I briefly examine here the concepts of subject, subjectivity, and subjection in the works of three philosophers: Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” Étienne Balibar’s “Citizen Subject,” and Roberto Esposito’s Communitas. Before doing so, however, I want to make a few preliminary remarks. While I argue that there exists between the concepts of interpellation and immunization a theoretical kinship so powerful that it may no longer be possible to think about one without at least taking the other into account, my inquiry into this kinship does not take the form of a chronology, as if interpellation, a notion developed by Althusser in the mid-1960s and introduced publically in “Ideology and the Ideological Sate Apparatuses” (1970), were the anticipation or even the pre-emption of a concept first outlined by Esposito nearly thirty years later in Communitas (1998). Such an approach would inevitably lead to the question of whether Esposito developed and advanced or, on the other hand, suppressed or replaced Althusser’s concept, perhaps by means of or against the intervening work of Balibar, published in 1989; such a question might be reduced to whether the thirty-year interval had been the site of progress or regression. Thus my title, “between interpellation and immunization,” should not be read as “from interpellation to immunization.” At the same time, I do not intend to pursue what might be understood as the opposite course: establishing the dialectical unity of the two apparently distinct concepts of interpellation and immunization by means of a mediation that would negate and overcome their difference. Such a procedure might take Balibar’s work on the subject as providing the common denominator or abstract equivalence into which Althusser and Esposito might be translated in order to be made commensurable. Instead, I regard these three texts and three concepts as forming a body in Spinoza’s sense, a composite unity made up of irreducibly distinct parts capable of acting together to be the cause of a single effect—in this case, of a theoretical and perhaps political effect.
 
I begin by recalling that Althusser’s verb “interpellate” (interpeller) is usually understood by English readers on the basis of Ben Brewster’s translation of it as “to hail someone,” or perhaps to address or call someone, as God, to use Althusser’s own example, calls on or to Moses. Brewster, however, does not quite capture the extent to which Althusser draws on one of the term’s meanings in modern French, a meaning particularly current in the period immediately following the revolt of May 1968. “Interpellate” refers to the action of the police when, as it is said in English, they “stop” or “detain” an individual; this action implies more than simply a hailing or calling out to the individual and instead takes the form of a command, which is to say, of a speech act necessarily grounded not simply in a specific legal context but also in an inequality of forces, to produce proof of the identity already assigned by the very process of interpellation: “it is the Prefecture of the Police which provides the individuals whom policemen interpellate with the identity papers that policemen request (demand) that one show” (“Three Notes” 83n21).
 
Perhaps even more significantly, none of Althusser’s numberless English-language commentators, to my knowledge, thought to inquire into the term’s use in English prior to its reintroduction into the language precisely by the translation of Althusser’s text. The verb “interpellate,” now listed as obsolete in the Oxford English Dictionary, was used as late as the end of the sixteenth century to signify “to interrupt a person speaking,” and, in a broader sense, to interrupt a process or action. This now unfamiliar use of interpellate was in fact derived directly from the Latin verb interpello, which also means to interrupt or disturb someone who is speaking. There exists a Latin noun, interpellator, to denote the one who interrupts or disrupts. A related term, appello, not only means to make an appeal to or to address someone, but also to accost that person, to call him out of and thus separate him from an assembly of which he is a part. The etymology of “interpellate” thus reminds us that Althusser is himself an “interpellator” in the Latin sense, one who disrupts an ongoing discourse with an unwelcome appeal or application, as if he were owed something, a debt that no one knew remained outstanding, perhaps nothing more than an explanation—the demand for which, however, can only disturb the ongoing discourse whose perpetuation is perhaps organized around the denial of that debt.
 
That Althusser’s disruptive appeal concerns the category of the subject hardly allows us to separate the disturbance he caused in philosophy and political thought from that of his contemporaries, from Heidegger to Lacan to Foucault. They, too, while never declaring or attempting to bring about the disappearance of the subject—as has been so often claimed—nevertheless in different ways and to different degrees question the status of the concept as a given and as the unquestioned origin and therefore source of explanation for any conceivable human activity. Texts such as Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?” pose difficult and disquieting questions about the historical emergence of the category of the subject that themselves proved disruptive, as if their authors also are interpellators interrupting the assembly of learned discourse.
 
The disturbance caused by Althusser’s introduction of the notion of interpellation therefore could not simply be attributed to its demand for a theory of the constitution of the subject heretofore regarded as the condition of intelligibility of any social practice. To grasp the singularity of this disturbance, I turn to the specific textual form or, more precisely, forms in which Althusser develops the concept of interpellation through an important but thus far unnoticed revision of his account of what he calls “the duplicate mirror-structure of ideology [la structure spéculaire redoublée]” in the ISAs essay (“Ideology” 180). This essay, dated January-April 1970 and appearing in the Communist journal La Pensée in June 1970, is described in an editorial footnote as consisting of “two extracts from an ongoing study” (127n1). The manuscript from which the essay was “extracted” bears the handwritten title “De la superstructure” and is itself dated one year earlier, January-April 1969; this piece would be posthumously published in a collection edited by Jacques Bidet, entitled Sur la reproduction. The idea of extraction, however, which suggests that the two sections were removed as is from the manuscript, is a bit misleading. Within the extracts themselves, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and, indeed, entire sections were suppressed, in certain cases decisively altering the meaning of the text.
 
No omission has more decisively changed the philosophical and political significance of Althusser’s analysis than that which shaped the section entitled “The State” in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” The corresponding section in Sur la reproduction (“The State and its Apparatuses”) is not only significantly longer, but represents an attempt, of which there is little trace in the later version, to theorize the process of the reproduction of the relations of production as the simultaneous production/reproduction of antagonism and conflict. From the perspective of the earlier text, the relations of production could never take the form of an order or a system, but rather could only take the form of a perpetual, ever-changing battle; here, even Gramsci’s model of hegemony appears to Althusser to freeze or fix the relationship of class forces as if to abstract it from the contingencies of actual combat. The final sections of the chapter on the State in Sur la reproduction were all omitted in their entirety from the ISAs essay and their titles alone suggest positions at odds with what is now known as Althusser’s theory of ideology: “The Ideological State Apparatuses and the Ideological By-products of Their Practices,” “The Double Functioning of the State Apparatuses and Their ‘Combined Action,’” and “The Fragility and Solidity of the Ideological State Apparatuses” (Reproduction 113-123). In these suppressed parts of his discussion of the state and its apparatuses, Althusser offers an account of the way class struggle, present from the beginning, is constitutive of the apparatuses themselves, which thus arise to counter already existing movements against the reproduction of the relations of production. Class struggle thus deforms the apparatuses, not only inhibiting their functioning but causing them to produce contradictory effects. He argues that while an ideology does not precede and give rise to apparatuses that would correspond to it (an “idealist” error he attributes to Stalin), neither do the apparatuses precede and give rise to the ideology or ideologies proper to them; the second proposition is merely the inverse of the first (113). There is instead, first, an ideology that “exists in,” is immanent in, or is consubstantial with an apparatus and, second, the ideology produced by the practice or practices of this apparatus insofar as it is engaged in and shaped by the struggles outside of which it has no existence or meaning. These “secondary ideologies,” as Althusser calls them, “are produced by a conjunction of complex causes in which figure, along with the practice in question, the effect of other external ideologies and other external practices—and in the last instance, however dissimulated they may be, even the distant (but in reality very near) effects of class struggles” (115).¹ The apparatuses, in other words, cannot be understood as inert institutions or mechanisms existing independently of their actual operation, which is to say, independently of their participation in struggles subject to the variability of fortune that characterizes war and especially, as in this case, an interminable war whose ever changing modes and sites of engagement require perpetual adjustment of tactics and strategy. As such, the apparatuses “secrete” (a term always placed in quotation marks by Althusser) “secondary ideological sub-formations [sous-formations]” or “by-products [sous-produits].” The effects of struggle thus cause the ISAs to secrete a by-product that by definition is not only not functional but may even prove “toxic,” as if through a kind of autoimmune reaction. An apparatus can thus be described, depending on the disposition of forces internal and external to it, as more or less “fragile” (120). Often, though, the apparatuses remain “solid,” despite the by-products whose toxicity only occasionally and in the right circumstances (in combination with other by-products of other apparatuses) reaches a level that threatens the very existence of the apparatus itself (119). This description of the apparatuses and their double functioning or their tendency to produce conflict instead of order, and thereby in their totality to destabilize rather than promote the stability of class relations, is notoriously absent from the ISAs essay (with the exception of its postscript, where the primacy of class struggle appears as an afterthought). It also allows Althusser to devote an entire chapter in Sur la reproduction to the very phenomenon critics of the ISAs essay had charged him with excluding a priori: revolution.²
 
Althusser’s suppression of his own account of the process of the production of irreducible conflict in favor of the rigorously functionalist account of capitalist society offered in the published version of the text is undoubtedly an example of the theoretical bending of the stick that he repeatedly justified until the end of the 1970s, when he recognized that hyperbole in the realm of theory could correct theoretical-political errors only by introducing new and different errors, replacing existing confusion not with clarity but with other and perhaps more powerful, durable forms of confusion. It would be a mistake, however, to allow ourselves to be distracted by what Jacques Rancière (who perfectly represented the intended audience of what he calls Althusser’s theater of the abstract and who knew it when he accused Althusser of employing a philosophical sleight of hand to dupe and amaze his “spectators”) has referred to as Althusser’s “philosophy of Order.” Instead, we should keep in mind that the genesis of the concept shows that the Ideological State Apparatus only has meaning in relation to the resistance that precedes and provokes its emergence and its operation: the ISAs taken together in their tendential and always unstable unity can at best temporarily preserve a certain equilibrium of forces without ever being able to resolve or abolish the conflict itself.
 
The ISAs essay did not, however, simply consist of extracts shaped and determined by omissions and elisions. Althusser also introduced changes and additions. Of these, none are perhaps more important or decisive than those made to the section described as “an example” of the “central thesis” that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, that is, the section entitled “An Example: Christian Religious Ideology” (“Ideology” 177-183). In both versions of the text, Althusser begins with a justification of the very notion of “an example,” which as an illustration of a generality would seem to commit him to an emanationist logic at odds with his insistence elsewhere on immanence and singularity. He restricts his “analysis to a single example, one accessible to everyone,” because “the formal structure of all ideology is always the same” (177). It is important to note, however, that Althusser offers two different accounts of this formal structure that is everywhere and always the same. In the longer, 1969 manuscript, this formal structure is “a triple system” that ensures or guarantees (he uses the verb assurer) three simultaneous operations: 1) the interpellation of individuals as subjects; 2) the mutual recognition between subjects and the Subject, mutual recognition between subjects, and each subject’s recognition of himself; 3) the absolute guarantee that everything really is so: that God really is God, that Pierre really is Pierre, and that, if the subjection of subjects to the Subject is truly respected, everything will go well for them: they will be “rewarded (récompensé)” (Reproduction 232-233).
 
In the more familiar, published version of 1970, the triple system had grown into a quadruple system of ideological operations, and the addition is anything but trivial. Between points 1 and 2–between, that is, the interpellation of individuals as subjects, on the one hand, and the three forms of recognition (between subjects and the Subject, between subjects, and each subject’s recognition of himself), on the other–Althusser inserts an additional operation, that of “their subjection to the Subject” (“Ideology” 181). The fact of subjection (assujettisement) is thus situated between, on the one hand, the interpellation of individual as subject, as agent and author of thought, speech, and action, and, on the other hand, the recognition of this fact by the Subject, by other subjects, and by each subject in relation to himself. Althusser will add to the 1970 version an explanation of the link between what we might call subjectivation and subjection. That the subjects produced by this quadruple system “work all by themselves [marchent tout seul]” seems, Althusser admits, a “mystery,” but the mystery is itself an effect of the irreducible “ambiguity” of the term “subject.” In “current usage [l’acception courante],” the term “subject” signifies, in effect, 1) “a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission” (“Ideology” 182). The order of these definitions is anything but arbitrary; for Althusser, the subject is interpellated as free and as a consenting subject so that it will freely choose or consent to its own subjection (with the word “consent” remaining strategically absent from the entirety of the ISAs essay).
 
It is difficult not to see in these phrases a more or less direct reference to Hobbes, to whom, moreover, Althusser devoted a course at the École Normale Supérieure in 1971. The only limit—itself perhaps the point of intersection between law and nature—on the individual’s right to self-government is that at which a man is “forbidden” not to act to preserve himself (to use Hobbes’s own ambiguous phrase [189]). This quasi-absolute right of the individual to direct himself and thus to be governed by no power other than that to which he freely consents is accorded him precisely so that he will choose to transfer the right of which he is the sole proprietor to the Sovereign, so as to preserve himself from the dangers of the state of nature. If, once he has consented to the sovereign, he should repent of his actions and attempt to recover the right he had earlier transferred, he will, properly speaking, initiate a war with himself and will consequently be himself the author of any punishment carried out against him. Here the individual is addressed as a free agent and author so that the power to which he consents and to which he thus freely submits will have the greatest possible legitimacy: whatever it does, whether to him or for him, it does with his own authorization.
 
Is this then Althusser’s interpellatio, his disruption and disturbance of political thought: the argument that the attribution of freedom to a subject is the retroactive effect of a submission whose voluntary acceptance of authority furnishes its absolute ground? To judge the ISAs essay and particularly the substantially revised passages referred to above by their effects, the answer would have to be no. In both versions of the essay, Althusser acknowledges that the interpellated subject does not always heed the call of the Subject. There are those who, once called into existence as subjects, turn away from the vocation of or the call to submission, as if the free will with which they are endowed permits them on occasion to refuse the destiny in relation to which they are inscribed as subjects. These are what Althusser famously called “bad subjects”: criminals, heretics, and rebels. Michel Pêcheux was perhaps correct to worry that the phrase, “they work all by themselves,” could suggest that once interpellated (and every subject is always already interpellated), they become indistinguishable from the “classical subject” (215). It was perhaps to forestall such a reading that Althusser added this italicized sentence to the second version as the penultimate phrase of the inserted paragraph: “There are no subjects except by and for [par et pour] their subjection” (“Ideology” 182). Here Althusser moves beyond the notion that subjects only exist for the subjection that they will freely choose, to the far less familiar statement that subjects exist only by or through their subjection, as if subjection (in a logical if not chronological sense) precedes rather than follows the constitution of subject as author and agent, as the subject’s condition of possibility or sine qua non, that without which it cannot exist.³ Only here in the penultimate sentence of the penultimate paragraph of “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” does Althusser pose a question without a response: what precisely is the relation between the two meanings of the term subject and, more precisely, how does the subject arise from subjection (assujetissement)?
 
