principle. Even if the discourse on biopolitics might indeed invoke a “confused hypertrophy” of the meaning of politics, approaching life as wholly politicizable in every aspect, critique of and resistance to this hypertrophy point to a different kind of biopolitics, more appreciative and protective of the diversity of possibly incommensurable forms of life with their “thousand healths.” ⁵⁷ Indeed, what are Nancy’s affirmative procedures—“existential, artistic, literary, dreamy, amorous, scientific, thoughtful, leisurely, playful, friendly, gastronomic, urban”—if not forms of life with their own non-equivalent criteria of “health”? More generally, given the radically materialist orientation of Nancy’s philosophy, its persistent focus on bodies, sense, desire, touch, and pleasure, it is difficult to see how a politics derived from this orientation could be anything other than a bio-politics, a politics that makes the dispersal of incommensurable forms of life in struction legitimate. ⁵⁸ Rather than follow Nancy in abandoning the concept of biopolitics to its most authoritarian inflection, we shall rely on his notion of struction to advance towards a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy, in which the government of life would be democratized and democracy in turn translated into concrete ways of living.

In the biopolitical sense, democracy is a regime of government that renders legitimate the coexistence of incommensurable forms of life that precede and exceed politics. The function of the notion of struction is precisely to demonstrate that the incommensurability in question is not a construct of democratic politics, let alone an effect of any crisis or ruin of democracy, but rather always already characterizes the world itself, making every cosmos acosmic and every universe a multiverse. This means that any politics that seeks to impose a privileged form of life or even valorize bare life as such can claim no foundation in being. For Nancy, there is no politics proper to life “as such,” precisely because “as such,” that is, as struction, life is nothing but the plurality of its incommensurable forms. Since these forms are non-equivalent, it is impossible not merely to elevate one form over the others, but even to establish the value of life “itself” as the general equivalent across this pluralistic field: incommensurable forms of life are likely to have very different criteria of health and illness. Just as one’s concern about one’s health may be lauded as proper care of the self in one form of life and dismissed as self-obsessed hypochondria in another, we are unlikely to arrive at any consensus about what good life is, whether “life itself” is already good or what “life itself” actually is. All that politics can legitimately aspire to in Nancy’s view is letting these incommensurable lives live themselves in accordance with their senses and ends without dominating or suppressing other such senses and ends. Democratic biopolitics would let every bios pursue its fitness in whatever way it sees fit.

This is why Nancy’s rethinking of democracy is so strongly opposed to Rousseau, or at least to a certain paradigmatic “Rousseauism” that he reconstructs in The Truth of Democracy. ⁵⁹ What Nancy wishes to take distance from is Rousseau’s famous claim that “were there a people of gods, it would govern itself democratically. So perfect a government is not suited to men.” ⁶⁰ The association of democracy with perfection and its construction persists throughout Rousseau’s Social Contract more generally: as we recall, the sovereign order based on general will presupposes the very subjects it must itself first produce. The “godlike” democratic subjects, who will only the general without being contaminated by private particular interests, are at once the precondition and the product of sovereign power, which introduces the well-known paradox of the Legislator entrusted with the task of “altering man’s constitution.” ⁶¹ Yet, what is important for Nancy is less the paradox of producing one’s own presuppositions than the mere ambition of production or construction of a political community that in his reading remains the ideal of Rousseauan democracy, even when not taken in the strict sense. On this reading, there must always be a proper form of life, whose institution in actuality would make democracy, firstly, possible, and secondly, worthwhile: “If Rousseau resigns himself to thinking that democracy properly speaking would be good only for a people of gods, it is because of his invincible conviction that the people should be divine, that man should be divine, in other words, that the infinite should be given.” ⁶² This is why Rousseau’s democracy must be contained solely and entirely in the sovereignty of the general will, with all particular interests, senses and affirmations bracketed off to maintain the purity of the product. ⁶³

In contrast, Nancy proceeds from the opposite presupposition: “The infinite should not be given and man should not be (a) god. This lesson is the correlate lesson of the invention of democracy.” ⁶⁴ The “infinite identity” of the Rousseauist community is “infinitely lacking” ⁶⁵ : a democratic community only exists as heaped up plurality without any identitarian predicate. This is why democratic (bio)politics must refrain from setting its own ends, positing a privileged form of life, defining the criteria of health and illness—any alternative would simply mark a relapse into the Rousseauist negation of struction in favor of the reconstruction of humanity in a privileged form. Thus, while Nancy only addresses the concept of biopolitics tangentially, his account of democracy immediately resonates with the discourses on affirmative biopolitics, which, on their part, often shun explicit discussion of democracy. What Nancy adds to these discussions is the explicit consideration of the form of government that would make such affirmation possible. Democratic biopolitics for him is affirmative insofar as it establishes and guards the space for the multiplicity of incommensurable affirmative procedures with their own principles of good life and criteria of health and illness.

