Beyond the Biopolitics of Capability and Choice in Human Development: Being,Decision,and World

Introduction

‘Human development’ has been widely accepted as the most viable contemporary development paradigm and it has contributed to making international development one of the primary biopolitical problematics of the 21^st century. The concept forms the basis of the UNDP’s Human Development Reports and informs the development policies of a wide range of states as well as intergovernmental and nongovernmental organisations. The approach is formulated most explicitly by Martha Nussbaum and the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, the Founding Presidents of the Human Development and Capability Association. ¹ Human development was intended to challenge the neoliberal ‘Washington consensus’ promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Sen and Nussbaum consider their framework to be a revolutionary counter-theory to macro-economically motivated conceptions of development. According to Nussbaum, their approach ‘brings moral philosophy into development economics’. ²

Although widely embraced by states and non-state actors alike, the human development framework has also received a great deal of critique. While much of this critique has been directed at the difficulty of operationalising Sen and Nussbaum’s concepts, ³ thus aiming not to contest the framework as such but to refine its functioning, there have also been critiques pointing towards their approach’s complicity with neoliberal capitalism. ⁴ Furthermore, those working in the wake of Michel Foucault’s conceptualisation of biopower have problematised the biopolitics that such a ‘humanised’ formulation of development entails. ⁵ Following Foucault, biopolitics refers to a modern type of government that regulates populations through techniques of power that take ‘life itself’ as their object. ⁶ As far as human development is focused on improving, promoting and managing ‘life’, it is thoroughly biopolitical. In a recent issue of Millennium, David Chandler mobilises Foucault’s thought to argue that, through its way of conceptualising ‘development as freedom’, human development internalises both development and freedom, thereby creating a de-politicised subject who can merely work on his or her ‘inner life’ but who cannot conceive of changing the ‘outside’ world. ⁷ Like Chandler, I argue that human development needs to be addressed by problematising its foregrounding of ‘choice’ and ‘capability’ as the key markers of both development and freedom, thereby also engaging with its relationship to (neo)liberalism. However, I argue that the reasons for the de-politicisation caused by neoliberal development go deeper than Chandler’s problematisation assumes, and therefore also require a more nuanced way of conceptualising resistance to it.

In this article I problematise the biopolitics of ‘capability’ and ‘choice’ entailed by human development through an engagement with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of modernity. Although during the past decade there has been an increased interest in the relationship between the works of Foucault and Heidegger, ⁸ and at the same time International Relations (IR) has seen a surge of biopolitical theorisation and critique, ⁹ these critiques rarely make any reference to Heidegger. ¹⁰ Biopolitical critiques rarely probe the ontological constitution of governance, exposing a lack of explicit discussions of biopolitics vis-à-vis Heidegger. ¹¹ This article seeks to remedy this gap by interrogating the ontological premises of the contemporary international human development paradigm. In doing so, I seek to foreground the need for explicit engagements between Heidegger and biopolitics in International Relations. The focus of this article is on formulating a distinctly Heideggerian critique of human development, which both complements and challenges the biopolitical critiques prevalent in contemporary IR.

Yet, the Heideggerian ontological problematic may seem far removed from the concerns of the human development framework. According to Nussbaum, the approach begins with the questions: ‘What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities for activity and choice has society given them?’ ¹² When the object of examination arguably deals with the ‘actual possibilities’ and ‘real opportunities’ that people have in their lives, what good is it to talk about ontology? The argument that I advance in this article holds that the limits of those possibilities and opportunities are drawn not least on the ontological level. Ontological inquiry does not mean a retreat into transcendental categories or abstract generality supposedly separate from political praxis. ¹³ By delimiting the real as such, ontological grounding also delimits the ways in which beings can become. Such a limitation, though it reflects a particular ontological logic, is accessible to beings in the ‘facticity’ of their existence: for example, in the lack of possibilities that Nussbaum and Sen are also concerned about. For Heidegger, facticity refers to the dimensions of existence by which humans understand themselves as living beings. Facticity is thus that which brings together life and being; existential concerns and ontology. ¹⁴ Ontology is therefore not to be understood as detached from the life of beings, but as always happening in the midst of beings.

In the first part of the article, I argue that Nussbaum and Sen disregard the ontological presuppositions on which their approach is based, hence also overlooking its de-politicising effects. More broadly, the section argues that this disregard is reflected in the lack of ontological considerations in IR. I then go on to examine human development’s prioritisation of ‘capabilities’ and ‘choice’ in terms of Heidegger’s concepts of ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand). I argue that underlying human development is an ontology that presupposes the total makeability of human beings, while at the same time concealing its own contingent ground. This means that human development conceives of humans as active, makeable and mouldable beings who are free to change, choose and become, but only within the framework that human development deems permissible.