As I now turn to Balibar’s “Citizen Subject,” published nearly twenty years after the ISAs essay and in as radically different a historical conjuncture as could be imagined, I want to be clear that I do not read it as a response to or rectification of Althusser’s text, nor even in a strict sense as “following” Althusser’s intervention; rather I read it as another approach different from and in certain ways opposed to that of Althusser. Of the differences, none is more obvious than the absence of any notion of the transhistorical if not the eternal existence of the subject (as in Freud’s dictum: “the unconscious is eternal”) and therefore, to follow Althusser’s argument, of subjection. Balibar begins by examining another critical account of the subject, one which in its own way posits a ground of the being of the subject that is necessarily present to its historical permutations: that of Heidegger, especially in the 1938 text “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” translated into English as “The Age of the World Picture.” For Heidegger, “This word, Subjectum, must certainly be understood as the translation of the Greek ΰποκείμενον. The word names that which lies before [das Vor-liegende], that which as ground gathers everything on itself [das als Grund alles auf sich sammelt]” (“Age” 128; “Zeit” 81). The original of which “subjectum” is a translation and that marks “subjectum,” like all translations, with a certain loss of meaning has, unlike its modern versions, no special relationship “to men [Menschen] and none at all to the I” (“Age” 128; “Zeit” 81). As Heidegger approaches Descartes, with whom he credits the introduction of the anthropological notion of the subject into Western thought, he reminds us that it is “impossible to say that the modern understanding of whatever is, is more correct than that of the Greeks” (“Age” 117; “Zeit” 77). On the contrary, with Descartes (an origin whose function in Heidegger’s discourse Balibar calls into question by simply reading Descartes’s text) comes a contraction of the subject that has as its corollary a reduction of Being to World and a reduction of World to a picture. Man, understood less as species than as the human individual, as if the separation of individuals were the form of its species-being, becomes ground, the “subjectum,” or subject of Being. I would note here that Heidegger has in fact projected the modern sense of subject as that which “as ground, gathers everything on itself” onto the Greek “ΰποκείμενον,” which normally signifies not the agent of an action but precisely that which is acted upon, that which is placed under or in front of, that which is subjected or submitted to something else. It is perhaps more often translated as substrate or substance than as subject, no doubt because of its use in Aristotle’s texts.⁴ Heidegger’s “ΰποκείμενον” is, in contrast, a strange agent that not only places itself under, but collects together (sammeln) all the things that will be on top of or above it, as if choosing to subject or submit itself in an Opfer or sacrifice to that which is by its own effort and agency made literally higher or superior. Heidegger’s assertion that Descartes carried out an anthropologization of Western Metaphysics by instituting the ego cogito as original ground is thus itself based on or grounded in an already anthropologized or anthropomorphized conception of the ΰποκείμενον as the agent of a gathering or collecting that is also a subjection, as if a certain notion of the subject as agent and author possessed, as Althusser argued, an omni-historical existence.
 
Heidegger’s interpretation of Descartes’s Meditations as introducing into Western thought the anthropological subject (subjectum), an interpretation hardly peculiar to him, is all the more remarkable in that, as Balibar shows, not only is the word subjectum itself missing from the Meditations, but the concept is as well: to follow Descartes’s reasoning to its end is to see that the ego cogito finally discovers the impossibility of its functioning as a ground and that its being a subject at all is predicated on its being subjectus, not the subject of knowledge but subject to a knowledge that originates in something greater, namely God, subjection to whom is the condition of any knowledge including, above all, the subject’s knowledge of itself. It is as if, Balibar tells us, speaking not only of Heidegger or of Heideggerians, but also of a general tendency to accept Heidegger’s reading with or without any reference to Heidegger himself, there has occurred around the concept of the subject a generalized “forgetting” (“Citizen” 33). And what has been forgotten is precisely the irreducible division of the subject. First, there is the subjected subject, the subject of a sovereign, the sovereign’s subject, as opposed to the sovereign subject. At the extreme, of course, since there is no king but God, we are in this sense God’s subjects, subject here being understood as a “subditus,” literally, as he who is subject to the words and commands/commandments of another, not as a slave (servus) who is coerced, but as one who chooses to obey and who therefore possesses or is possessed by a supplement of will or faith in the sense of fide or fidelity. Secondly, alongside the sovereign’s subject is the sovereign subject, the subject subject only to itself and therefore the sole and unconditioned author of thought, speech, and action. However, it is not only the irreducible division of the subject that has been forgotten, but also and perhaps even more importantly the historical and political anteriority of the former over the latter.
 
For Balibar, the modern notion of the subject as origin and center of initiatives begins with Kant, but paradoxically only in the form of an interpretation of Descartes that attributes to him a “Cartesian subject” that in fact appears for the first time only in the Critique of Pure Reason. Far from overcoming the contradiction tying subjectivity to subjection, the Kantian/”Cartesian” subject only multiplies its effects, dispersing them even more widely than before. It is in the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant first transforms the verb “cogito” or “I think” into a noun, “das Ich denke” or “the I think,” as if the subject is something or someone that exists only through the act of thinking: “the ‘I think’ expresses the act of determining my existence” (169). The subject can thus no longer be conceived as substrate in the classical sense, but is instead an activity, thinking thinking itself as both agent and object of thought. While, as Balibar points out, there is little overtly political or practical in the discussion of the “I think” in the Critique of Pure Reason (except briefly at the conclusion of the discussion of the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason”), Kant insists that my (and we must speak in the first person here) thinking myself thinking constitutes a representation or intuition (as opposed to a rational knowledge) of “my existence as a self-active being” (169), and this opens the way to its “correlate” (“Citizen” 77), the notion of freedom that underlies the very possibility of morality. It does so in a double sense: Kant posits the “spontaneity” of the I think, that is, the fact that it determines itself, while at the same time denying the subject a knowledge of this self-activity that would be anything other than an intuition (Anschauung) or a representation (Vorstellung). Thus, as Balibar notes, “the Kantian ‘subject,’ that is, the Ich or better the Ich denke, is fundamentally caught in a relation of imputation” (“Citizen” 77). Because I can know myself “only as I appear to myself and not as I am to the understanding” (Kant, Critique 167), my intuition or representation of my spontaneity (Critique of Pure Reason) or my freedom in the sense that I am a causa libera (Metaphysics of Morals) “can never aid me in advancing beyond the field of experience” to know myself “as noumenon” (383, 382). Because practical existence, however, “is always directed to objects of experience,” we may apply these intuitions to the problem of how “a subject that is possessed of freedom” should act, that is, how it should legislate for itself and then obey moral law (383). In fact, this very freedom, the ground of any possible morality and that which separates the human from the natural world, cannot be known in the pure sense and thus must be “imputed.” Thus, in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant defines the person “as a subject whose actions can be imputed to him” and moral personality as the “freedom of a rational being under moral laws,” which are only those “which he gives himself (alone or with others)” (50).
 
Imputation, however, is not an unconditioned act of recognition or projection on the part of one subject in regard to another, as if it would grant to the other what it intuits about itself in a kind of spontaneous sociability. On the contrary, there is nothing spontaneous about imputation; it occurs only in the context of a fundamental Ungleichheit: both inequality (and not simply in law, but also an inequality of force) and dissimilarity. Imputation (Zurechnung) is above all a “judgment by which someone is regarded as the author (causa libera) of an action” formulated by a judge or person “authorized to impute with rightful force” (Metaphysics 53). To argue that Kant’s subject, even as it emerges in the Critique of Pure Reason, is a kind of Zurechnungssubjekt or subject of imputation, a subject to whom a freedom not rationally knowable can and perhaps must be ascribed or imputed, is to suggest the primacy of the political dimension. To be a person and to have a moral, legal personality is not to be free, that is, demonstrably the free cause of one’s own actions as an author (Kant’s term is Urheber, which means origin and creator, but also perpetrator), but is rather to have this freedom imputed by one “authorized to impute by rightful force.” The imputation of freedom is thus a violent imposition of causal, moral, and legal responsibility on an individual by an anonymous juridico-political order (note that the judge himself “is authorized” in the passive voice, as if he too were a subject of imputation authorized by yet another subject of imputation in a necessarily endless chain). This order precedes the subject of imputation, and his subjection to it is the condition of the act by which he is imputed freedom, which in turn is necessary to any morality. If he can be said to have given himself either alone or with others the (moral) laws he then freely obeys, this giving or creating is also then imputed and so requires the temporal and logical precedence of the legal over the moral. Thus, Kant too has affirmed in his own way that there are no subjects except by and through their own subjection.
 
To draw the line of demarcation that will make the hierarchical opposition inscribed in the notion of subject in its historical existence permanently visible, that is, to undo the repression to which it has been “subject,” so to speak, Balibar proposes that after the sovereign subject that itself follows the sovereign’s subject—but only by folding subjection into itself as the condition or result of its freedom—there emerges through a rejection of the subjection/subjectivation antinomy the figure of the citizen, a figure born out the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth-century, particularly the French Revolution. To be precise, the citizen is
 

a historical figure that is no longer the subjectus and not yet the subjectum. But from the outset, in the way that it is formulated and put into practice, it exceeds its own institution. The citizen is what I have called the statement of a hyperbolic proposition; its developments can only emerge from conflicts whose stakes can be sketched out.
 

(Citoyen Sujet 53; my translation)

It exceeds its own institution: the citizen is thus a utopian figure not in the sense that its essence lies in a future to be realized, but in the sense that it exists nowhere—neither in the collectivity nor in the individual, neither publicly nor privately, neither as subjectus nor as subjectum—and in the sense that its very identity grows out of these exclusions. Historically it emerges within the development of the subject, dividing it from itself by working to overturn the primacy of a subjection that, even when it originates in the unconditioned will of free and equal subjects, produces inequality and unfreedom. The citizen exists only in and through a struggle that is by definition permanent, a struggle that leads it beyond its own limits, as if to remain within them would reduce the citizen to the very subject against which it has defined itself. The citizen thus exists only through the activity in which its objectives remain immanent.

 
The work of Roberto Esposito on immunity may well appear to be inscribed in a different register than that of Althusser and Balibar. As a response to some of the theoretical problems engendered by Foucault’s work on biopower, particularly that “interval of meaning which remains open in Foucault’s text between the constitutive poles of the concept of biopolitics, namely biology and politics,” it would seem to address the question of the appropriation of life by politics that in a certain way would allow us to sidestep or circumvent the question of the subject altogether. Reading Esposito in the light of the foregoing discussion, however, we cannot escape the sense that the opposition between communitas and immunitas is another way to think the constitutive aporia of the subject and the irreducible conflict at the heart of the notion of citizen. As Esposito demonstrates, the concept of immunity is political before it is biological. Communitas or community is not only not “a property belonging to subjects that joins them together,” the totality to which they would pertain before their separation into individuals; it is not even a thing (the res publica) that could be substantified as that which individuals “share” or possess (Communitas 8). If we can speak of a sharing, it would be the sharing of a munus, an obligation, a debt, a tax, even the paradox of an obligatory gift, the sharing of which Esposito describes as a lack or void. Communitas is thus not more than the individual, but less; it does not add but subtracts and is finally the experience of destitution and expropriation (depropriazione) (6-7). Such a subject is subject of and to debt and despoliation: an outside that marks its own limit is rediscovered within, as that which separates each subject from itself. It is here, in a gesture whose timing in relation to the argument concerning the subject’s relation to communitas as well as whose content can only remind us of Althusser, that Esposito turns to Scripture and the example not of Moses but of Paul. Even fellowship, κοινότης, in the community of the faithful, the κοινονία, is a “taking part in” that entails a loss and a diminution, a participation in a loss of freedom that is δούλεια or slavery in Christ, in whose death one must participate (11). These, of course, are the images of subjection so total that the subjected subject is threatened with extinction, a destitution that leaves no remainder.
 
It is in relation to the “unacceptable” as well as “unbearable” munus, in which the subject is lost to itself at the heart of the Christian communitas, that the countermovement of immunization takes place. Immunity emerges as the demand for exemption from debt, obligation, service, and above all from the shared debt of communitas, which is now experienced at the extreme as a claim on one’s life and therefore as the threat of death. Every social tie becomes a threat against which the subject must be immunized by as complete a separation as possible from others whose claims on him can be ignored with impunity (a term closely related to immunity). Immunity evacuates the void of the munus by emptying the common: there is nothing in common. But the subject thus free from obligation and from the movement of alienation and exteriorization represented by the munus, a subject therefore restored to the self-sovereignty and self-proprietorship that community had denied it–the subject, that is, in the modern sense—can only become and remain a subject in this sense by virtue of its subjection to that which will protect or immunize it against the threats to its autonomy. The subject thus can exercise sovereignty over itself (over its life, property, and liberty) only to the extent that it is subjected or subjects itself to the sovereign power capable of assuring its immunity. To translate this into Althusser’s idiom, there is no subject except by and through subjection.
 
It is, at least in part, on the terrain of Hobbes’s philosophy that the link between interpellation and immunization becomes intelligible: “the Leviathan-state coincides with the breaking [la dissociazione] of every communitarian bond, with the squelching [l’abolizione] of every social relation that is foreign to the vertical exchange of protection-obedience” (14). As Esposito argues, this state is the denial of the very possibility of relation, not only of the cum, as if human beings are originally separated and unite only secondarily, but even of the entire transindividual dimension from which the juridical individual cannot be disentangled and extricated without violence and loss and without being deprived of that part of himself that is in common with others and nevertheless proper to him. In fact, taken to its logical conclusion, which is, as Esposito notes, paradoxically a remnant of irrationality, individuals are “preserved” and “protected” only at the cost of the very sociality that makes their existence in a material as well as cultural sense possible: “they live in and of their refusal to live together [convivere]” (14). Every possible combination, coagulation, and confusion in which the juridical individual might become lost or dispersed – or, on the contrary, might become part of a composite singularity ranging from couples, in particular (the or “one flesh” of the first couple–a phrase establishing that their separation could only be a tearing or laceration of the composite but irreducible body they had become), to collectivities of all kinds, whether “natural” or “artificial”-is abolished and replaced by the relation between subject and Subject. In fact, politics itself becomes prevention, not only the prevention of war, but just as importantly a prophylaxis against any exposure to others that would automatically carry the danger of transindividual contagion and a weakening of the vertical relation of subjection. Hence the immunitary practice that both precedes and accompanies interpellation as its simultaneous condition and result.
 
But Esposito also shows that the Hobbesian model requires a foundation that, if not exactly missing from, nevertheless remains underdeveloped in his texts. The self-mastery that both requires the protection or granting of immunity to the individual by the sovereign (the process by which every social tie is broken except that of the vertical relation to the sovereign) and that simultaneously serves as the guarantee of the legitimacy of the individual’s subjection to the sovereign (the transfer of the right of self-government must itself be grounded in right) is made possible by an original or natural right. As Hobbes explains in the opening of chapter 14 of Leviathan, this jus naturale is “the Liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature, that is to say, of his own Life; and consequently of doing anything which in his own Judgment and Reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” The assertion of liberty here is of course designed precisely to make it possible for the individual to “divest himself” of that liberty for the sake of self-preservation (190). But what is critical here and regularly overlooked by commentators is that in this brief passage immediately following the account of the state of nature and in which Hobbes states very forcefully that “there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct,” the phrase “his own” (power, nature, life, judgment, and reason) occurs no less than four times (188). While “his own judgment” may appear merely to assign in a descriptive sense the agent or cause of a judgment, “his own life” is clearly more complicated insofar as it is the object of the action of using one’s own liberty: it is that which our natural right enjoins us to “preserve.” To say my own life (or even, to complicate matters further, “myself”) in this context is to assert possession: it is my life by right and no one else’s, and what liberty and power I “possess” or “have” by natural right, I will use in defense of what is “my own.” Here, a certain form of property precedes and makes possible, even as for Hobbes it paradoxically requires, the absolute sovereignty of the Leviathan state.⁵
 
For Esposito it is Locke who will “solve” the problem that appears in Hobbes’s version of immunization (that is, by intensifying and multiplying its contradictions).⁶ In order simply to refer to myself, my own self, what I myself own, the self that is mine and no one else’s,⁷ the self that is separate from what is common—in order, that is, to declare or establish that which is to be immunized (and interpellated)–“man” must be both “master of himself, and Proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labor of it” (27; ch. 5, sec. 44). Property has now become an attribute or property of life (or at least human life) itself, which means that just as there can be no property without the life that it will (pre)serve, so there can be no life without the property, proprietorship, and appropriation that allow it to exist: Man has “still in himself the great foundation of property; and that, which made up the great part of what he applied to the support or comfort of his being . . . was perfectly his own” (27; ch. 5, sec. 44). The common is that which must be overcome through the labor of a single individual whose proprietorship of his own person insures that his labor remains his and cannot (legitimately or de jure) be mixed or confused with the labor of others. To appropriate through individual labor is thus not simply to remove “out of the state that nature hath provided,” but it also “excludes the common right of other men.” (18; ch. 5, sec. 27). The original separateness of the body confers the status of property on the “fruit or venison” it appropriates from the natural state, so that it must be his who appropriates it and it requires the exclusive right that property brings (“another can no longer have any right to it”) “before it can do him any good for the support of his life” (19; ch. 5, sec.26).
 