The pleasure of contingency: Freedom, equality, community

Yet, it is precisely in its biopolitical declension that Nancy’s approach to democracy begins to appear problematic: in his desire to avoid the naïve Rousseauism of a (self-) productive democracy that turns its subjects into the gods it presupposes them to be, he appears to throw the baby out with the bathwater by rendering the spirit of democracy impossible to either affirm or enjoy. Despite Nancy’s explicit rejection of the economic logic of general equivalence that defines liberal pluralism, his reduction of democracy to the regulatory function of keeping the space of the incommensurable safe bears a somewhat uncanny resemblance to the proceduralist theories of liberal democracy. It also makes it difficult to understand how democracy, which does not affirm anything, can itself be the object of affirmation in struggles, revolts, and revolutions worldwide, from the Velvet Revolutions to the Arab Spring. These and other events demonstrate how the most diverse and even incommensurable political orientations are articulated into movements and coalitions that affirm democracy as such, as an alternative to the existing authoritarian regimes. The courage, resolve, and resourcefulness of these struggles could hardly have been motivated by the regime that “leads to nothing” and can only be “satisfying” without being capable of inciting joy or enjoyment. What is it about democracy that makes it worth struggling for? In our view, while Nancy’s “Rousseauism” vainly seeks the purification of the universality of the general will from particular interests, Nancy himself commits the opposite error of affirming incommensurable particulars without explicating the universals that make this affirmation possible to begin with. Since these universals evidently cannot take the form of a new principle of construction, we must revisit the concept of struction itself in order to explicate the universalist content that remains implicit in Nancy’s own reading.

As we have seen, Nancy defines struction in terms of coexistence in contingency, fortuity, dispersion, or errancy. To affirm this contingency and dispersion is not merely to proclaim the absence of order or relation between individual elements, but rather to highlight their coming to presence as incommensurable and non-equivalent, their co-appearance without co-ordination. The implications of struction are therefore never merely negative: to say that something is in struction is to say it is contingent, dispersed, errant among other such contingent, dispersed, and errant entities. For this reason, to affirm one’s own form of life is always already to affirm it as in common with others, equally contingent with them, and free from any principle of construction. To affirm oneself in any procedure in a democracy (art, science, sexuality, yoga, gastronomy, etc.) must therefore mean also and simultaneously affirming the community, equality, and freedom of all other affirmations that come to presence in the space of struction.

Community, equality, freedom—these familiar notions forming the motto of the French Republic should therefore be rethought as more than historically specific and essentially contested terms of political discourse. ⁶⁶ Instead, they do nothing other than name the various aspects of struction itself, the mode of being devoid of all coordination, hierarchy or exclusion. In fact, Nancy’s own discussion of community throughout his work is perhaps one of the most significant attempts in contemporary philosophy to advance in this rethinking, making it possible to conceive of a community devoid of any defining predicate or identity and suspended from the work of its actualization. ⁶⁷ Instead, community is always already given in the dispersed plurality of struction, in which beings share nothing but their errancy, dispersion, and exposure to each other. Nancy has also interpreted freedom and equality in similar terms in earlier works ⁶⁸ and briefly returns to them in The Truth of Democracy: “[The] words equality and freedom are but problematic names, nonsaturated by signification, under which it is a matter of keeping open the exigency of not accomplishing an essence or an end of the incommensurable. The exigency of regulating according to a universal that is not given and must be produced.” ⁶⁹

In our view, freedom, equality, and community, indissociable as aspects of struction, serve precisely as the universal that keeps open the exigency of incommensurability, nonequivalence, and detotalization. Yet, it is difficult to see why and how this universal would (have to) be produced, since it is evidently already given in every experience of struction itself and especially since it was precisely the production of universals that was the problem with the naïve “Rousseauist” understanding of democracy. As aspects of struction, freedom, equality, and community could never be produced as principles of construction or coordination, but precisely for this reason can always be affirmed against every exclusion, hierarchy, or oppression.

This explication of the universal principles that regulate the democratic space entails that the plurality of forms of life affirmed in Nancy’s concept of democracy is infinite but not unlimited. It only accepts as legitimate those forms of life that affirm their own contingent dispersion and errancy alongside other contingent and errant forms, that is, affirm their being-in-common with others as free and equal. While racist, homophobic, or misogynist forms of life certainly belong to the “heap” of struction, they find no justification in the political regime that affirms struction as legitimate and takes it upon itself to protect this radical plurality of forms of life.