This critique is followed by a juxtaposition of the liberal conception of choice in human development with a Heideggerian ‘decision’ (Entscheidung), which essentially means deciding beyond the choices that are made in a field which is ontologically limited. Whereas the field of choice in human development has already been foreclosed by the Western metaphysical tradition, Entscheidung opens the possibility for being to happen differently. Such a decision calls into question the legitimacy of the human development framework’s claim to universality. Finally, I suggest an engagement with the concept of ‘world’ that goes beyond the human development framework’s inability to conceive of a radically different world as well as beyond Chandler’s call to engage the ‘outside’ world instead of working on the ‘inner life’ of the subject. The article suggests understanding the world as the openness of being, by which I mean the fundamental indeterminacy and contingency of being. It is the realm within which everything can be other than before. On a more practical level, openness refers to our attentiveness to the possibilities that the world offers to us. The article argues that the human development framework tends to reduce the openness and contingency of being to the demand for individuals to simply consider themselves as contingent. The openness of being does not in itself say what the alternative to neoliberal development is. But it affirms the idea that there are alternatives. A politics that draws its involvement in the world from the openness of being entails the ability to question critically even benevolent and supposedly emancipatory projects, such as human development, when they lack recognition of their own ontological commitments and of the limitations that those commitments impose on people’s lives.

Liberalism, Biopolitics and Ontological Critique

Sen and Nussbaum consider the human development framework to be universally applicable. As justification for the framework’s universality, Nussbaum gives the idea of political liberalism. She argues that the approach is ‘without any grounding in metaphysical ideas of the sort that divide people along lines of culture and religion’. ¹⁵ The approach, as a form of political liberalism, shows ‘respect for citizens by not asking them to endorse a political doctrine built on any particular religious or metaphysical view’. ¹⁶ Following the lines of the classical liberal tradition, Nussbaum understands liberalism as a political philosophy that upholds each individual’s right to life, liberty and property, influenced, furthermore, by Adam Smith’s account of the appropriate nature and extent of government intervention as well as John Rawls’ theory of justice. She argues that because human development is a form of political liberalism, ‘it is not a comprehensive doctrine of any sort’, and, therefore, it should be able to attract a universal consensus. ¹⁷ Disregarding the ontological presuppositions on which the approach is based, she fails to acknowledge that liberalism, too, is grounded in a certain metaphysical tradition. ¹⁸

Contrary to common understandings, liberalism, for Heidegger, is not merely a political ideology but a comprehensive metaphysical system that is characterised by self-certainty, a supposed knowledge of what it means to be a human being. ¹⁹ This self-certainty is indicative of the broader forgetting of being in the Western metaphysical tradition. Hence, Heidegger seeks a destruction of metaphysics conceived in terms of substance, presence and the lack of distinction between beings and being – what he calls ‘ontological difference’. Instead of merely examining ‘ontic’ beings – the particular characteristics of entities – Heidegger argues that we should inquire into being as such, that is: ontology. ²⁰ This inquiry, however, does not concern only the meaning of being. Rather, Michael Dillon points out that the idea of ontological difference is ‘the very thought that re-opens the question of the political’. ²¹ Conversely, the forgetting of the question of being, which is characteristic of the metaphysical tradition in which liberalism is embedded, entails de-politicisation because it forecloses the possibility that there could be any radically other ways of being. Hence, politicisation is here understood as the opening up of ontological positions, which forms the conditions of possibility for a variety of ontic forms of politics. Importantly, then, the Heideggerian critique advanced in this article does not ascribe content to the politics that challenges liberalism. Rather, it exposes the ontological grounding of the human development paradigm and points towards the ontological conditions that allow for moving beyond it.

IR theory has tended to shy away from such ontological considerations, focused as the fourth debate has been on epistemological and methodological rather than ontological disagreements. ²² When ontology is being discussed, it often simply refers to conceptions about the basic images, units and content of IR, ²³ rather than to the fundamental grounds on which these categories are based. While there have nevertheless been some sustained examinations of the ontological premises of IR, ²⁴ the growing biopolitical literature in IR hardly ever explicitly addresses ontology. This is somewhat peculiar, considering the extent to which contemporary conceptions of biopolitics are indebted to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and his ontological elaboration of ‘technology’. Heidegger does not understand technology in instrumental terms as machines or appliances that humans ‘use’. As Heidegger famously argues, ‘the essence of technology is by no means anything technological’. ²⁵ Rather, the essence of technology is a particular way of revealing beings, and this way of revealing is constitutive of the metaphysical tradition that Heidegger seeks to deconstruct. The name that Heidegger gives this way of revealing is ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and the real that is ordered by it is called ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand). The following section of the article examines the way in which the concept of enframing challenges and extends biopolitical critiques of human development.