Thus property not only precedes sovereignty as its condition, it also more problematically precedes any form of interhuman existence at all, with the result that it is not simply the common that threatens the existence of the individual proprietor, but also the mere presence of another, separate individual. The threat here is not that of violence and despoliation, as in the case of Hobbes, but instead is the properly biological threat of contagion, infection, and contamination, an invasion of the “mine” by the “thine” at the corporeal level, a mingling whose effects can only deprive the body of what is its own and what is necessary to its preservation. This danger is forestalled in the state of nature where everyone is free (from others; the danger there is that individuals will lose contact with their fellows in the “vast wilderness of the earth,” rather than feel “straightened” by their presence [ch. 5, sec. 36]) and where there exists a rough equality of appropriation and consumption. Both liberty and equality, however, disappear in the social state, or rather persist as that which must be imputed to those who no longer appear to be either free or equal. While everyone theoretically continues to have a property in his own person, the continuum between life, body, work, appropriation, and property is broken and the fruits of one’s labor are immediately the property of another. Immunization becomes the means by which it is possible to say “that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth,” as if declaring the human-individual proprietor of himself only turned him into the thing that he owned, permitting his expropriation, an expropriation that is all the more violent insofar as it results from the individual’s own labor that now drains life instead of preserving and strengthening it (ch. 5, sec. 50). For Locke, the vertical relation of subjection is subordinate to and in fact serves the horizontal separation of individuals understood as proprietors of themselves, their persons, and whatever they, through their labor, “annex” to themselves—an immunity given by both nature and reason and that must itself be protected by the state. The danger lies less in the threat to property posed by the absolute monarch’s taxes on his subjects than in the threat posed by those (in)human predators who ignore the fact that a man’s possessions have been annexed to his person and that an attempt to steal his coat (or occupy his land) represents an attempt on his very being.
 
Against a line of thought that connects Schmitt, Arendt, and Agamben, both Althusser and Esposito have thus, in different ways, displaced the question of sovereignty from the center of political life, insisting that, if it has any meaning at all in the modern context, sovereignty (and the notion of law that it implies) must be understood to be co-extensive with the specific forms of property and appropriation characteristic of modernity itself. Not only have interpellation and immunization been mobilized (often but not only by the state) to bring about and maintain a regime of absolute private property against all other forms of use and occupation; they also ascribe to the individual a property in his own person and a possession of his own liberty that, in the guise of restoring freedom and equality, actually provides the means of his alienation through the transfer, sale, or forfeiture that in the vast majority of cases has always already taken place. Thus, if there is struggle, it is as much against the merely horizontal relations that, through a universal individualization and separation, produce new and durable forms of subjection and inequality, as it is against the vertical relation of subject/sovereign.
 
But I cannot conclude without acknowledging the precise point at which Althusser and Esposito diverge from each other. For the former, interpellation remains profoundly functional, serving the reproduction of the system of production (and property) that makes life possible. We have noted that Althusser’s decision to exclude the discussion of resistance and revolt found in Sur la reproduction from the published text of the ISAs essay results in a theory of reproduction in relation to which opposition can only arrive from outside or be deferred to the end or limit (as in the letter of Althusser’s own text, where class struggle appears only after the essay’s conclusion, in a postscript), as if it can never arrive but instead remains irreducibly to come. But can we not see this error, so often identified and criticized, as itself a symptom of another conflict, that which animates what we might call Althusser’s biopolitics? Capitalism appears in his essay as a constantly expanding and optimizing system whose ability to guarantee subsistence to its population is never in doubt, insofar as this subsistence, according to Althusser, is necessary to its functioning. Here too, by imputing a generalized rationality to the capitalist mode of production, Althusser has banished the possibility not only of understanding the tendency to crisis outlined by Marx in the third volume of Capital, but also of grasping the contradictions that set capitalism against itself—of understanding capitalism, in certain circumstances, in a certain conjuncture, and in a certain balance of forces, as a mode of (self) destruction rather than production. Esposito, by contrast, insists on the ever-intensifying contradiction of a society that works to deprive itself of the very relations that allow it to survive, as if “life were sacrificed to its own preservation,” or as if life were destroyed in the process of its own production (14).
 
It is here, and I give Balibar the last word, that the concept of the citizen intervenes, not as the mediator between interpellation and immunization understood as vertical subjection and horizontal privation, but as a wedge that prevents their convergence. Balibar recalls that which has been subject to a forgetting, precisely the historicity of the citizen, a historicity whose traces remain indelible. Inscribed in the historical reality of the citizen is a refusal to accept a merely formal or symbolic definition of the liberty and equality that constitute it, an imputation of freedom whose function is primarily punitive and penal and an equality that is the retroactive projection of actually existing hierarchy. The citizen represents the unfulfilled demand for a freedom and equality immanent and inseparable from the ability to think and to act. If there is no subject except by and through subjection, there is no subjection except in response to a resistance that it arises to contain. In a sense, the citizen is the deferred effect of that to which subjection is a response, the resistance that is life itself, life resisting that which threatens to weaken and destroy it, the actually existing forms of coercion and privation, the symptoms of the profound autoimmune reaction of a notion of society from which all that is genuinely social must be eliminated. In the figure of the citizen as it emerges in Balibar’s essay, a figure that is less the antithesis of or antidote to the subject than the marking of its limit, we see the insurrection to come, which, like every future, is already inscribed in the present.
 

Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians (Hütern), who are the possessors of commodities (Warenbesitzern).
 

(Marx, Das Kapital 99; Capital 94)

The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself, “in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation.” The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners (diese Race eigentümlicher Warenbesitzer) may perpetuate its appearance in the market.
 

(Marx, Das Kapital 186; Capital 182, my emphasis)

1. The Presupposition of Homo nationalis

 
“The history of nations, beginning with our own, is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject” (Balibar and Wallerstein 86). So begins Étienne Balibar’s now-famous inquiry into the “nation-form,” the term he gives to the aggregate of “apparatuses” and “practices” that institute the individual as “homo nationalis from cradle to grave” (93). Already in this short sentence we are introduced to an entire network of concepts and issues—the field of the historical, the nation-form, the problem of the beginning, origin, or commencement, the national as narrative, the form of the subject, and its possibility of being grasped as a continuity—that circle around a theoretical question that is not only historical but profoundly actual: the relation between the inner logic of capital, the fundamental expression of modern social relations, and the form of the nation-state, the quintessential entity within which the modern form of belonging is most often cartographically, politically, and conceptually organized. In turn, this excavation of homo nationalis is inseparably linked to a set of questions posed in another famous text, one in which Balibar introduces us to a very specific problematic characterizing our modern world order: the volatile articulation or process of referral between the citizen and the subject. Here, he emphasizes something that will become absolutely central for the present inquiry when he states, “The citizen is the subject, the citizen is always a supposed subject (legal subject, psychological subject, transcendental subject). I will call this new development the citizen’s becoming-a-subject (devenir-sujet)” (“Citizen Subject” 46). As we attempt to think the relation between these two fields of concerns, we will need to extensively examine the problem here of supposition and presupposition. This sequence—the intense and complex conceptual field of Setzung and Voraussetzung in Marx—will allow us to productively complicate the ways in which homo nationalis remains not merely a corollary or peripheral question to the broad concerns of capitalist development, but rather a profoundly historical field of force located at the very core of the logic of capital, in which the abstract individual who is the presumed subject of exchange is always presupposed not merely as a subject, but as a national subject.
 
When we imagine the national question, we generally think of a field of problems that presume or presuppose the givenness of the nation-form. That is, we often presuppose that the national question involves simply the excavation and categorization of the putatively national factors of development, the relative stage of a given national capital in relation to various other national capitals, the dynamics internal to a particular national formation’s reproduction, the distinction of one national market from another and so forth. In other words, the national question is typically posed as if the national itself is not a question, but rather an answer: the notion of specificity or particularity is frequently treated here as if it were something that explains, rather than something to be explained, a split between explanans and explanandum that has a long rhetorical history. But we might also say that the national question can be understood in precisely the opposite manner, an insight to which Balibar’s work has long alerted us.
 
It is relatively common to conceive of the nation as a form in which belonging is organized and to which the state responds. That is, the form of the nation-state is often understood in a common-sense manner by means of a simple sequence: the nation must precede the state, because it legitimates and justifies the state, giving it a certain solidity that would otherwise be lost in attempting to link the state’s boundaries to a given community. But this sequence cannot be logically sustained for a number of reasons. First and foremost, if the nation were to precede the state, it would imply that a concept of boundary or border could be rigorously drawn between one nation and another prior to the advent of the modern political community. It would imply, for instance, that national language or custom could be strictly delimited or demarcated within boundaries that correspond to concrete differences on the level of the concept. This in turn would imply that prior to such nations, there exists a natural stratum of difference in which difference could be understood as already organized. In this sense, it would imply that each national community is simply a historical concretization of a set of differences that not only existed in antiquity, but exists eternally, in an infinite regress, though always corresponding to some natural hierarchy inscribed in the earth itself.
 
Needless to say, we know, and have known for centuries, that such a conception of an inherent systematic ordering of difference inscribed in the earth never existed. Nations rise and fall, they are constituted and dispersed, the borders of languages fluctuate and mutate in historically complex waves, groupings emerge, and accidentally aggregated groups become peoples who migrate, resettle, colonize, are colonized, are eradicated, or flourish. None of the communities that emerge from or submerge into the historical body of the earth has ever corresponded to a prior systematic ordering of difference, in which their divergences and continuities could be simply proven by reference to a given natural stratum. This leads us, therefore, to assert the precise opposite of the commonly held wisdom. In other words, the state—a social form always associated with an intensive concentration of systems and institutions that in turn are made to correspond to an extensive territoriality and formation of borders—must always precede the nation. This would lead us quickly to another means of understanding why the nation-form is so critical to modernity in general, as well as to two fundamental characteristics of modernity as we know it: its irreversible historical imperialism and colonialism, and the fundamental basis of modern social relations in the form that we call “capital.”
 
If we accept a divergent ordering of the common wisdom of the formation of the nation-state as a building-block or unit of analysis through which the modern international state system was formed and continues to be maintained, it remains to be clarified why this form of the nation should be necessarily produced. In thinking this problematic, there is, for instance, the famous line from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi, later utilized by Lacan: “Long live Poland, for without Poland there would be no Poles!”¹ This apparently cursory line in fact theoretically condenses the problem: at first glance, this statement has a certain uncanny functioning in its recalibration of the expected dynamic of relation between the nation-form and the national subject. It strikes us as humorous precisely because it apparently implies its inverse—”There must be Poles first, so that they can constitute a Poland”—as a matter of course. But in fact we should read it in a quite faithful manner: the national people, as an extension of the presupposed national subject, is a production of the nation-form, itself a technology of belonging that is subsequent to the form of the state, and not the reverse. That is, the supposedly concrete, obvious, and real national subject is in fact always a derivation from the most abstract schema of modern life.²
 
But behind this problem of the temporality or ordering of the genesis of the nation-form lies a more basic problem of the national question. Because the national question is essentially concerned with the specificity or particularity of a given national scenario, its peculiar developmental features and so forth, the national question is always linked to a specific field of historical concerns. That is, it is always linked to the question of the transition. The various debates on the transition to capitalism on a world-scale have long been at the center of the problem of the nation-form. Why and for what concrete material reasons should a certain national situation develop a particular arrangement of factors, a particular trajectory of the concentration of capital, particular expressions of social relations, particular cultural features or rituals, customs, linguistic specificities, and so on?
 
This type of question has typically been answered by understanding the specific mixture of social factors that were present in the local elements that preceded a given transition to capitalism. Was there a strong feudal social stratum, as in Western Europe, with its broadly developed seigneurial system and burgeoning urban centers? Was there a type of absolutist social system with an inverted form of overpopulation in the rural village rather than the city, as in the Russian or Japanese countryside? Was there a strong legal character to the transition, as in the English Enclosure Acts and Poor Laws, which threw the peasantry off the land and simultaneously criminalized movement through the category of vagabondage, or as in the eastern German Bauernlegen, which stripped land tenancy protections from small farmers and subordinated them to a vast estate system? And what about the profoundly colonial character of the transition to a world capitalist system throughout Africa, South and East Asia, and Latin America, wherein the growing global character of markets was from the very outset tied to the experience of slavery and imperial plunder of natural resources?
 
What we see in all these cases is that the transition to capitalism has always been tightly linked to the history of the formation and global ordering of putatively national communities, areas or regions that serve as consistent frames for differentiation. In this sense, the historical background of the transition to world capitalism, situated just behind the formation of the global and systematic arrangement of the world on the basis of the form of the nation-state, is always linked to the production of national subjectivity. That is, the nature and character of the national question, when investigated historically and theoretically, always reveals itself to be first and foremost a question of how this peculiar and generalized arrangement, in which territory, human beings, and social systems are articulated together into national units, came into existence in the first place. The question of why this particular arrangement should obtain, as opposed to the infinite variety of other possibilities of social organization, is involved from its very origins with the production of individuals who would furnish, in their forms of citizenship, and above all, in their supposed forms of subjectivity, the raw materials through which the nation-form could emerge, this homo nationalis that the social apparatuses of our modern world system essentially presuppose.
 

2. Citizen-Subject and Capital

 
Let us go back and briefly develop this somewhat spatial lexicon in relation to Balibar’s analysis of the citizen-subject. The citizen is a historically specific form of individuality which corresponds to a general mode of social relations. That is, “the citizen (defined by his rights and duties) is that ‘nonsubject’ who comes after the subject, and whose constitution and recognition put an end (in principle) to the subjection of the subject” (“Citizen Subject” 38-39). This figure of the citizen as a new development in the production of individuality is located at a critical historical juncture: “We can even give it a date: 1789, even if we know that this date and the place it indicates are too simple to enclose the entire process of the substitution of the citizen for the subject. The fact remains that 1789 marks the irreversibility of this process, the effect of a rupture” (39). But what precisely does such a rupture consist in?
 

It has often been demonstrated how, in the political history of Western Europe, the time of subjects coincides with that of absolutism. Absolutism in effect seems to give a complete and coherent form to a power that is founded only upon itself, and that is founded as being without limits (thus uncontrollable and irresistible by definition). Such a power truly makes men into subjects, and nothing but subjects, for the very being of the subject is obedience. From the point of view of the subject, power’s claim to incarnate both the good and the true is entirely justified: the subject is he who has no need of knowing, much less understanding, why what is prescribed to him is in the interest of his own happiness. Nevertheless, this perspective is deceptive: rather than a coherent form, classical absolutism is a knot of contradictions, and this can also be seen at the level of theory, in its discourse. Absolutism never manages to stabilize its definition of obedience and thus its definition of the subject.