As universal aspects of struction, freedom, equality, and community evidently resonate with Rousseau’s general will that forms the sole content of democratic affirmation, ⁷⁰ yet in contrast to any “Rousseauism” this generality is not an effect of any production, let alone any purification from the particular, but is in principle at work in every particular act of affirmation. It is not a matter of separating the universalist affirmation of these three principles as properly democratic from the other affirmative procedures that democracy makes possible, since freedom, equality, and community refer to nothing other than these procedures themselves and the forms of life that they constitute. It is even less a matter of elevating political affirmation above other procedures of affirmation, since once it is elevated it loses touch with the forms of life whose freedom, equality, and community it was meant to affirm. It is impossible to affirm freedom, equality, and community as general principles isolated from particular forms of life: they are nothing but the implications of the coexistence of the latter without any principle of construction, hierarchy, or unity.

Rather than elevate politics above other affirmative procedures, a democratic biopolitics inspired by Nancy would add the affirmation of freedom, equality, and community to every particular affirmative procedure as its own precondition. We can only affirm our own idiosyncratic and non-equivalent form of life along with affirming the freedom, equality, and community of all the other forms of life with which it coexists. Only such a supplementation of the particular by the universal ensures the detotalization that democracy consists in, as the universality in question has its entire content in the subversion of any totality by the plurality that cannot be aggregated into any whole. It is this affirmation of the universality of the freedom, equality, and community of the incommensurably singular that makes possible the widest coalitions in the struggles for democracy, which frequently unite individuals and groups with incompatible ideological orientations. What the participants of democratic struggles share in common is not any positive principle of the construction of society, an empty signifier articulating their particular demands into a chain of equivalence or even the expropriation of their individual identities, but rather the contingency of their own affirmative praxis, which in its very act legitimizes other such affirmations as free and equal in their very non-equivalence. The community presupposed in Nancy’s democratic biopolitics is founded neither on a single privileged form of life nor on the subsumption of their multiplicity under universal principles but rather on their exposure to each other in their contingency, errancy and dispersion, that is, on the “all together” of the heap itself.

Thus, democratic biopolitics does not construct any forms of life, nor does it merely deconstruct any of them. It is a mode of politics that legitimizes at once all forms of life and procedures of affirmation, but only insofar as their affirmation includes the affirmation of both their own contingency and the contingency of all others. While non-democratic regimes and ideologies tend to assert their legitimacy with claims to natural or historical necessity, democracy accepts only the contingent as legitimate. The contingency that characterizes struction ontologically becomes in a democracy not merely a contingent fact but a necessary principle that must be affirmed, however tacitly, in every particular procedure of affirmation. Yet, this necessary contingency is not a normative principle that would be imposed on political praxis from the outside in the manner of an injunction or constraint. On the contrary, the affirmation of this contingency ensures our enjoyment of whatever form of life we happen to dwell in as free, equal, and in common with the infinite number of others. What makes a form of life enjoyable is precisely its contingency, its not having to be what it is, and its potentiality for being otherwise. A necessary form of life, if it existed, could be dutifully abided by, tolerated, or practiced without reflection, but it definitely could not be enjoyed.

This is why, contrary to Nancy, the spirit of democracy is not merely perfectly formulable in terms of freedom, equality, and community, but also enjoyable beyond mere “satisfaction” or “sufficiency,” which makes Nancy’s own recent work on aesthetic and sexual pleasure of immediate relevance to his democratic theory. ⁷¹ Nancy describes aesthetic enjoyment as the “[effort] of a form in the process of being made and which, in a way, must never be completed. An aesthetic form is probably never exhausted and, on the contrary, does not stop enjoying itself.” ⁷² Similarly, when discussing sexual pleasure, Nancy emphasizes the perpetual renewal of enjoyment that never attains complete and final satisfaction: “If people continue to create and jouir [enjoy], it is because desire does not stop when it takes one particular form. Because there is a constantly renewed desire, the desire to make new forms arise, to make a new sensibility perceptible. And this new sensibility is desired and created not because we lack something, but because what is desired is the renewing of meaning as such.” ⁷³ The absence of a “climax of joy” that Nancy found in democratic politics now turns out to characterize enjoyment in general, which also “leads to nothing” in the sense of involving no fulfillment or accomplishment, no definitive form of life to be attained and valorized. And yet, this absence of climax does not indicate any deficiency of enjoyment, but only confirms its strictly infinite character that keeps desiring itself beyond any fulfillment—“a pleasure whose essence is repetition itself.” ⁷⁴ What is enjoyed in every form of life is less the form itself than the force of its formation, its coming to presence in a contingent way. In the absence of any definitive form that life must attain, the myriad forms created and decreated along the way only serve to maintain and renew this enjoyment at work in their formation. The difference of democracy from other political regimes does not consist in the renunciation or prohibition of affirmation or enjoyment but rather in their reassignment from a privileged form of life to the ceaseless practice of formation itself, to life as the endless play of transformations, of coming into and going out of presence of singular forms that all derive their legitimacy from being heaped up without any coordination: free, equal, and in common.