While the Foucauldian biopolitical critiques that examine particular practices and forms of subjectification are absolutely crucial for critiquing contemporary international development, they tend to overlook the ontological logics that constitute the real wherein those practices become both rational and intelligible. Engaging with those logics does not mean to ‘ontologise’ biopolitics as if it were somehow non-ontological to begin with. It is not possible to say anything about anything without always having already made assumptions about being. Therefore, an examination of the ontological underpinnings of contemporary biopolitics is needed because without an adequate conception of the ways in which life is contemporarily governed, it is not possible to conceive of a politics that is capable of challenging that governance.

Yet, engaging in an ontological critique of human development does not mean arguing that the effects of human development policies are the same everywhere. Nor is it to collapse the multiplicity of realities produced by the biopolitics of capability and choice into one all-consuming whole. In the light of the poststructuralist suspicion of meta-narratives and, indeed, of ontology as such, it should be noted that an engagement with ontology is not an attempt to homogenise reality. On the contrary, a Heideggerian critique points towards the plurality of ontology. Ontology, when conceived of in light of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, is not a status-quo preserving perspective but rather as such a critical activity. ²⁶ However, Sen and Nussbaum’s insistence on the universality of their approach and, therefore, on its applicability everywhere is indicative of the need to address the approach as a totalising framework that implies a particular way of delimiting the horizon within which beings become intelligible. It is to this problematic that I now turn.

The Enframing of Capability and Choice in Human Development

Biopolitical perspectives are concerned with the ways in which ‘life’ is produced and governed in modern societies. Although Heidegger is similarly engaged with the formation and ordering of beings within modernity, he has an ambivalent relationship to the concept of life:

Biological concepts of life are to be set aside from the very outset: unnecessary burdens, even if certain motives might spring from these concepts, which is possible, however, only if the intended grasp of human existence as life remains open, preconceptually, to an understanding of life which is essentially older than modern biology. ²⁷

The 19^th century Lebensphilosophie, with its foregrounding of the concept of ‘life’ and its critique of the processes of rationalisation, civilisation and mechanisation, is a predecessor of contemporary conceptions of biopolitics. In Being and Time, Heidegger rejects such philosophies of life because in them ‘“life” itself as a kind of Being does not become ontologically a problem’. ²⁸ Hence, Heidegger’s critique is by no means coextensive with biopolitics. For him, existence is decided not through the category of biological life but through being, which is always already beyond the ontics of mere biological existence. Roberto Esposito points out that, for Heidegger, ‘the biological category of life isn’t the site from which the thinkability of the world opens, but is exactly the contrary’. ²⁹ Whereas Esposito seeks to ground an affirmative biopolitics ³⁰ on precisely that biological conception of life that Heidegger consciously sets aside, I argue that Heidegger can be fruitful for thinking beyond biopolitics precisely because he is not limited by biologised conceptions of life.

However, Timothy Campbell pursues a biopolitical perspective on Heidegger’s thought by arguing that Heidegger provides the grounds for a politics that distinguishes between proper and improper life, which can eventually lead to the sacrifice of those who lack a proper relation to being. He concludes that ‘the Heideggerian ontology of Being presupposes the lesser form of the human’, making it deeply thanatopolitical. ³¹ Contrary to such a reading, any engagement with Heidegger in the context of biopolitics should recognise the centrality of the openness of being in his work. Instead of providing an ontology that implicitly legitimates the death of ‘lesser’ human beings, Heidegger’s ontological critique points towards the deconstruction of any such politics.

As noted in the previous section, Heidegger’s contribution to the problematisation of contemporary governance comes from his ontological elaboration of technology:

The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. Such challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. […] The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating is, for its part, everywhere secured. ³²

Modernity is characterised by the ever-increasing will to ‘challenge forth’ the energies of nature, transforming nature into a standing energy reserve. Yet, Heidegger also asks, ‘does not man himself belong even more originally than nature within the standing-reserve?’. He goes on to note that ‘the current talk of human resources […] gives evidence of this’. ³³

Heidegger’s problematisation of the standing-reserve reflects the centrality of ‘capabilities’ in human development. In the human development framework, ‘capability’ refers to ‘the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or, less formally put, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)’. ³⁴ Sen concludes each of the chapters in Development as Freedom by reiterating that the fundamental point of his approach is to consider individuals as active agents of change instead of passive recipients of benefit. Yet, ‘capability’, i.e., the ontological condition of something being potential, is more important than ‘functioning’, i.e., the actual manifestation of a capability’s existence. Following this line of reasoning, poverty and inequality, for example, are defined as capability failure ³⁵ and are thereby conceived of primarily in ontological terms. What is at stake in the contemporary human development framework is the way in which human capabilities, such as emotions, intelligence and the capacity to relate to others, are the human resources that become enframed as standing-reserve. Herein lies the biopolitical nature of enframing. Enframing puts humans ‘in position to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve’. ³⁶ Human development positions human beings in such a way that they come to perceive, understand and develop themselves as a reserve of capabilities.