(40)

By linking the subject to absolutism, and the citizen to the aftermath of absolutism, Balibar introduces this question immediately into the discourse, central to Marxist historical inquiry, of the transition to capitalism. Now, of course, 1789 does not mark this transition as such, nor in fact, can we pinpoint a date of the transition itself. Rather, the transition in Marx is a relational and elongated process, a process that ebbs and flows in waves of historical developments, rewriting and reordering the social sphere in divergent modes and differing arrangements with the microscopic logic of capital as a social relation. But what 1789 does mark is the development of a figure of the citizen that will become absolutely essential to the functioning of world capitalism, a figure that remains for us today crucial for an understanding of the dynamics of the national question, among other problems. As Balibar notes, however, and here we see an important parallel in Marx, there is never a moment when the citizen in fact completely replaces the subject, when the form of citizenship is fully untethered from its absolutist precursors (nor, of course, is absolutism or feudalism ever merely the simple and pure other of capitalism).³ Rather, like the entire historical and theoretical question of the transition itself, the figure of the citizen always remains in a paradoxical complicity or conspiracy with its antecedents; that is, it always remains in a process of referral whereby it only comes to operate through those seemingly absolutist mechanisms that its genesis was presumed to have overthrown. “The citizen,” Balibar notes, “is a man in enjoyment of all his ‘natural’ rights, completely realizing his individual humanity, a free man simply because he is equal to every other man.” But because installing this field of putative equality among citizens requires from the outset the capacity to differentiate or distinguish a citizen from a non-citizen, the citizen must in fact remain “always a supposed subject” (“Citizen Subject” 46).

 
In order to determine who is and who is not a citizen, a border must be drawn around citizenship; the citizen must therefore be imbued with something external to itself as a purely political category. Here is where we see how the process of referral between citizen and subject takes place, silently and cyclically. Because the citizen is a category that can in principle include anyone, it is historically able to function as a universal aspiration and general form of individuality suitable for civil society and property relations. But the category of citizen cannot include everyone, precisely because it would therefore be impossible to mark a boundary or differentiation where the space of the citizen would begin and end. Immediately, we are thrown into the domain of the subject. In order to determine the inside and outside of the citizen, this category of individuality must be referred to the field of law, the field of economy, and the field of belonging. (Obviously, numerous other fields of subjectivity would apply here also.) Thus, citizenship would begin where the citizen coincides with the subject of law, for instance, subject to certain rights and duties of a given political community. But above all, the borders of citizenship are referred to the figure of homo nationalis, the specific form in which the citizen is made to coincide with or is superimposed onto the figure of the national subject. Here, we must enter into the relation between the citizen-subject and capital.
 
When we inquire into the problem of how to locate the specific local form of capitalist development, concretized in the single nation-state, within the overall nature of global capital, which in itself knows no such boundaries, we immediately confront the problem of the logical and the historical. This problem of the relation of world and nation is mediated or supported by the concept of civil society, the general social form of economic life, which in turn is based on both the logical necessity and the historical contingency of the form of the individual, a problem that will be directly linked to the question of the production of subjectivity. In this term “civil society,” two lexical sequences are immediately opened up. These two lexical sequences are in turn related to two semiotic fields, two registers of signification: on the one hand, the existence of civil society expresses, in Louis Althusser’s well-known terms, a “process without a subject” in which concrete individuals are merely shells corresponding to positions in relations of exchange or commerce, existing solely as the “bearers” (Träger) or “guardians” (Hütern) of the forms of commodities and money.
 
On the other hand, precisely because interest and need are expected to appear at the basis of these social interactions, the individuals who engage in the social process of exchange are produced as subjects of these needs. This double structure itself returns back into the unstable core of the concept civil society, where it exerts forces that produce a set of fundamental limitations or boundaries within which the vast and aporetic question of the subject is located. For Marx, civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), designating the development of a form of society in which the bourgeoisie becomes the quintessence of social relations, is precisely the sphere in which the exchange of commodities is buttressed by very specific forms of individuality through which the subjects of exchange can be produced or convoked. It installs in history a bizarre situation in which “the bourgeoisie idealizes and universalizes its own conditions of existence under the name of ‘man’, or more generally, the form of individuality which allows private property to be considered ‘natural’” (Citoyen sujet 473). In turn this creates a situation of something like a “multiple personality” for “man”: homo nationalis, homo economicus, homo juridicus, and so forth (474), whereby all the institutional aspects of bourgeois life are generalized and naturalized as inalienable characteristics of historical progress. What appears as the historical installation of a very specific regime of differentiation so as to furnish the basis of exchange relations comes to be linked to property, a question we will return to in the following section.
 
When Marx refers to civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), he indicates in the most general sense “the total material intercourse (Verkehr) of individuals within a determinate stage of development of the productive forces.” He continues, “It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar as this, goes well beyond the state and the nation.” However, I believe Marx gives us an absolutely decisive clue that we must pay close attention to when he critically reverses this claim, or more accurately, adds to this claim a simultaneous paradox: “Yet, on the other hand again, civil society must assert itself externally [or “on the outside”] (nach Außen) as nationality (Nationalität), and internally [“on the inside”] (nach Innen) must organize itself as the State” (Das Kapital 36; Capital 89). Marx provides us here with an extremely suggestive problem to insert into the question of civil society, and in turn, into the articulation of citizen and subject. If civil society, or the historical emergence of the tendency towards the universalization of the bourgeois, is the field in which the citizen-subject is formed and joined together, it is significant that Marx identifies two directionalities or vectors of its function: exteriority and interiority.
 
The sphere of civil society corresponds, for Marx, to the sphere of economic life on the surface of society in general; it connotes, in other words, the sphere of circulation or exchange, the site wherein given commodities are exchanged between given individuals occupying specific roles. As we have mentioned above, the citizen installed into the scene of society with the advent of “bourgeois universalism,” in Balibar’s terms, always maintains a complex relation with the form of the subject, and specifically with the form of the national subject, or homo nationalis. In a concrete sense, then, the form of individuality that is presumed or presupposed within relations of exchange is itself assumed to be historically continuous with a given national formation. In turn, this indicates that, if the individual presumed in capitalist society on the level of abstract generality must always be homo nationalis, this national element intervenes at a primal stage of the reproduction of social relations. Social relations in capitalist society take on a specific character that stems from the logic of this relation itself from the very outset. It means homo nationalis is a central mechanism, apparatus, or arrangement that capitalist social relations are founded on. Thus when Marx reminds us that “civil society” designates exactly the social level at which “exchange” (Verkehr and thus “intercourse” but also “échange” and therefore the later sense of Austausch for “exchange”) between “individuals” is made into the motor-force of social life, he draws our attention to the bizarre and paradoxical relation of the sphere of circulation and the sphere of production. That is, the productive capacity of society exerts a historical force on the way in which social relations can operate. But the image or schema of a rational civil society based on the undivided unit, literally the in-dividual, is not derived from the production process, but from the circulation process, which itself must be presupposed. Therefore, there is always already, at the core of civil society, some hard kernel of irrationality or impossibility, an impossibility that has been made to operate as if it were not there.
 
The world of capital, which presents itself as a total systematic expression of pure exchange, produces civil society in order to invert itself and tries to derive itself precisely from its own presuppositions. Civil society connotes a field in which is presupposed a formal equality between sellers, the owners of this strange thing called labor power, and buyers, the owners of money. Exchange between them puts the form of money into the hands of the seller of labor power, who in turn uses it to purchase means of subsistence by which he or she can reproduce him- or herself. Thus, Marx importantly points out, the value of labor power as a commodity always “contains a historical and moral element,” that is, this value always has a necessary reference to something outside the exchange process, outside the supposedly smooth sphere of circulation. This shows us too that the theory of the exchange process, in which social relations are represented as a rational field of smooth circulation, is implicated from the very beginning in the real functioning of this circuit:
 

The economic is in this sense the object itself of Marx’s “critique”: it is a representation (at once necessary and illusory) of real social relations. Basically it is only the fact of this representation that the economists abstractly explicate, which is inevitably already shared practically by the owners-exchangers (propiétaires-échangistes) of commodities, that the “economic” relations appear as such, in an apparent natural autonomy. The representation is implicated in the very form of the manifestation of social relations. This is precisely what enables producers-exchangers to recognize themselves in the image that the economists present of them. The “representation” of the economic is thus for Marx essential to the economic itself, to its real functioning and therefore to its conceptual definition.

(Balibar “Sur la dialectique” 213)

Therefore, civil society presupposes the form of the individual endowed with these needs and socially engaged to pursue them. Civil society in this sense is a name for the field of effects in which the production of subjectivity is undertaken. Without this specific form of social life characteristic of modernity and the world-scale of social relations, we cannot speak about the concept of the subject. On the other hand, in a disciplinary sense, we thus see that the production of subjectivity, in which the form of singularity must necessarily be violently re-produced as the form of individuality which belongs to a genus, is in no way separate from the logic of capital.

 
Civil society is a paradox: the relations that compose it can only be understood as adequately civil (i.e., founded on the smooth and supposedly equal exchange of the market) on the basis of an entire volatile historical sequence. The pre-history of capitalism’s emergence into the world constitutes the genealogy of the concept: the bands of feudal retainers are broken up, the self-sufficient peasantry is transformed into the proto-proletarian small tenant on the one hand and the “beggars, robbers, and vagabonds” on the other; this movement of enclosure on the scale of the land is thus mirrored in the enclosure of bodies, sentiments and so forth into the form of the “individual” or “property in his own person” (Locke). In turn, it is this form of identification between the formation of the property-owner endowed with rights and the individual endowed with social rationality that forms the specific historical movement which culminates in the figure of the bourgeois or indeed the civilian (cives). But the entire capacity of civil society to form the bond or articulation between social organization (state) and social legitimation (nation), a capacity presumed to be a rational, coherent, and necessary development from within its own logic, is therefore always reliant on its outside, or what must be axiomatically excluded from its own process: the volatility of historical time. In this sense, the whole logic of the citizen-subject is that of a volatile amalgam: held together, but always threatening to expose the fundamental volatility of this amalgamation itself. In this sense it is exactly something like the (im)possibility, the instability that underpins the social forms that exist under capital.
 
Let us now sum up the contours of the problem and put forward a further complication. Capitalism is a form of society organized by capital. This already presents us with a certain regressive structure in theory, because capital is not a thing but a social relation. At the same time, capital in capitalist society is the only thing that expresses itself as an individuality, that is, not as a bearer or guardian but as a true individual in the sense that it cannot be divided, but operates as one. The social human being is always divided in capitalist society, as the bearer of the thing that proves its social position, labor power. The human being in this sense is not active in capitalist society, but passive, a receptacle for the object—labor power—that is generated inside him or her. Thus when we say that capitalism is organized by capital, we mean that capitalism is a society in which relationality is a perspectival or focal point devoted to the logical reproduction of this originally historical relation itself. This is the broad philosophical point behind the description of capital as self-expanding value. Capital is itself a relation devoted to the reproduction of the relations that it itself implies as the motor-force of a social field. Labor power, in this sense, is a kind of exterior or externality whose givenness must be assumed in precisely the same way that the boundaries of citizenship must presuppose that they can be mapped onto a set of coordinates already given by the form of the national subject—it is precisely here that we must carefully note Marx’s point that civil society expresses itself externally as nationality, and internally as the state. The entire question of the function of the nation-form within the capital-relation thus pivots around this complex and unstable object at the core of capital’s logic, the commodity-form of labor power. It is this strange form of labor power that constitutes one of the most important advances of Marx’s critique of political economy, an advance that we are still seeking to understand. After all, “If there is an element of ‘proletarian politics’ in Marx which is a genuine third term, it is necessary to seek it in the direction of everything which resists and dislocates the civil society/state dichotomy. If it is to be found above all in the critique of political economy, this is because this dichotomy, as it is handed down to Marx (and to us after him) is above all an effect of economic ideology” (Balibar, “Marx” 18). Labor power, as we will see, cannot be located in either pole of civil society or the state, but it exposes something critical about this dichotomy: both civil society and the state must essentially presuppose the existence of labor power, yet neither can guarantee it.
 

3. The Nation-Form and the Labor Power Commodity

die Erbsünde wirkt überall. [“the original sin is at work everywhere.”]

(Marx, Das Kapital 620; Capital 589)

 
Although the national question has a long polemical history, not only within Marxist theory but also in the broadest political sense,⁴ the relation between the supposedly political content of the national question and the supposedly theoretical content of the critique of political economy remains complex and open. Typically, this relation has been posed in a dual structure: theoretical analysis of capitalism’s local development furnishes the basis on which the national question may be strategically resolved according to an accompanying political line. But this tendency therefore treats the national question as something inherently separate from the inner logic of capital itself. In order to disrupt this prior reading and reassert the centrality of the national question to the capital-relation itself, we will investigate certain paradoxes that characterize the labor-power commodity. This strange commodity, which never attains a stable existence, but is always within capital’s circuit of positing (Setzung) and presupposition (Voraussetzung), must be assumed to be capable of reproduction. But its reproduction does not take place in the style of any other commodity: it is something indirect for capital, an effect of the worker’s body that must, in effect, be given from the outside so that the inside may function in the style of a logical process. Because of this exteriority, Marx emphasizes to us that the value and price of labor power can only be determined by means of a whole field of historical and moral factors. Here is where the nation-form is always entering the picture, but not merely as a corollary moment: rather, the nation-form is a mechanism that is always-already located at the alpha and omega of capital, where the volatile play of force and torsion cyclically repeats itself in the form of crisis.
 
Labor power and land are the two elements of capitalist production that can be circulated as commodities but that cannot be originally produced as commodities. Rather, they must be encountered or stumbled upon historically—in the process of the “so-called primitive accumulation” (Marx, Capital; ch.26)—in order to function thereafter logically. Already this introduces a rupture or gap into capital’s own image of itself as a social totality in which all social relations are expressed (darstellt) as a pure field of exchange. Because labor power cannot be produced directly, as in the case of all other commodities, its presence can never be assumed to be stable or assured. Therefore, in order to traverse this gap so that capitalist production can be established as a circuit-process, capital must continuously utilize the form of the relative surplus population to pretend or act as if the labor power commodity can be limitlessly supplied, or to indirectly produce it, so to speak. Only by means of this immaculate deception can capital expand itself in the form of the business cycle. In turn, the relative surplus population must always be formed through something that appears external to capital, through which it can be aggregated and managed. This typically appears in the modern world in the form of the border, or in the form that Balibar has often referred to as “the anthropological difference.” In other words, when Marx describes the irrationality that characterizes the form of labor power as a commodity, it is no accident that he refers to the modern proletariat as “this race of peculiar commodity-owners” (Marx, Das Kapital 186; Capital 182).
 