In Heidegger’s work enframing was preceded by the closely related concept of machination (Machenschaft), which refers to an interpretation of beings as makeable. The history of machination extends all the way back to Plato, but it is in modernity that machination becomes the essence of beings. ³⁷ Although machination is a particular kind of truth of being, what characterises it, along with calculation, is that the question of ‘truth’ is no longer needed. In its essence, calculation does not refer to numerical expression or counting, but to this inclusiveness and unquestionableness of the makeability of beings. ³⁸ The incalculable, to the extent that it exists, is merely something that has not yet been included in calculation but will be incorporated in the future.

Nussbaum sees the makeability of human beings through the creation of capability and choice in such terms. While there can be debate regarding the specificities of the framework, the political principles guiding it – liberalism, the creation of capability and individual choice – are something that should, over time, become the object of ‘an overlapping consensus’. ³⁹ As it monopolises the truth of being as makeability, neoliberalism does not merely encourage economically rational conduct but is also a process of ontological violence that enframes all beings as standing-reserve. ⁴⁰ It is important to emphasise, however, that the term ‘standing-reserve’ does not imply human passivity. Rather, it means that the actual is revealed as the potential. Capabilities function as the kind of future-oriented, endless reserve that can be unlocked, transformed and distributed in various ways so as to secure the revealing of being that enframes human beings as orderable, calculable and as endlessly developing according to a (neo)liberal logic.

In this vein, Nussbaum argues that because human psychology is malleable to intervention, we ought to work on ‘figuring out the psychological dispositions that support or impede the realisation of human capabilities’. ⁴¹ Nussbaum goes on to say that ‘the normative side (which emotions we ought to foster) will come from the political principles themselves, which presumably have already become the object of an overlapping consensus’. ⁴² By these ‘political principles’ she means political liberalism and freedom of choice. Positive emotions such as compassion and respect are seen as supporting human development, whereas negative emotions such as anger and disgust are seen as subverting it. According to Nussbaum, our hope of achieving political stability depends on the development of a ‘reasonable political psychology’. ⁴³ People’s psychological dispositions and emotions are to be the object of development and ordering so that they will support choice-making and the realisation of capabilities, thereby also guaranteeing political stability. Bearing in mind that Jean-Luc Nancy calls anger ‘the political sentiment par excellence’, ⁴⁴ the political psychology that is seen as supporting human development is also a psychology of pacification and de-politicisation. The point that I wish to make here, however, is that this biopolitical governance of human psychology derives its rationality from the underlying enframing of the real which thereby secures its own continuation.

With the concept of capability, the ontological constitution of the human thus becomes the principal site through which he or she is governed. Hence, although Sen and Nussbaum have a deep-seated belief in the functioning of the market mechanism, a critique of the human development framework cannot be limited to a critique of their ‘market romance’. ⁴⁵ Nor is the present critique a matter of merely critiquing the international elites that guide the process of neoliberal development. As a result of what has been termed ‘causumerism’ (shopping for a better world, aiming to effect change through the market), ⁴⁶ global development has begun to operate through the consumer choices made by guilt-ridden Westerners, thus producing a ‘biopolitics of choice’ whereby the lives of ‘others’ are being decided upon through the union of ‘freedom of choice’ and market logic. ⁴⁷ Undoubtedly, ‘choice’ becomes degraded when it turns into mere consumer choice. However, I am interested in pursuing the problematisation of choice further than a critique of the subsumption of ‘choice’ by consumerism. Neither is ‘choice’ merely a social construction determined by the people with whom we interact and the society in which we live. ⁴⁸ Rather, the liberal conception of choice underlying human development is delimited by an enframing that makes ‘choice’ always an expression of calculative rationality.

In human development, ‘choice’ is intertwined with people’s ability ‘to live the kind of lives they have reason to value’. ⁴⁹ Sen and Nussbaum embrace a rationalist approach in which choices are to be based on reasoned evaluation and calculation. The assumption is that there are certain types of freedoms, capabilities, opportunities and lives that people have ‘reason to value’ more than others. Not just any life can be viably ‘chosen’. Choice is valued when it leads to the creation of more capability and to more choice. ‘A passive state of satisfaction’ cannot be an appropriate condition for human beings. ⁵⁰ Humans are thus enframed as active agents in relation to their capabilities. This does not mean, however, that humans are entirely in control of their capabilities as an ontological reserve. The revealing of beings as makeable does not happen somewhere beyond all human doing but neither does it happen exclusively through human doing. ⁵¹ Rather, enframing forms the ontological conditions of possibility for the production of biopoliticised, de-politicised subjectivities who participate in and reproduce enframing. Hence, enframing regulates not so much the specific ways in which capabilities become manifest in the world but their contribution to securing the continuation of the calculative ordering of the real. This is why the human development framework is capable of including a variety of ways of life as long as they do not contest the ontology of becoming that is so central to neoliberalism, and on which the framework also relies. Capability and choice are thus ontological categories that contribute to solidifying neoliberal forms of governance in international politics.

Deciding beyond Choice

In searching for a way beyond the de-politicising effects of neoliberalism, Chandler makes a clear distinction between the traditional liberal discourses in IR that conceived of the limits of liberalism in the spatio-temporal terms of international hierarchy and the contemporary neoliberal development policy that demands that we locate these limits rather in the inner life of the subject. ⁵² However, although neoliberalism has exacerbated and multiplied the ways in which global development functions through subjectivities, the limits of liberalism already existed on the level of subjectivity before neoliberalism. Development has always been concerned with changing not only the political and economic structures of developing countries (so as to make them conform to the liberal model), but also with changing their populations. ⁵³

Likewise, the liberal conception of freedom has always been predicated on a developmental understanding of both individuals and populations. ⁵⁴ Hence, it does not seem plausible that the ‘return’ to modern liberal conceptions of the human and freedom advocated by Chandler would be a solution to the de-politicisation caused by contemporary neoliberal development. Even if such a rehabilitation somehow managed to avoid the worst forms of violence that liberal distinctions between inside and outside, freedom and unfreedom, have historically produced – especially when it comes to development – it would hardly be able to challenge the biopolitical will to develop life that has always been so central to liberalism.

Assuming the makeability of human beings and the injunction to choose one’s being presuppose an ontology whereby the human is contingent, while the conditions within which choice happens are not. Neoliberal subjects are free to choose anything, except for the fundamental conditions that constitute them as ‘choosing’ beings. Whereas in IR contemporary contingency is mostly treated as the unexpected event that needs to be managed, contingency is also to be understood as the organising ontological principle. To survive in what is taken to be an increasingly contingent world, contingency has to be accepted as constitutive of one’s subjectivity. Since contingency appears to have become the principal characteristic of neoliberal life and the primary site through which it is governed, how can we think of a form of politics capable of transcending such ‘governing through contingency’ ⁵⁵ without resorting to pre-conceived transcendental truths or simply settling for the existing ontology? While propounding the contingency of subjectivity is hardly sufficient to counter governance that operates by demanding that very contingency of its subjects, it is the contingency of the real, that discloses beings in such a way, that needs to be revealed. What is needed, therefore, is an ontological crisis, not of subjectivity – for the neoliberal subject lives a life of continuous crisis anyway – but a crisis of the neoliberal ordering of the real. Hence, distinguishing between biopolitical governance on the level of subjectivity and the ordering of the real helps us grasp how it is possible for neoliberalism to demand contingency of its subjects while at the same time concealing its own contingent ground.

While for Sen and Nussbaum there can be neither freedom nor development without the infinite becoming ordered by the expansion of ‘choice,’ considering the de-politicisation brought about by both biopolitical subjectification and the neoliberal ordering of the real, to choose within neoliberalism is to validate the de-politicisation of choice. This is not to say that the choices people make in their everyday lives are totally meaningless. But it is important to recognise the distinction between ontic choices made within neoliberal contingency and what is here discussed as ontological ‘decisioning’. The metaphysical tradition on which the human development approach is based ought to be countered with a valorisation, not of choice articulated within, but against a neoliberal contingency, which paradoxically conceals its own contingency. Heidegger’s conception of ‘decision’ (Entscheidung) shows what this might mean.

In Being and Time, Heidegger describes the possibility for inauthentic Dasein to regain its potentiality-for-Being as lying in ‘making up for not choosing,’ which, nevertheless, involves ‘choosing to make this choice – deciding’. ⁵⁶ This decision is not simply the realisation of a subjective will. It ‘has nothing in common with what we understand as making a choice or the like. Instead, de-cision [Ent-scheidung] refers to the sundering itself, which separates [scheidet] and in separating lets come into play for the first time the ap-ropriation of precisely this sundered open realm’. ⁵⁷ The decision cuts open a space for being to reveal itself in a way different from enframing.

While human development, as a form of neoliberal biopolitics, demands of humans above all ‘activity’, Heidegger argues that what our era conceives of as the highest activity is in fact total decisionlessness. ⁵⁸ Decision is essentially responsiveness to a sense of urgency. For a decision to come about, human beings must first recognise the plight that they are in. In accepting the dominant form of political-economic organisation, as well as its historical-ontological conditions, the human development paradigm is unable to recognise that the solutions it offers to problems of human well-being are complicit with these very problems. Sen and Nussbaum’s grounding of development in the ideas of capability and choice, as well as their prioritisation of liberal market economy, falls short of any sense of urgency and of their promise of a revolutionary new conception of development.