In order to clarify how “the anthropological difference,” based on the fundamental figure of the citizen-subject, can be understood in the social logic of capitalist society, we must also look for the antecedents of this theoretical problem in the historical production of the individual, a continual movement of inclusion and exclusion with which the individual is imagined and constructed. This production of difference by means of an oscillation or torsion between inclusion and exclusion culminates in the discourse of citizenship, which underpins not only the modern state-form but also its genesis in the form of empire and colony. Here we confront immediately the logic of contractualism that grounds the creation of the citizen, the free contractuality of social life that stabilizes the enclosures or borders of the regime of citizenship, installing a discourse of governing and managing the state centered around what Locke called “property in his own person.” This logic of the citizen as the bearer of this strange property of his or her own person called labor power shows us how the contemporary management of the nation-state is inseparably linked to the reproduction of the aggregate capital. In turn, this mode of analysis can also show us how the figure of the citizen is the nodal point through which we can see the function of racism within contemporary global capitalism.
 
The operation of this strange thing can therefore be summed up by emphasizing that labor power, while it can function as a commodity (as variable capital in the production process), cannot be a commodity as a direct product of capital. Thus, the whole issue of labor power shows us this torsional and recurrent loop, whereby it must be presumed in order to exist, yet the condition of its very presupposition itself presumes that what should be a result of the process must somehow be there at the beginning. That is, in order to control and maintain something that escapes its control, capitalism forms a means of producing the labor power commodity as if it were, in fact, under its direct jurisdiction. What it requires is the formation of social-historical institutions capable of inciting forms of the historical and moral aspects of the field of physical life (from which labor power is drawn) that are suitable for capitalism’s own reproduction. Thus, capitalism’s specific form of population is a complex aggregate of techniques that are overlaid like a grid on the existing “natural” stratum of bodies, words, physiognomies, affects, desires, etc., recalibrating and reformulating them as countable or computable as inputs for capital’s circuit-process:
 

Capitalism turns all products into commodities—it turns labor power itself into a commodity as well, but it cannot produce this labor power as a commodity by means of capital. As a result, in order to completely commodify labor power, capital requires the industrial reserve army. Yet, unless this industrial reserve army is formed by capital itself, capitalism cannot posit the social foundations of its own establishment as one historical form of society.

(Uno 497)

That is, capital is repeatedly exposed to its inability to produce the foundations of its own order. Yet, without in effect convincing itself of the possibility to generate itself, capital cannot expand, because its expansion presumes the availability of labor power, which in turn presumes the industrial reserve army effect. Capital can give form or direction to the relative surplus populations that appear in the territorial domains of capital’s manifestation, but the industrial reserve army effect paradoxically presupposes that wage labor, and therefore a working population, exists. Because of this presumption, the excess population that would guarantee capital’s ability to act as if it were capable of producing labor power directly is a result of capital’s untraceable beginning (Anfang), which should always logically precede the ordering of the population. But if capital therefore presumes this Anfang, it must silently or magically repeat the beginning over and over again every time the circuit C-M-C’ reaches its end.

 
Capital must repeat the violent capture of the beginning, the violent verso of the supposedly smooth cycle of circulation, but thus cannot rid itself of this fundamental “condition of violence” (Gewaltverhältnis) (Balibar, “Reflections” 110), located in its logical alpha and omega, the labor power commodity, whose indirect production is located paradoxically outside commodity relations. An excess of violence is haunting capital’s interior by means of this constantly liminalizing/volatilizing forcible production of labor power. Precisely by this excessive violence, capital endangers itself and opens itself up to a whole continent of raw violence, and it is exactly on this point that we see something important in terms of the question of how capital utilizes the “anthropological difference” to effect the indirect production of labor power, how the nation-form is entering into this historical circuit of violence to force labor power into existence.
 
The primal violence, sustained as a continuum or status quo, appears as a smooth state, a cyclical reproduction cycle without edges. But this appearance or semblance of smooth continuity is in fact a product of the working of violence upon itself: violence must erase and recode itself as peace by means of violence. In other words, when we encounter the basic social scenario of capitalist society, the exchange of a product for money, we are already in a situation in which the raw violence of subjectivation—whereby some absent potentiality within the worker’s body is exchanged as if it were a substance called labor power which can be commodified—is covered over by the form of money, which appears as a smooth container of significations that can serve as a measure of this potentiality. But in order for labor power to be measured and exchanged as money, there must be a repeated doubling of violence. What must remain on the outside of capital as a social relation is paradoxically what must also be forced into its inside, perpetually torn between the forms of subjectivation that produce labor power as an inside, and the historical field of reproduction in which the worker’s body is produced on the violent outside of capital.
 
In this sense, the commodification of labor power is the degree zero of the social itself, the apex or pinnacle of the social relation called capital. But this thing indicated by the problem of the commodification of labor power, or more specifically the excess or seeming (im)possibility of the commodification of labor power,⁵ is also an analytical or theoretical object that discloses the limits of the social itself. In other words, the original accident, the chance or hazardous historical encounter between capital and the owner of labor-power, is continuously being set in motion by capital in the circulation-form of the buying and selling of labor power, where we see the basic social antagonism (Gegensatz) between capital and labor. Yet when we enter the “hidden abode of production,” we discover not the stable yet concealed ground of this relation, but rather the site of its ultimate expression of contradiction (Widerspruch): we are immediately thrown back on the fact that although labor power cannot be originally produced by capital as a commodity, it can be circulated on the surface as a commodity; that is, the excess or absurdity of the commodification of labor power can be overcome without being resolved. Thus this historically excessive or irrational accident of the original encounter that is being incessantly reinscribed on the circulation-surface of social life, leads us from history to logic in the sphere of production. But critically, we are not presented here with something like the truth or a pure relation of depth that lies behind or below the surface. Rather, we see that a certain process of coding is always taking place. What is coded as free contractual exchange between substantial entities of purely random origin is recoded in the sphere of production as the logical impossibility or even absurdity of the stability of this relation itself.
 
This relation of (im)possibility—in which capital cannot produce labor power directly, but can circulate it on its surface as if it had—is above all a question of reproduction, a question that returns us to the link between the national question and the form of labor power as a commodity. The paradox of the modern nation-state is that, while the nation and the state cannot be said to coincide, but rather must be kept separate in order for there to be a process of referral between them, nevertheless the nation is always utilized by the state in order to trace the contours of its interiority. Thus, this installs a permanent site of slippage within the nation-state as a form. On the one hand, the state must utilize the nation in order to imagine itself as an interiority with clear borders and demarcations that would separate it from a general exterior, itself composed of other interiorities. In turn, the nation, as a purely ideational link between individuals that cannot be strictly located in terms of territory, institutions, or boundaries, must rely on the form of the state to provide it with a determinate field of localization, a concrete sphere within which one nation-form can be said to be dominant or hegemonic. This process of referral, in which state and nation essentially require each other in order to imagine themselves as pure interiorities that could then legitimate a given hierarchical arrangement of phenomena in the form of a community, is therefore always linked to the question of reproduction. On this point, we can turn to a famous letter of Engels:
 

According to the materialist view of history, the determining factor in history is, in the final analysis (das in letzter Instanz bestimmende Moment), the production and reproduction of actual life (wirklichen Lebens). More than that was never maintained by Marx or myself.

(Engels, Marx-Engels Werke 462-465; Collected Works 34-36)

What is intriguing and important here is the concept of the production and reproduction of “actual life” (wirklichen Lebens),⁶ that is, the reproduction not only of the social factory that is the worker’s physical body (itself the site of production of labor power), but also the literal reproduction of the body through the consumption of means of subsistence, a process which takes place outside of yet internal to the sphere of circulation. It also means something much broader: what Michel Foucault called, in The History of Sexuality, the “entire political technology of life” (145). Here, we require a focus not only on labor power and its complex role within the dynamics of capital, but also on its bearers or guardians. Marx reminds us that precisely because commodities, including labor power, cannot themselves go to the market and sell themselves, we must have analytical recourse to their “guardians” (Hütern). That is, we must have recourse to the historical forms of individuality that furnish the social bodies within which labor power, the archi-commodity at the origin of all other commodities, could be produced, reproduced, and borne to the market so as to be exchanged. Paradoxically, therefore, we see something crucial here that once again Balibar has drawn our attention to: the somewhat absent or blank character of the proletariat, that position most central to the sphere of circulation, wherein the possessor of nothing but labor power exchanges it as a commodity for a wage. Let me quote an especially crucial passage from Balibar here at some length:

Everything takes place as if the proletariat as such had nothing to do with the positive function that exploited labor power carries out in the sphere of production, as the “productive force” par excellence; as if it had nothing to do with the formation of value, the transformation of surplus labor into surplus value, the metamorphosis of “living labor” into capital. Everything occurs as if this term connoted merely the “transitional” character of the working class in a triple sense:
 

1. 1. The condition of the worker is an unstable state, perhaps even a state of “marginality,” of exclusion from a relation to “normal” social existence (a society that proletarianizes itself thus tends towards a situation of generalized insecurity).
2. 2. It perpetuates a violence that characterized initially, in a open and “political” manner, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and for which it later substitutes a mechanism that is purely “economic” in appearance, simply because it is juridically normalized.
3. 3. It is historically untenable and thus implies another transition that erases the previous one, and through which capitalist accumulation prepared its material conditions.

(La crainte 223)

In essence, Balibar links together two critical moments in the unfolding of the capital-relation: its unstable history in the “so-called primitive accumulation” or process of enclosure, and its unstable logic in the form of exchange, the moment in which labor power, itself generated in the volatile contingency of history, must be presupposed in order to convoke itself when its bearer exchanges this inner potential for a wage. In essence, therefore, we see that the entire question of how something like the nation-form could constitute one of the crucial historical and moral factors in the formation of value is linked to a repetition, a repetition that effectively erases its own defects in order to operate as a logical rationality. The transition here thus indicates not only the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but the constantly repeating transition of the salto mortale, or fatal leap, of exchange, the irruption into existence of the labor power commodity, this absent potential that links together capital’s history and capital’s logic in an intimate relation to the nation-form.

4. Translation and Transition

The nature of a great philosophy is not only to incomplete itself, but to incomplete others, by introducing itself or by being introduced in their writing. […] If it is true that the regulating idea of “system” is fundamentally a modern version of the old imago mundi, the meaning of all these aporetic undertakings is, if not to “transform,” probably to incomplete the world, or the representation of the world as “a world.”

(Balibar, “Infinite Contradiction” 146)

 
The concept of the transition is not only concerned with the historiographical identification of the transformation of the basis of a given social order, or the “articulation of modes of production.”⁷ It is also a temporal question that goes beyond the simple possibility of periodization to encompass the question of how divergent temporalities, divergent trajectories of development, could be located within the same sphere, that is, the world. The transition is thus not simply a notion of how an individual social formation, or a given nation-form can be understood in its emergence, maintenance, and transformation; more broadly, the transition is a concept central to the historiographical discovery of the world as itself an integrated unit of analysis. In turn, the transition itself has long been a crucial site of contestation around the ways in which the world could or could not be understood as a unity. That is, the concept of the transition has always been profoundly linked to the history of representations of the world, a history that links together the national question and the inner logic of capital.
 
Capital is always operating retrospectively as a relation, preparing the ground of its outside from within its logical orbit. This perverse, irredeemable quality of capital’s historical time is miniaturized within the logic of civil society—the citizen, whose existence cannot be grounded, must be legitimated by the retrojection of a national subject that gives continuity to something purely discontinuous, heterogeneous, and contingent. This process of fixing or ordering is always-already present in capital’s form of presupposition. That is, by presupposing its own suppositions, capital acts in such a way as to ensure that its limits are sealed off, removed from the historical process. Yet, precisely by therefore according such an essential place to history, capital acknowledges at all times its fundamental weakness or the defective moment in its logic: the contingent continent of history is the field of flux wherein the practical expressions of the representations essential to the image of a continuous subject are inscribed, and this field of history cannot be accounted for in capital’s logic as such. But capital attempts to do just that in the form of its own peculiar historical time. It conjures itself up from a history that it inscribes back onto the historical process, giving consistency and continuity to an accidental moment, a continuity that then serves as a legitimating device, a narrative that capital appeals to in order to prove itself.
 
It is precisely on this point that Sandro Mezzadra underscores the importance of the postcolonial condition that contemporary capitalism inhabits.⁸ In other words, because capital’s reliance on the schematic array of differences furnished and maintained in the contemporary world constitutes the concrete reality of the globality of the present, we must connect contemporary capitalism to the long and complex history of “the continual movement of inclusion and exclusion with which the individual is imagined and constructed” (Mezzadra 43). This production of difference by means of an oscillation or torsion between inclusion and exclusion culminates in the discourse of citizenship, which underpins not only the modern state-form but also its genesis in the form of empire and colony. Through a pre-history of the postcolonial condition, we are alerted immediately to the chain of signification between the logic of the citizen as image of the state, and the logic of property as a microphysics of capitalist development as a whole. This dual homology traces for us the inscriptions of power that irreparably condition the modern regimes of citizenship and that continue to show to us what is at stake in the state’s policing of the figure of the citizen.
 
It is no longer a surprising or shocking historical intervention to note that the regime of control constituted by the discourse of citizenship is something that has a directly colonial legacy, but it remains an important task to theoretically demonstrate how the political and juridical theorizations that accompanied the colonial project attempted to naturalize “precise racial hierarchies” in the division of the earth itself, recalling Carl Schmitt’s notion of the originary nomos of the earth that characterized the juridical field of the colonial era, the jus publicum europaeum.⁹ What we must constantly emphasize is the cyclical deployment of borders, margins, limits, interiors, and exteriors, in the historical production of the colonial difference, the means of recoding the incommensurabilities of the world as hierarchical commensurabilities, whereby the underdeveloped or colonized are temporally located in a permanent waiting-room of history. It is no surprise therefore, that these conditions of the historical production of difference, located within the production of the nation-form itself, not only condition the emergence of labor power, but also therefore condition the entire circuit of capital itself:
 

The historical conditions of [capital’s] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. Capital only arises when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker selling his own labor-power on the market. This one historical precondition comprises a world’s history [or, a world-history] (diese eine historische Bedingung umschließt eine Weltgeschichte). Capital, therefore, ushers in from the outset (von vornherein) a new epoch in the process of social production.

(Das Kapital 184; Capital 180)¹⁰

We see here a complex integration of the formation of the world with the production of labor power as a commodity, two moments without which the concept “world” itself is unthinkable, the single and decisive precondition of world history itself. Without this precondition a concept like “world” could not be produced precisely because labor power, while generated in relation to the nation-form, also reveals a new universality of the possibility of proletarianization. In this sense, it is only because the logical world of commodities (what Marx called the Warenwelt) and the historical world of bodies are volatilely amalgamated together in the form of labor power, that we can have a concept of world at all. Yet, this systematic logic of capture is only part of the story. The paradox of the historical formation of the colonial difference and its juridical recoding is that it is being continuously undermined from within by the “discovery of equality” (in Fanon’s phrase) that the increasing integration of the world implied (see Mezzadra 28; 52-55). In other words, by integrating the world into a single schematic, based on the unit of the nation-state, the colonial project also produced the conditions for a global politics of equality, by placing difference into an overall framework of commensurability. It is precisely this moment that shows us the way in which the history of the anti-colonial movements, those political irruptions that demanded the nascent equality implied in the organization of the world be raised to a principle of society, continues to impact our world today, insofar as it is irreversibly and irrevocably a world. Therefore, the experience of the twentieth century, which we have lived through, can be characterized by this colonial paradox—on the one hand, this discovery of the world as a world produced an irreversible threshold in the historical process of planetary unification. On the other hand, insofar as this unification is a historical tendency that emerges from the colonial scenario, it also shows us that the colonial project is always tensely moving in two directions at once: it requires the form of confinement above all else (and it is on this point that Mezzadra’s work has opened new analytical directions complementary with Balibar’s thought)—the bordering of groups, national languages, racial hierarchies, bounded spaces and so forth—and at the same time the revolt against this confinement or bordering. The principle of equality or globality that is produced under the effect of the colonial enclosures is this revolt, the development for the first time of a world as world (rather than a world as collection of divergent parts); therefore, this form of enclosure “constitutes the fundamental principle and at the same time, the internal limit, of the colonial project” (Mezzadra 53-54).