But once the urgency of the situation is recognised, Heidegger does not rule out the possibility that what he calls ‘world-historical revolutions’ might gather together a people in such a way that they are brought into the nearness of the decision. Yet, he warns that in such revolutions the realm of decision may just as well be overlooked. ⁵⁹ For no doctrine or system will be able to bring about a radical change in being. Despite Heidegger’s eschatological discourse, the decision is not something that can be achieved once and for all. As a division that cuts through unconcealment, the decision is ‘constant’. ⁶⁰ Neither does the decision have an essence in itself. Rather, its essence is determined only through its occurrence. ⁶¹ Hence, there is no specific content given to the politics that challenges neoliberal development. Nevertheless, the decision is not a de-historicised category but derives its meaning from the factical situation. In the decision one finds that which ‘“resides” prior to the “activity” and reaches beyond the activity’. ⁶² While human development works to monopolise that which is prior into a reserve of capabilities, the decision points towards the always already underlying openness of being.

Yet, the decision does not concern ‘life’ as far as life is grasped merely as a drive towards self-preservation. ⁶³ Whereas contemporary global politics exhibits what Heidegger would probably consider a mere battle over the conditions of surviving, what is at stake in the decision is not the continuation of the biopolitical, that is, biological, life of the population. Although the decision does not concern life, engaging with it does not mean arguing that the material needs of biological life are somehow unreal or irrelevant – a point worth making especially when discussing such ontological ‘decisioning’ in relation to development. Rather, the decision means countering biopolitical governance through a site that is not disconnected from ‘life’ but which is nevertheless a different mode of being. Hence, the Heideggerian problematisation of the enframing of the real as contingent standing-reserve does not force us to abandon the Foucauldian biopolitical analytic that examines the biological life of the population as the site through which it is governed. But Heidegger does help us in thinking of both beings and being as something that can never be grasped by such biologised accounts of life.

Ultimately, what is at stake in the decision is the event of appropriation (Ereignis). ⁶⁴ Rather than a shift to an entirely different world, turning from machination to Ereignis is a recognition of the finitude of our prevailing mode of being. ⁶⁵ In terms of human development, this means that the claim for the universality of capability creation and choice is recognised as limited. Thereby it becomes possible to question infinite makeability as the essence of beings, and to be critical of the neoliberal demand for such makeability. Richard Polt calls the recognition of finitude that leads to a new beginning the ‘emergency of being’. ⁶⁶ However, in international politics, the first decade of the 21^st century is a case in point of the way in which liberal ‘emergency’ functions to produce not a new mode of being but more and more governance. Whereas liberalism seeks to secure its own continuation by securing the biological life of the population through myriad forms of governance, ⁶⁷ for Heidegger, on the contrary, finitude does not refer to biological death, and it does not function to legitimate forms of governance – liberal or otherwise.

When finitude is conceived of as an existential threat, it gives rise to the kind of decisionism that has coloured, for example, the war on terror. The emergency of the war on terror has been an emergency of the survival of the present liberal mode of being; rather than a sense of emergency concerning that mode of being as such. But when finitude is instead conceived of as the possibilities provided by the groundless ground, regulatory government cannot militate against it. ⁶⁸ Without recognition of ontological finitude, it is not possible to break out of taken-for-granted world-disclosures. The violence of late modernity is that it denies us this ontological finitude, the sense of the limitedness of the prevailing mode of being. ⁶⁹ As opposed to any sense of ontological finitude, Sen and Nussbaum deny altogether the metaphysical character of the concepts on which the human development framework relies. As a result, the question of being is forgotten, and ‘capability’ and ‘choice’ in human development function to solidify the enframing of being that Heidegger identifies as key to the Western metaphysical tradition. When the question of being is forgotten, choice happens within a totality where people can only choose that which already exists. The decision, on the contrary, draws on the idea that there is a possibility that being could happen differently. The next section turns to a discussion of ‘world’ as the space of politics that is opened up by such a decision.

Involvement in ‘World’: The Beyond within Existence

According to Sen and Nussbaum, human development is best realised in a liberal-democratic market economy that respects the individual’s freedom to choose his or her lifestyle. Political agency is desirable as long as it supports the stability of such a framework. Although they consider their approach to be ‘revolutionary’, its role in augmenting neoliberal power relations, forms of subjectification, and enframing of the real, have made explicit the framework’s inability to conceive of a radically different world. Likewise, contemporary debates in IR largely continue to assume that questions concerning the interests and potential futures of human beings are more or less settled, thus also disregarding the biopolitical drivers of liberal-emancipatory policies. ⁷⁰