 
Today we remain within this tension or paradox, in a world in which humanity itself is framed, in the final analysis, through its historical character of irreversibility. This irreversibility is contained in the fact that “the violence of origin imposes a common language which erases forever any experience of difference that has not been mediated by the colonial relations of power and by the logic of global capital” (Mezzadra 65). It is here that we see the link to the transition.
 
The transition, Balibar argues, takes shape in a particular way, what we might call a dialectic of limit and threshold, through the gradual emergence of the elements of the nation-state, those elements that have gradually begun to nation-alize society. Here, we can think not only of socio-economic apparatuses, such as the examples Balibar provides of the reemergence of Roman law, the development of a broad mercantilism, and the domestication of the feudal aristocracies. We can also conceive here of a certain dynamics of translation, wherein the historical forms of language, diffused in entirely different arrangements according to localities, rituals, and so forth, experience an increasing concentration into the early elements through which the nation is concatenated and pulled together. Translation, in this sense, would be precisely the experience of the historical formation of the national border as an ideational moment, the process through which “this side” and “that side” of a gap could be posited, the moment when two sides are presupposed, in turn necessitating a regime of translation between them.¹¹ Thus, “the closer we come to the modern period, the greater the constraint imposed by the accumulation of these elements seems to be. Which raises the crucial question of the threshold of irreversibility” (Balibar and Wallerstein 88).
 
The question of the transition, therefore, is linked in Balibar’s work to this concept of threshold, for which Foucault provides us a careful formulation:
 

What might be called a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question.

(History of Sexuality 143)

Foucault’s vocabulary here of “wager” as the key to the transition between apparatuses of the limit and apparatuses of the threshold should be linked back into the interior of the social relationality that composes capital. What is wagered is the capacity of life—that is, specifically social life—to both generate the building blocks and shoulder the burden of this social relation that is capital. Capital originates as a social relation capable of initiating and rejuvenating certain internally produced formations of relation. This is the sense in which Althusser points out that capitalist reproduction is never the simple reproduction of the material basis of capitalist society, but rather the reproduction of the relations that allow for this reproduction itself. Capital, as a social relation, can initiate and maintain itself but only as a defective circle, or a circuit process that never quite reaches its cyclical starting point (see Nagahara, Warera; “We, the Defective“). In order, therefore, to bridge this gap marked by the (im)possibility of the labor power commodity, the “whole political technology of life”—the statements, formations, apparatuses, modalities, and so forth that sustain the arrangement called “life”—must be mobilized to seal over the contingency of this wager. And it is exactly this constancy or inseparability of capital from its putative outside—the form of the nation and so forth—that Althusser indentifies as the “naïve anthropology” of humanism haunting the world of capital. Capital’s “wager” on “life” constitutes a “vicious circle,” one which never adequately returns to its starting point, because the whole sequence of presupposition forms an abyssal and regressive chain, in which something must always be given: “the homogeneous given space of economic phenomena is thus doubly given by the anthropology which grips it in the vice of origins and ends” (Althusser 163).

 
In the final analysis, Balibar reminds us that “it is the concrete configurations of the class struggle and not ‘pure’ economic logic which explain the constitutions of nation-states” (Balibar and Wallerstein 90). Without doubt, this is correct. But is it not also the case that the entire schematic of Marx’s critique of political economy is devoted to showing us precisely that the “concrete configurations of the class struggle” always haunt and contaminate the supposedly pure interiority of the logic of capital? The labor power commodity, the product of a historical accident in the form of a contingent encounter (the “so-called primitive accumulation”), is given a central role within the logical drive of capital. How could the relation of self-expanding value form itself as a circuit, as a cyclical and repeating process, without presupposing the presence of the labor power commodity, which is precisely that which can never be strictly presupposed in capital’s interior? In other words, from the very outset of the form of exchange relations, the labor power commodity, which is a product of a volatile and purely contingent history, is made to function as if it could be assumed to be a “‘pure’ economic logic.” This is exactly where the secretive role of the form of the nation comes into the innermost moment of the logic of capital, a moment which behaves as if historical considerations are axiomatically excluded, a moment intimately related to capital’s most fundamental phenomenological “conjuring trick” (escamotage; Derrida, Specters). In this sense, we ought to push Balibar’s argument slightly further by emphasizing that the “concrete configurations of the class struggle” and “‘pure’ economic logic” are in fact always contaminated with each other in the historical experience of capitalist society.
 
In other words, this “naïve anthropology” or “anthropological difference” which is supposedly excluded from the circulation process or the “total material exchange” between rational individuals, is in fact located at its very core. The form of the nation is already contained at the very origin of the supposedly rational and universal process of exchange, a process that acts as if it represents the smooth and perfect circle of pure rationality, but that is actually permanently suspended between its impossible origin, which it is compelled to cyclically repeat, and its end, which is equally impossible, because it would relativize the circuit of exchange and expose it to its outside, which it must constantly erase. Thus civil society itself must remain in its state of insanity or derangement, forever pulled in two directions of the production of subjects. It cannot exit this deranged form but must try perpetually to prove its universality simply by oscillating between these two boundaries, two impossibilities. Its underlying schema of the world, which “seems absent from the immediate reality of the phenomena themselves,” is permanently located in “the interval between origins and ends,” a short-circuit that incessantly reveals to us that “its universality is merely repetition” (Althusser 163).
 
Just like the representation of translation as pure exchange (Sakai and Solomon), the transition must always be represented as if it were a natural growth, a “simple and contentless” leap of inevitability from one side to the other. But when we closely examine the transition, we find something truly disquieting: we discover that the transition is not an accomplished fact of history, or a necessary step in the evolution of social life, but rather an endless loop of falling short, never accomplishing its task, always erasing or recoding its failure. In this sense, the paradox of civil society is not that it is strong, weak, absent, inverted, or so forth. It is rather that civil society is never fully established anywhere, precisely because the exchange process on which it is based must always traverse the historical outside while pretending to be a pure interiority, a pure logical circle. What sustains this circle that is always not quite returning to itself is its repetition. But because this circular logic of civil society in the world of capital is compelled to repeat, it is also compelled to constantly re-remember its incompleteness, contingency, and relativity, a problem that remains in the everyday life of society in the form of the “indetermination” of the citizen (Balibar, “Citizen Subject” 53). In other words, the figure of the citizen itself, the juridical and political figure in whom is incarnated the historical body producing labor power, remains in a permanent state of incompleteness or chance, a figure that depends “entirely on an encounter between a statement and situations or movements that, from the point of view of the concept, are contingent. If the citizen’s becoming-a-subject takes the form of a dialectic, it is precisely because both the necessity of ‘founding’ institutional definitions of the citizen and the impossibility of ignoring their contestation—the infinite contradiction within which they are caught—are crystallized in it” (53).
 
It is around this point that Balibar’s work itself functions as one of the great philosophies that incompletes others, that incompletes our image of the world. By showing us that “world” as a concept, “world” as a project, remains incomplete, it also restores to us a politics of the world, a politics that would restore precisely those concrete struggles to their central place in its incompleteness. Above all else, Balibar’s work, in linking together the logic of capital, the history of capitalism, the transition from subject to citizen and back again, the emergence of the nation-form and its regime of anthropological difference, shows us the persistence of politics, the open politicality that always remains within the core of the supposedly rational and closed social forms we inhabit. Balibar argues that
 

All of Foucault’s work, or at least that part of it which, by successive approximations, obstinately tries to describe the heterogeneous aspects of the great “transition” between the world of subjection and the world of right and discipline, “civil society” and State apparatuses, is a materialist phenomenology of the transmutation of subjection, of the birth of the Citizen Subject.

(“Citizen Subject” 55)

We might as well say that it is Balibar’s thought itself that has most importantly developed and undertaken this “materialist phenomenology” for us today. In the face of another world crisis, a crisis in which the reproduction of the aggregate capital has come into a clear conflict with the tendency towards an increase in the rate of appropriation of surplus value, we also see that this moment of crisis in the capital-relation is mirrored in a crisis of the nation-form and the existing arrangements of the “anthropological difference.” By repeatedly exposing us to the politicality that can never be erased from the logic of capital and its complicit inner relation to the nation-form, Balibar has taught us, and continues to teach us, that another arrangement of social life is always possible, that another sociality, beyond the enclosure into capital and the nation, remains a potential in the history of the present.

Recent reevaluations of Adam Smith in political philosophy, eighteenth-century studies and economics have tended to pivot on a single claim: despite clichés concerning unfettered markets and unrestrained self-interest, Smith’s oeuvre has always maintained that human beings are naturally social animals. Anyone who has so much as thumbed through The Theory of Moral Sentiments will recognize this claim as true. If such widespread cultural misperceptions do indeed exist, they could only result from reducing Smith’s entire body of work to a single, decontextualized citation from the Wealth of Nations: “[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest” (29; I.ii). Nonetheless, recent Smith scholarship, whether focusing on his Stoic inheritance, Moral Sentiments’ impact on economic theory, or influences of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson or Rousseau, has gained traction rereading Smith against the cultural myths according to which “Adam Smith” stands as cipher for self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism.¹ Consequently, Smith has reemerged as a peculiar inversion of the former caricature. Rather than shorthand for homo economicus, Adam Smith has been mystically transformed into a theorist of our ineluctable being-in-common. This depiction, too, reads like a caricature, again reducing Smith’s work to a single quote, this time the first words from Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it” (60; I.i).² These countervailing myths, which distinctly resemble the nineteenth-century debates clumsily dubbed “das Adam Smith problem,” have found traction again with conservatives, liberals, and Marxists alike, for whom natural human sociability has become something of a new political catechism.³
 
This recent critical turn to Smith’s “natural sociability,” as innocuous as it may at first appear, is not without a host of problems. First and foremost, as this essay argues, it elides from Smith’s work the absolutely central mode of unnatural relations: citizenship. Even if it accepts that human beings are always political creatures – a tradition running from Aristotle’s anthropos zoon politikon physei to Burke’s “art is man’s nature” and social contract theory’s principle adversary – Smith’s work “naturalizes” human relationships, rendering citizenship a superfluous political category. As Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence suggest, the citizen is a historical remnant from republican traditions of antiquity, undoubtedly central to Smith’s humanist education at Glasgow and Oxford, but out of place in the modern global economic order described in the Wealth of Nations. Citizenship, however, does not simply vanish from Smith’s texts. When Smith addresses citizenship head-on, the limitations of “natural” human relationships become all too clear, as does the need for its unnatural double, the citizen. As I will argue, the re-evaluations of Smith’s sympathy, his impartial spectator, and his vague gestures toward Stoic cosmopolitanism appear like so many liberal-humanist pipedreams, if not apologies for the status quo. Most notably, Rothschild, McCloskey and Sen use Smith’s moral philosophical work to justify the ever-increasing inequalities of the market. At best, what they propose is a kinder and gentler capitalism. At worst, their argument is pure cynicism. Imagine seriously arguing that inequalities of the marketplace are always already cushioned by velvet ties of sympathy!
 
Against this liberal humanist resuscitation of Smith’s sympathy, I am interested in reading Smith’s moral philosophy – the seemingly benign categories of sympathy and natural sociability – as a screen displacing the critical issue of citizenship. Behind “natural sociability” lurks the profound implication of Smith’s unsystematic treatment of the unnatural citizen. In what follows, I present Smith’s rejection of the citizen as a consequence of people’s supposed natural disposition for society. As a result, both Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations turn every citizen into a potential refugee, ultimately displacing onto capital all the benefits of cosmopolitan citizenship. It is this line of inquiry that this essay outlines, an opening salvo into demystifying “natural” associations by placing these empty concepts alongside Smith’s overlooked economic theory of citizenship.
 

i. Decline of the Republic and the Rise of Creaturely Life

 
Citizenship is today undeniably a central political battleground precisely because it is haunted by its double; estimates suggest that undocumented residents, les sans papiers, and all of those living in the citizen’s shadow may have already surpassed 30 million people worldwide.⁴ Even if the U.S. has made small gains (such as President Obama’s DACA Act), divisive rhetoric about immigration has sunk to new lows, and anti-immigration legislation has rarely been more draconian. While the country was still reeling from the passage of anti-immigration legislation, Arizona SB 1070, Republican ideologues, especially Kris Kobach, continued to cultivate the so-called “self-deportation” legislation. Passed into law in both Alabama and South Carolina, Kobach’s “self-deportation” vision had also been adopted by the defeated Romney campaign. So-called “self-deportation” relies entirely on making the lives of undocumented residents intolerable, so that living in the United States will seem worse than staying in the hopeless situations people fled. If the Arizona anti-immigration bill essentially transforms the police into an anti-immigration force, Kobach’s proposals go one step further, transforming every “citizen” – every cashier, repairman, as well as potential employer – into an “immigration checkpoint.” If we are naturally social and sympathetic, this legislation clearly stands human nature on its head. No longer is man a wolf to man; it is the citizen one must fear. Now more than ever, America’s economic refugees emerge as the new stateless people, recalling the displaced refugees for whom, as Hannah Arendt argues, the “rights of man” have been revealed as a groundless abstraction without the rights of citizenship. Economic refugees have continually faced the double-bind: mare than the obvious fact that the U.S. economy depends on illegal labor,, the impossible logic of attaining political refugee status is perhaps the most illuminating of refugee’s position. In the latter case, many applications are denied because political refugees are always economic refugees as well, the latter invalidating the former.⁵ These political refugees perfectly capture the modern contradiction of immigration: they are denied political asylum because they also have a body, and therefore are always necessarily economic beings as well.
 
In light of its contemporary importance, it does seem strange that for Smith, citizenship barely warrants being mentioned. It is tempting to pin Smith’s lack of attention to citizenship on the historical fact that his unfinished work on jurisprudence, burned by Smith’s express wish before his death in 1790, may well have contained a more nuanced reflection on this point. To the extent that, as Smith explains in the “Advertisement” to the sixth edition of Moral Sentiments, the Wealth of Nations functions as an inquiry into the government as it concerns the “police, revenue and arms,” one might expect a more thorough discussion of citizenship in another, unfinished work dedicated to the theory of jurisprudence. And yet, Smith’s 1763 lectures on jurisprudence delivered in Glasgow give no such indication. To the contrary, Smith’s spotty thoughts on citizenship are clearly dismissed as of limited importance, especially in the context of large, modern nation-states. Student notes of his lectures, published as Lectures on Jurisprudence, record him as saying:
 

In generall when the citizenship intitles one to peculiar priviledges, family descent (…) the number of citizens being small, gives one a probable chance of being preferred to some office or employment as their number is very large in proportion to that of the number of citizens (…). But in large ones, where this priviledge gives one no other advantage than that of electing or being elected out of a vast number of others, the place of ones [sic] birth generally determines whether or not he is to be accounted a citizen.