In his critique of human development, Chandler points out the de-politicising effects that the ‘development as freedom’ approach has on our world. However, Chandler equates the ‘world’ with power relations, in the light of which it is peculiar that he also calls the world ‘external’ when his whole argument is that governance has become internal. If it is true, as Chandler argues, that contemporary power operates exclusively through the inner life of the human, to the point that the world has disappeared, does this not precisely make the kind of engagement with the world that he envisages – public reason, contracts and the like – completely futile? Chandler’s separation of the human and the world expresses ontological dualism, which understands reality in terms of two ontologically separate categories. The disconnect between the human and the world that Chandler presumes is precisely what also makes the solution he is suggesting ultimately untenable. ⁷¹

Instead of longing for the security of modernist categories and liberal binaries, a political challenge to neoliberalism ought to recognise that there cannot be any easy distinctions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Whereas human development internalises development and freedom, leaving behind nothing but the subject’s work on itself, the injunction to change the ‘external’ world instead of changing oneself merely reproduces the ontological presuppositions that guide modernist distinctions between the subject and the world. The former denies the subject its outside and the latter denies the world its existence as anything other than the object of the subject’s actions. While Chandler attempts to reconnect the subject with the world, he only ends up abstracting the subject from its world.

Heidegger provides us with a more fruitful way of thinking about the relationship between beings and ‘world’:

“World” does not at all signify beings or any realm of beings but the openness of Being. […] Thought in terms of ek-sistence, “world” is in a certain sense precisely “the beyond” within existence and for it. Man is never first and foremost a man on the hither side of the world, as a “subject” […] Rather, before all this, man in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the open region that clears the “between” within which a “relation” of subject to object can “be”. ⁷²

In (re)creating the open realm where beings can become differently, what the decision in fact opens is the world. The world, then, is what Heidegger calls the ‘abyssal ground’ (Abgrund). It is the staying away of the ground, the fullness of what is yet undecided. ⁷³ As such, the Abgrund of open being is the condition of possibility for the constitution of all ontologies. ⁷⁴ In the same vein, Sergei Prozorov shows how the Heideggerian conception of world functions as the condition of possibility for the constitution of all positive worlds, entailing a politics that ‘consists in coming to terms with the radical contingency of the infinity of worlds that we inhabit, which enables the contestation and transformation of their orders’. ⁷⁵ While this conception of ‘world’ brings about a re-thinking of the relations between the subject and the world, it also entails a re-conceptualisation of ‘world’ in IR theory. ⁷⁶ Furthermore, in terms of human development, this means that the self-certainty with which its conception of life is promoted as ‘universal’ is questioned. ‘World’, then, no longer refers to a limited entity within which humans create capabilities and make choices, but is rather to be understood as the openness underlying any particular order.

Yet, even if under every form of order there is radical contingency and indeterminacy, beings cannot dwell in sheer openness. It is not possible to exist in the form of absolute contingency, but this contingency is nevertheless the condition of possibility for the becoming of beings. This raises the question of the role of the beings themselves in that becoming. In another recent article in this journal, Chandler credits Heidegger as giving the contemporary post-humanists the conception that ‘it is being which does all the work with no need for subjects at all’. ⁷⁷ Yet, in his famous Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger points out:

Being is not Being without humans being needed for its revelation, protection, and structuring. […] the experience that humans are structured [gestellt] by some-thing that they are not themselves and that they cannot control themselves is precisely the experience that may show them the possibility of the insight that humans are needed by Being. ⁷⁸

Heidegger’s rejection of the idea of the Cartesian subject does not mean that he does not allow humans any agency at all. On the contrary, for Heidegger, ‘the world cannot be what and how it is through human beings, but neither can it be so without human beings’. ⁷⁹ Furthermore, Chandler equates the Heideggerian being-in-the-world with the contemporary demand for humans to adapt to the conditions of the world instead of seeking to transcend them. ⁸⁰ Chandler’s reading of being-in-the-world is understandable in the light of his implicit commitment to ontological dualism, which translates into the subject/object dichotomy. Heidegger, however, explicitly rejects understanding being-in-the-world in terms of the separation between subject and object. For Heidegger, being-in-the-world is ontologically prior to any specific ways of being in the world, ⁸¹ and it is therefore wholly irreducible to the kind of ‘external’ demand for adaptation that Chandler is concerned with.

Chandler appears to argue that there can only be either the classical liberal subject guiding processes of external transformation or the succumbing of humans to blind necessity, thereby stripping them of all meaningful agency. This form of reasoning is itself indicative of the limits of binary thinking. Recognising that beings are embedded in a world not entirely of their own making and that their being is disclosed in a framework that directs their becoming does not mean succumbing to the need to merely adapt to external necessities. Rather, a critique of human development that recognises that the being of beings is ontologically enframed can bring to light the underlying openness of the world. Whereas freedom in human development is basically the freedom to modify oneself indefinitely, the freedom provided by the decision is engagement in the world as the open realm. The decision is therefore the form in which freedom is carried out. ⁸² Heidegger distinguishes thereby the essence of freedom from the kind of freedom that expresses itself as freedom from constraint or the freedom to choose this or that. Prior to all this, ‘freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such’. ⁸³ Keeping watch over this disclosure means not letting enframing reign in such a way that it is able to conceal its own being as a finite mode of revealing. Heidegger warns that enframing implies the greatest danger, yet he continues with the often cited poem by Hölderlin: ‘But where danger is, grows the saving power also’. ⁸⁴ Peter Sloterdijk, however, inverts the dictum to say: ‘But where the saviours are, grows equally the danger’, arguing that only when these two ideas are in balance, have we learnt something. ⁸⁵ What Sloterdijk is suggesting is that we need to both become engaged in the ways in which our situation may allow a way beyond contemporary conditions and remain aware of the fact that each way brings its own dangers with it.

Despite claims to the contrary, human development as envisaged by Sen and Nussbaum does not enable conceiving of a radically different world. On the contrary, human development de-politicises the world both because it internalises and individualises development through its foregrounding of capability and choice and because it denies the metaphysical character of its commitment to these ideas. Relating to the world rather as the openness of being which, nevertheless, requires involvement by beings in order for them to overcome the limitations that even supposedly emancipatory projects may (re)produce is an infinitely more radical effort than helping those projects, no matter how benevolent, consolidate the existing order of things.

Conclusion

In IR, the common inability to recognise the ontological commitments of the human development framework, and of liberalism more broadly, attests to the continuing relevance of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics. The biopolitics of capability and choice in human development manages life as a mouldable standing-reserve always ready to be taken up, transformed and improved, while at the same time reproducing the liberal-individualist conception of the human that reduces development to the choices made by the individual. Furthermore, I have argued in this article that human development not only produces biopoliticised, de-politicised subjectivities but also reflects and reproduces a particular enframing of the real that normalises the contingency of life while concealing the contingency of the framework within which humans are supposed to manage their lives. As such, human development is a form of ontological violence.

If development projects and institutions wish to contribute to a politics that does not re-produce both ontological and ontic forms of violence, they would need to start by recognising that even seemingly emancipatory ideas such as capability and choice shape and limit human lives in ways that are not necessarily only positive. Those already challenging development projects in their immediate life-environments all over the world do not need to be told about the limits that neoliberal development creates in their lives. They are acutely aware of them. This article has addressed the ontological constitution of those limits, yet they always also have an ontic articulation, which can be resisted in the realm of the ontic. The ontological critique of enframing and commitment to the openness of being do not preclude practical politics. Gandhi’s resistance to British colonialism has been cited as an example of the kind of creative action and non-coercive involvement in world disclosure that a Heideggerian critique points towards. ⁸⁶ However, the content of the politics challenging neoliberalism is not determined by this ontological critique. Rather, it re-opens the question of what is possible. This is the crux of the contribution of Heidegger’s thought to the critique of neoliberalism in IR. Yet, neoliberalism is not, of course, the only form of order that is prone to conceal its own contingency, which only goes to show the import that these ontological considerations can have to International Relations more broadly.

Following the massive proliferation of biopolitical critiques during the past decade, it has become popular in the last couple of years to seek an affirmative biopolitics aimed at transforming biological life from the site of governance to a site of resistance. Yet, the critique I have pursued here, informed by Heidegger’s work, does not seek to overcome biopolitical governance by relying on the same categories through which it operates. Rather, another contribution of a Heideggerian perspective on biopolitics in IR is the recognition of ontological difference and thus the conceptualisation of being beyond the conception of life recognised by modern biopolitics. Heidegger’s perspective engages with a non-biologised conception of being which, nevertheless, does not deny the very real materiality of life, but neither does it limit being to that materiality nor, more importantly, seek its political power in it. While this argument was pursued only in a preliminary manner in this article, it remains one of the directions that future research on the ‘beyond’ of biopolitics ought to explore more fully.

Power is thus to be countered at the sites where it manifests itself, and in this article I have argued that these sites are not only ‘actual’ but also historico-ontological. Freedom, then, is not developmental capability creation directed by neoliberal contingency, but engagement in world as the open realm. Conceived of in such terms, ‘world’ is the condition of possibility for beings to become differently. Yet, beings cannot dwell in sheer openness. Rather, beings must participate in the revelation and structuring of the multiplicity of the worlds that they inhabit. Despite their apparent similarity, the creation of capability within neoliberal contingency and involvement in world as the openness of being are not the same thing because the former lacks recognition of its own ontological finitude and, therefore, allows people to choose only that which already exists and which does not threaten the security of the calculative ordering of the real. In a world de-politicised by neoliberalism, exposing the ontological finitude of order is as such a political act. Yet, for our worlds to be properly political, they require involvement in the factical situations that the decision to see being beyond biopolitical life opens up before us.