(40)

In other words, republican citizenship in a small principality may help one to obtain an administrative position, taking one’s turn at ruling and then at being ruled. In a large nation, as “descent” gives way to merely indicating place of “birth,” the value of citizenship declines. Significantly, the principal reason that someone would care about citizenship in this era before strict immigration laws, worker protections, or modest welfare-state benefits, would be political enfranchisement – which these student notes record with a clear sense of derision: citizenship “gives one no other advantage than that of electing or being elected out of a vast number of others.”

 
In this context, citizenship becomes an empty category, its only value being access to an irrelevant electoral political system. Smith’s position makes sense historically, however, as the importance of politics in the old republican sense of the term has waned in the new globalized, commercial world.⁶ Implicitly, Smith appears to champion what contemporary citizenship theory describes, against the competing communitarian and republican models, as the model of liberal citizenship. This may have seemed self-evident to Smith as Smith’s own historical moment signals the birth of the self-interested liberal citizen whose orientation becomes his own “life, liberty and … happiness,” while politics gives way to political economy. As Herman van Gunsteren points out in his Theory of Citizenship, “Until a hundred years ago, owning property, rather than having a job, was considered the primary condition of citizenship” (103), but once workers were included, insurance and potential labor-power came to function as if it were property.⁷ As a consequence, the workplace and the worker have all but elided active citizenship; the political citizen retreats to work, becoming thereby a passive economic citizen, the very essence of liberal “citizenship.” Here, for Smith, citizenship, no longer tied to the active politics of the republic, has become a category without content. Workers, not citizens, are the inhabitants of the burgeoning industrial age, and the workplace, not the agora, provides their stage.
 
Even while Smith appears to dismiss the importance of citizenship, it nonetheless does play a role in both Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, the implications of which are dramatic. The use of the word “citizenship” in Moral Sentiments is revealing. Twice, both in Parts I and II of his moral philosophical treatise, Smith replaces his standard term, “fellow-creatures,” with a surprising and politically inflected “fellow-citizens” (19; I.III; 8; II.II). In both instances, however, Smith employs “fellow-citizens,” ironically, to point to an unequal relationship between a “superior” and the subordinated citizen-subject, not to describe the mutual respect of co-citizens. In the first instance, Smith designates a superior “nobleman” to function as a model of propriety for subordinate “fellow-citizens,” while in the second a “superior” imposes propriety on his “fellow-citizens” by law. Surprisingly, in both instances, “fellow-citizens” replaces “fellow-creatures” to mark the subordination of the citizen and his presupposed inability to act in such a way that “natural” sympathy prescribes. In fact, here, the citizen is marked out by his inability to act appropriately and needs lessons in the propriety of natural sympathy. And yet this makes perfect sense according to the logic of Moral Sentiments, in which sympathy is entirely contingent on propriety. That is to say, everyone appears to be potentially worthy of sympathy – not, to be sure, of pity, but of simple human relations as such – if and only if they act according to the rules of propriety. Sympathy, in this light, requires a disciplinary society. Otherwise, sympathy breaks down and individuals are cast beyond the pale of human emotions, or at least beyond “our” sympathy. In fact, such people become worse than mere outsiders; they become objects of disgust evoking antipathy. In these two instances, Smith’s “citizen” has not yet internalized the propriety of action that makes “natural” sympathy possible, and he must learn to endure suffering like so many statues of Laocoön who, as Winkelmann explains, makes us “wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man” (qtd. Lessing 7).
 
Remnants of Smith’s republican citizen emerge again in Part III of Moral Sentiments. Smith introduces this section, entitled “Of the Foundation of Our Judgments Concerning our Own Sentiments and Conduct, and the Sense of Duty,” by saying that “[i]n the two foregoing parts of [Moral Sentiments], I have chiefly considered the origin and foundation of our judgments concerning the sentiments of others. I come now to consider more particularly the origin of those concerning our own” (148; III.i.i). While the first two sections famously articulate a theory of social relations determined by one’s ability (or, as is often the case, inability) to imagine one’s self in the place of another person, then to sympathize with figures in what Smith renders as so many tableaux vivantes, the third section redirects the viewer’s gaze back on himself, thereby taking up the perspective of the “impartial spectator.” This marks a shift from judging spectator to moral actor—or, more accurately, to the moment when one becomes both. Tellingly, Smith here also dismisses, in the most explicit terms of Moral Sentiments, a solitary individual who might live, literally or figuratively, in the isolation imagined by the theorists of the state of nature: “Were it possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety and demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face” (148). Society is the mirror reflecting the moral person back to the individual, even if it is not literally there; the individual can see himself through the eyes of his “fellow-citizens” or the impartial spectator, even when alone. Ultimately Smith insists that, against the skepticism of Bernard Mandeville or Pierre Nicole, not only do we want to appear praise-worthy to our “fellow-creatures,” but we desire to be praise-worthy in actuality as well. Such a distinction is only possible, however, once one becomes both actor and spectator of the drama of one’s own unfolding life.
 
This is a crucial moment in the Moral Sentiments, for two reasons. The first, as David Marshall suggests in The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot, is that here “[i]dentity is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the characters of both spectator and spectacle” (176).⁸ This is actually what it means to never be without others; rather than sympathetic human relations, Moral Sentiments pushes toward the vaguely Stoic and fully neurotic internalization of social normativity under the guise of “propriety.” Secondly, Smith addresses directly the skeptical critique of social relations, perhaps most notably the version proposed by Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. This skeptical position, everywhere in eighteenth-century moral thought, was associated (and often confused) with Epicureanism.⁹ But in Mandeville’s formulation, which became a touchstone for Smith, Rousseau, Hutchinson, and Kant, civic-minded action results from nothing other than self-interest. According to the Fable of the Bees, asocial man recognizes that the best way to satisfy self-interested desires is to act as if he were civically minded.¹⁰ Smith’s theory of propriety serves as a much better argument against Mandeville’s skepticism than do the more explicit engagements with Mandeville’s work (such as the opening pages of Wealth of Nations, Moral Sentiments’ Part VII, chapter IV “Of Licentious Systems” which he revised continually from the first edition to the end of his life and “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” in which Smith unconvincingly presents Mandeville as espousing natural sympathy). Smith returns to well-worn territory, to a common place of moral philosophy at least since Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; here, however, the objective is to dispel the skeptical threat that humanity is simply a loose aggregate of self-interest machines. We judge ourselves, Smith insists, according to the same criteria by which we judge the actions of others. We become another to ourselves, in fact, in order to make this possible, adopting the position of the impartial spectator. In this respect, there can be nothing hidden, no secret self-motivated objectives distinguishing the vain “pretentions of the coxcomb” from truly praise-worthy action that is properly motivated.
 
The impact of Smith’s logic becomes clear by way of the opposition between the citizen and the public enemy. Because we supposedly know our own motives, “we dread the thought of doing any thing which can render us the just and proper objects of the hatred and contempt of our fellow-creatures” (154; III.ii.ix), even when nobody else could possibly know. We would ourselves know, by virtue of our ability to imagine what others would say if they did know, the criminal nature of our thoughts and deeds. But if it is criminal thought or action that puts us at odds with our “fellow-creatures,” it is public punishment that ironically sutures the citizenry and its outcast, the criminal, back together:
 

Men of the most detestable characters, who, in the execution of the most dreadful crimes, had taken their measures so coolly as to avoid even the suspicion of guilt, have sometimes been driven, by the horror of their situation, to discover, of their own accord, what no human sagacity could ever have investigated. By acknowledging their guilt, by submitting themselves to the resentment of their offended fellow-citizens, and, by thus satiating that vengeance of which they were sensible that they had become the proper objects, they hoped, by their death to reconcile themselves, at least in their own imagination, to the natural sentiments of mankind.

(155; III. II.xi)

The concept of citizen, here, limits our universal, natural sympathetic “fellow-feeling.” Indeed, Smith’s citizen comes into relief at the moment of the criminal’s exclusion from this category. After committing a crime, guilt puts us at odds with the suddenly clearly defined category of the citizen, with whom the criminal can reunite only by “submitting themselves to the resentment of their offended fellow-citizens.” “By thus satiating that vengeance” of one’s fellow-citizens, citizens who in the context of Smith’s text emerge by virtue of antipathy of resentment and vengeance, one can regain natural sympathy. Capital punishment reconciles man (or “creature,” to use Smith’s language) and citizen. This reconciliation, however, can only be anticipated in the imagination, because in the cold hard light of reality the death penalty must take place. More than anything else, however, Smith’s citizenry takes shape in this bizarre vignette, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt, precisely around the decision on the exception. If natural sympathy is universal, Smith’s citizens appear to draw the line between citizen and criminal, the exclusion overriding (or, underwriting, as the case may be) the universalism of natural sympathy or Stoic cosmopolitanism. Citizens emerge and tighten their ranks, precisely at the moment when they exclude the criminal–or even as they watch his execution.

ii. Constructing the Economic Citizen

 
In the previous section, a reading of Smith’s casual reflections on citizenship makes clear the limits of natural sympathy and, inversely, the need for a much more concrete definition of citizenship. In this section, I want to focus on yet another problem of natural sympathy – its commodification – as an implication of Smith’s unsystematic treatment of the problem of citizenship. Commodified natural relations are not relegated to the political economic formulae of the Wealth of Nations, but emerge in the pages of Moral Sentiments at the very heart of human sympathy itself. At its outset, Moral Sentiments imagines an ambiguous concatenation of theatricality and sympathy as somehow essential for counteracting the “Epicurean” threat posed by “those who are fond of deducing all our sentiments from certain refinements of self-love” (64; III.II.i). Appearances, Smith assures his reader at the commencement of Moral Sentiments, do not lie. As such, after the initial definition of sympathy as the process by which an observer “chang[es] places in the fancy with the sufferer” (61; I.i.i), the reader is presented with a litany of exemplary scenes demanding our sympathy. The list of examples paints a perplexing portrait of this experience: the reader confronts, first, “our brother on the rack,” then “a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person,” and “a dancer on a slack rope,” or “the sores and ulcers which are exposed by the beggars in the street,” culminating in the “heroes of tragedy or romance who interest us” (61). Conjuring a vertiginous world of street performers, beggars who simply function as a locus for “sores and ulcers,” and scenes of inflicted pain, Smith finally leaves the reader in the relative tranquility of the aesthetic domain of the theater or romance. This list already presents something of a hierarchy, juxtaposing inexplicable cruelty with scenes of poverty and public spectacle and, finally, the sentiments of the theater. Indeed, the theater will have been the truth and the end point of all the other examples: aesthetic, pleasurable and, ultimately, commodified. While public punishments may be free and open to the public, theatrical dramas of star-crossed lovers are not.
 
Of course the text claims to be, on the contrary, depicting the bonds forged immediately between individuals, simply relying on “fancy” to bridge the gap between them. At its most basic level, moral sentiments claim to suture humanity in a perfectly symmetrical relation: both, as Smith writes, according to the “great law of Christianity” to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves,” and according to the “great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbor” (17; I.i.v). Against this backdrop, the example of the “real calamity” – such as Smith’s hypothetical drama of a man losing his leg which provides an example of bad drama, one no one would willingly pay to see – proves an exception to the rule. As for drama properly speaking, even if the eighteenth-century British stage had been the focus of much censorious scrutiny, certainly neither ancient nor Elizabethan tragedy lacked physical suffering. Tragic drama, for all its historical differences, appears to be an uninterrupted display of physical suffering, from Oedipus to Titus Andonicus. Smith parries this criticism, stating that “some Greek tragedies attempt to excite compassion, by the representation of the agonies of bodily pain. Philoctetes,” for instance, in Sophocles’s adaptation of the myth, “cries out and faints from the extremity of his suffering” (80; I.ii.i). However, “it is not the pain that interests us, but some other circumstance… not the sore foot, but the solitude, of Philoctetes which affects us, and diffuses over that charming tragedy, that romantic wildness that is so charming to the imagination” (80). Without these attenuating circumstances, physical suffering, in every case, becomes burlesque or simply looks “ridiculous.” Theater should, therefore, model the very propriety that allows neighbors to become fully human objects of sympathetic interest.
 
But art – the theater in particular – appears to play a disproportionate role in Smith’s examples of “natural” sympathy. Moral Sentiments does attempt to ward off the potential difficulty that sympathy may be an aesthetic rather than a moral category by distinguishing intellectual from moral judgments, disinterested curiosity from sympathetic engagement. To this end, Smith writes, “We may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of another person by their correspondence or disagreement with our own, upon two different occasions; either, first, when objects which excite them are considered without any peculiar [i.e., particular] relation, either to ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of; or secondly, when they are considered as peculiarly affecting one or the other of us” (70; I.ii.iii.). The first class of judgments, which Smith calls “qualities of taste and good judgment” of the “man of taste,” and which concerning such things as “the beauty of a plain, the greatness of a mountain, the ornaments of a building, the expression of a picture, the composition of a discourse” (70) are disinterested judgments. Aesthetic judgments such as these, ostensibly, are not of terribly great concern because they do not intersect with the moral world, and therefore do not appear to have any direct bearing on social or political relations. In that these judgments are abstracted from the pragmatic concerns of utility, the fact that two people disagree about what is beautiful or sublime will not make them mortal enemies. By contrast with these thoroughly aesthetic judgments – not only clearly “aesthetic” by virtue of references to questions of taste and beauty which inundated the aesthetic treaties of the period but also the “disinterestedness” which Kant will soon pick up as the crucial component of aesthetic judgment – sympathy needs to keep both feet in the world of practical action, the touchstone of moral philosophy since Aristotle’s articulation of phronesis as practical judgment. Here Smith says that moral philosophy and aesthetics must be treated as separate categories, declaring his moral philosophy to be inoculated against the contagion of art.
 
Even so, Smith’s text does precisely the opposite, inverting the relation between theatrical and real worlds, transforming sympathy into a theatrical construction, and moral philosophy into an aesthetic theory. One finds the key precisely in what is now a growing list of the scenes of cruelty in Moral Sentiments. Why then does Smith insist that the scene of real suffering makes for such bad drama and the failure of sympathy? This is the case in the section “Of Passions which take their Origin from the Body,” because one cannot sympathize with another’s physical pain, hunger, or any other affliction grounded in biological existence rather than in symbolic economies of wealth, reputation, honor, etc. This is true, not because “these are the passions that we share in common with the brutes”; instead, the “true cause of the peculiar disgust which we conceive for the appetites of the body when we see them in other men is because we cannot enter into them” because they remain strictly bodily, obtuse, and cannot therefore be part of the symbolic register of the imagination (78; I.ii.i). That is to say, we cannot make them into a tragic drama or an aesthetic object to contemplate in the tranquility of the theater of our imagination. They remain at the register of brute fact.
 
To return to the list of pathetic scenes at the outset of the Theory of Moral Sentiments: following immediately after the often cited example of seeing “our brother on the rack” in the first section of Part I, Smith famously explains that sympathy functions by “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” As such, “when we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or the arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall we feel it in some measure” (61; I.ii.i). In section I, Part II, just before the apparent digression into the tragedy of the leg, Smith repeats himself virtually verbatim, making however two crucial changes: “If, as I have already observed, I see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg, or the arm, of another person, I naturally shrink and draw back my own leg, or my arm.” Here, not only does Smith exchange pronouns, substituting an “I” for the “we,” but his conclusion also points in an entirely different direction. Sympathy, one learns, remains possible just until the stroke falls. Smith adds the conclusion: “when it does fall, I feel it in some measure… My hurt, however, is, no doubt, excessively slight, and, upon that account, if he makes a violent out-cry, as I cannot go along with him, I never fail to despise him” (79; I.ii.i). At the precise moment that suffering passes from potentiality to actuality, when the sympathetic “we” dissolves into the solipsistic “I,” sympathy, contrary to all expectations, transforms into its opposite, becoming disgust at the scene and even contempt for the sufferer. Sympathy comes to an abrupt halt the moment the decorum of the theater has been broken; the fourth wall between spectator and spectacle reemerges precisely at the point at which it should come crumbling down, and sympathy gives way not to apathy, but to antipathy. The spectator cannot “fail to despise” the sufferer.
 
Smith’s affective world, therefore, diverges between two different registers: sympathy with the imaginative afflictions of the symbolic order and vile disgust with the suffering, physical and abject body that hungers, receives blows and bears wounds. No doubt, the former is a theatrical sympathy, or in Rousseau’s terms, amour proper passing itself off as amour de soi, a theatrical self-interest masquerading as sympathetic fellow-feeling. One can easily imagine the value of Smith’s inquiry, especially as it describes the mechanisms and mediations by which experience of sympathy’s “immediacy” gets produced. Sympathy’s long standing connection to occult promises of direct access to the other, here, stand exposed as so much mysticism. Smith’s moral philosophy, therefore, asks: which objects mediate our affective relations? By contrast to Sen’s and Rothschild’s archeology of modern economics, which returns to some moral philosophical soil, Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests makes precisely the opposite claim concerning the relationship between Smith’s economic work and moral philosophy, stating that Moral Sentiments “paves the way for collapsing […] other passions into the drive for the ‘augmentation of fortune’” and “the drive for economic advantage [which] is no longer autonomous but becomes a mere vehicle for the desire of consideration” (108-9).
 
What sets Hirschman apart from the resuscitation of a so-called “ethics of the marketplace” without a consideration of citizenship is his focus on the perplexing chapters which begin Section III of Part I of Moral Sentiments. Yet even Hirschman’s examination avoids the nucleus of Smith’s sympathy, one binding the market to the theater. It is in this section, “Of the Effects of Prosperity and Adversity upon the Judgment of Mankind with Regards to the Propriety of Action,” that Smith begins his overlooked discussion of the function of sympathy with respect to commercial society. He begins with the relatively modest claim that, even if “our sympathy with sorrow is, in some sense, more universal, than with joy,” what the spectator feels, for precisely the reasons that pain makes for bad theater, “does not, indeed, […] amount to that complete sympathy, to that perfect harmony and correspondence of sentiments which constitutes approbation.”¹¹ At the outset of Moral Sentiments, Smith cautions his reader to hear “sympathy” resonate in its fullest etymological sense and not limit its connotations to feeling another’s sorrow only. Of the OED‘s examples, only two, both later than Smith’s Moral Sentiments, explicitly distinguish sorrow and joy: first, Coleridge’s August 30 th Table-talk of 1833, which states that, “For compassion a human heart suffices: but for full and adequate sympathy with joy, an angel’s only,” and, second, Disraeli’s Endymion, which claims that the “sympathy of sorrow is stronger than the sympathy of prosperity.”¹² By contrast to these examples, however, Smith pushes the definitions of sympathy away from the former – mere “agreement, accord, harmony” – but in precisely the opposite direction from the one pursued by Coleridge and Disraeli. Even if misery provides a “more pungent feeling,” fellow-feelings with pleasurable emotion, according to Moral Sentiments, “approaches much more nearly to the vivacity of what is naturally felt by the people principally concerned” (95; I.i.iii). In retrospect, this seemingly offhand theatrical example reveals its exemplary status; one can sympathize with another’s misery, but only if it is adequately theatrical and, therefore, creates a certain element of pleasure. As Smith states, “there are evidently some principles in [man’s] nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it” (60; I.i). Sympathy with misery, unless already theatrical or aesthetic, remains an impossibility.
 
For Smith’s moral sympathy the divisions between theater and society become indistinct and the question of sympathy, no longer relegated to the space of the literal theater, enters into civil society as a generalized spectacle.¹³ This is true not only because one experiences another’s success with a more accurate “vivacity,” but because one cannot fail to despise the sufferers of “real calamity.” Smith writes: “It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make a parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty” (99; I.iii.ii). More to the point, it is the “parade of riches” which makes one visible before the eyes of others, while poverty’s condemnation is not simply the want of necessary goods, but one’s disappearance altogether from the scene of public concern. If the man of “rank and distinction” “is observed by all the world,” the poor are “out of the sight of mankind.” As wealth makes an individual a proper subject for sympathy, the spectacle of the suffering of the monarch, in the final instance, is where one can sympathize with physical suffering. Not only does penury make for a much less spectacular display – precisely why we love the useless displays of the palace much more than the utility of the prison – but it also opens onto the biological need or what Hannah Arendt will refer to as the “social problem,” a problem that cannot be aestheticized or transformed into a commoditized spectacle, which is precisely what prevents it from moving into the domain of sympathy. Strikingly, while Smith’s text collapses ethics and wealth, recent criticism has mirrored the movement of the market itself, specifically the latest mode of late-capitalism, with its increasing focus on “ethics” (everywhere, from market coffee to shoes, we see increasing “ethical” commerce and fair trade, while the financial industry remains as invidious as ever). Natural, sympathetic relations are never natural. More than that, they always divide friends from enemies, rich from poor. Artificially contrived antipathy proves to be the truth of natural sympathy.
 

iii. Capital’s Cosmopolitanism

 
If Smith’s oeuvre appears, up to this point, to outline little more that the limitations through which citizenship dismembers the inclusive nature of natural sympathy, this does not mean that Smith presents no positive theory of citizenship at all. It is just that for him the benefits of citizenship apply to what we would call today corporate investment – or simply “capital” – rather than to people, a logic that seems only to have been fully realized in the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision. What little discussion there is of citizenship in The Wealth of Nations is based on the similar logic, the logic of exclusion, now not of impropriety or criminality but of labor. Only a handful of references to citizenship in the Wealth of Nations occur within the context of national defense. As such, the concept of the citizen appears to be deployed by Smith rather cynically as a necessary fiction to generate national identity in time of war; most of his examples refer to the citizen-soldiers of ancient Greece and Rome, especially in Book 5, “Of the Expenses of the Sovereign of Commonwealth.” Smith’s most significant comment on the question of citizenship within The Wealth of Nations is, however, precisely a disavowal of the concept. In Chapter IV, “How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country,” of Book III, Smith writes that “A merchant . . . is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what country carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with all its industry which it supports, from one country to another” (346). With this gesture, Smith supplants citizenship by the cosmopolitanism of modern capitalist societies. The notion of citizenship appears anachronistic to the extent that new forms of mobile capital, rather than land, are the foundation of Smith’s vision of the emerging economic-political order.
 
Capital remains free to move from one country to another due to the slightest “trifling disgust.” This is perhaps why Smith, always so attentive to his prose style, here finds himself reaching with an ambiguous expression: “A merchant . . . is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country” (346). On the one hand, this may mean simply something like that a capitalist’s citizenship is of no real importance. Money recognizes no national borders, only the reach of the market. But given the context of this quote, the ambiguity of “not necessarily a citizen” appears to result from another cause. Once one establishes the context, Smith’s reflections on citizenship and cosmopolitanism resonate with an entirely different tenor:
 

The capital, however, that is acquired to any country by commerce and manufactures is all a very precarious and uncertain possession till some part of it has been secured and realized in the cultivation and improvement of its lands. A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another. No part of it can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands.

(122)

I find this quote extraordinary for several reasons: First, there is substantial evidence for another way of reading Smith’s equivocation concerning the capitalist as “not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.” Certainly, it is clear that the actual citizenship of an individual with money to invest is of little interest; from Smith’s perspective, capital is economic potential that can take shape virtually anywhere in the world where “the market” has spread and where sufficient division of labor has made investment possible. And yet the cosmopolitan potential of capital must necessarily be realized somewhere, in a particular space, within a particular political order: “capital,” Smith states here, remains “very precarious and uncertain . . . till some part of it has been secured and realized in the cultivation and improvement of its lands.” Further, “no part of [capital] can be said to belong to any particular country, till it has been spread as it were over the face of that country, either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands” (346; V.IV.iii). That is to say, capital remains precarious until located in country, at which point it “belongs” to that country. The formerly cosmopolitan capitalist must also belong, at some point, to a country. But now the cosmopolitan logic of capital trumps the local logic of the citizenry.

 
The second aspect of the passage that I find interesting is the elision from this formula of one of the three crucial terms that make up the triumvirate of Smith’s Wealth of Nations: land, capital, and labor. Following immediately after the opening consideration of the division of labor, Smith’s text introduces its three key concepts – land, capital, and labor – as the constituent elements of price, which require rent, interest, and wages. Much of the rest of the text follows the circuitous logic of the interrelation of these three elements. In this respect, the preceding quote specifically addresses the relation between two of these three concepts: land and capital. Again, it is precisely the capitalist who is “not necessarily the citizen of any particular country,” but the missing term here – laborers – appears to have no real bearing in this discussion of the citizen. Even as Smith bemoans the fact that wages are typically pushed as low as possible and often fall below the level of human decency, he does say explicitly, in Chapter VIII (“Wages of Labor”) of Book III, that “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men” (118). Indeed, man as laboring man appears to have no claim to citizenship precisely because, while clearly situated in a particular location, the laborer remains a mere commodity. If any notion of citizenship appears possible, it is certainly the exclusive domain of the “not necessarily the citizen,” or the capitalist, who begins to belong to a country to the extent that he begins not to work or fight, but to invest “either in buildings or in the lasting improvement of lands.” The unprotected laborer now finds herself or himself subordinated to the cosmopolitan circulation of the new citizen: money itself.
 
What then to make of the resolute choir of recent critics singing Smith’s praises by resituating his legacy within a philosophical, rather than solely economic, tradition? What are we to take from these new readings of Smith, each text making some new apology for the most pernicious myths of Smith’s supposed unqualified support of lassez-faire economic theory, but now civilized, refined, and domesticated by what McCloskey would have us believe are the “bourgeois virtues”? One might recall, as Smith does in the notoriously incomplete section of the Moral Sentiments, that Bernard Mandeville had just decried these precise “virtues” as simply one more tool in self-interest’s arsenal – and among them, sympathy as being particularly effective. Smith’s sorely neglected reflections on the citizen make these recent formulations of Adam Smith an inverted problem, consciously or otherwise, of the relation between sympathy and economics. Rather than being an ethical economics, Smith’s notion of cosmopolitanism – and the lack of any definite citizenship – begins to erode his conception of ethics. It demonstrates that ethics itself becomes a commodity exchanged in the marketplace. Through a notion of “economic citizenship,” Smith insists on the reciprocal relationship between capital and citizenship. Indeed, in the Wealth of Nations, Smiths designates capital as a kind of “world citizenship” or cosmopolitanism that, although fundamentally nation-less and abstract, must eventually manifest in a particular locale, or geography. As Smith reiterates throughout the Wealth of Nations, capital must eventually “cultivate the land”; this concrete intersection of capital and geography is the location of Smith’s citizenship. It is precisely at these locations that one must demand not sympathy, but the rights of citizen-laborer.

In October of 2008, less than two weeks before what would turn out to be an historic presidential election, the former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced his support for then-senator Barack Obama’s candidacy, over that of the Republican candidate John McCain, on national television. Powell’s announcement received particular attention for several reasons, not least among them that this endorsement for a man poised to become the first African American president came from a man who, for many years, was considered the most likely candidate to be elected to that position, especially following his leadership during the first Gulf War.¹ Not surprisingly, Powell quickly dismissed any suggestion that racial solidarity was a factor or motivation for his endorsement. Despite Powell’s disavowal, his comments on race came to be noted as arguably the highlight of his endorsement. Among other criticisms, Powell reserves particularly strong words of reproach for the Republican party’s racist rhetoric:
 

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” [sic] This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

(“‘Meet the Press’”)

Powell goes on to explain that he “feel[s] strongly about this particular point” because of a photo that he saw showing a soldier’s mother leaning on a gravestone that “had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith.” The gravestone belongs to Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a corporal in the U.S. Army, whose biography is succinctly summarized thus by Powell: “[H]e was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.” While Powell does not elaborate further, his example—the figure of the dead Muslim American soldier—works to counter Republican rhetoric that situates Islam and Muslims as un-American. In other words, the figuration of Corporal Khan, his service in the army, and his death serves as the proof of national belonging. The moral weight of the story is further compounded by Powell’s praise for Obama’s “inclusive, broader reach . . . crossing lines—ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines” (“‘Meet the Press’”). Likewise, Powell himself has also been described as a figure who “transcends race: even as he addresses many blacks’ skepticism about the American Dream, many whites find Powell a reassuring symbol of the American meritocracy” (Lane). In other words, Powell’s (and Obama’s) bodies and stories provide the grounds through which to argue for and make legible the Muslim soldier’s body as an American one.

 
Powell powerfully reiterates the ideology of a multicultural nation of which all races and ethnicities should and could be a part, reanimating his role during the first Gulf War. In Powell’s figuration, Melani McAlister argues, the meaning for both the military and the nation converges as “open-minded, as multicultural, as pluralist, and thus as having already successfully achieved the aims that ‘p.c.’ college professors and their students were agitating for” (Epic Encounters 255). In reprising his role as a spokesperson for and embodiment of liberal multicultural America, Powell’s pointed question—”Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?”—and its response reaffirm these values. And in doing so, Powell’s “nod to racial injustice,” as McAlister notes elsewhere, functions as both “inoculation . . . and proof of exemplary righteousness” for American power and global expansion (“Virtual Muslim” 225). In other words, his criticism of racism works to reassure us of our liberalism and tolerance while enabling imperialism and militarism. But in glossing over America’s ongoing wars and military occupations all over the world, Powell’s comments also mask the extent to which war, imperialism, and militarism have actively sustained and produced racism. Powell’s invocation of a Muslim American soldier to highlight and criticize anti-Muslim discourse in the wake of the “war on terror” is no accident; it is not only Powell’s own military background and therefore presumed affinity that inform his rhetorical decision, but also other powerful and long-standing links between the military, citizenship, and race.
 
The enlistment of volunteers for the U.S. military in the years since the Cold War and the Vietnam War has a particular relationship to the national body and racial ideology. As McAlister has shown, the post-Vietnam War U.S. military not only functions as a representative microcosm of a diverse and multi-racial nation, but also provides the justification for America’s imperial militarism while disavowing racism.² Thus, the citizen-soldiers of the modern U.S. military serve a dual purpose: to protect and defend the nation-state, but also to stand in for the national community they call upon to rally around the nation-state at war.³ The racialized soldier of the multicultural military is invoked in an appeal to the national community to see itself as pluralist, meritocratic, and multi-racial and simultaneously represents that national self-image. Because of the powerful link between the military and citizenship, which I will elaborate on later in the essay, the military continues to serve as the premier site through which race, racism, belonging, and citizenship are negotiated and resolved. But if it has historically functioned as such, the military has not, in fact, effectively resolved the contradictions of race and citizenship in national and political life. While the military has appeared to promote racial progress, its recruitment and integration of racial minorities in the U.S. reveal the opposite.⁴ The figure of the racialized soldier tasked with resolving these negotiations instead reveals the military’s complicity in the reproduction of conditions that compel racialized citizens and non-citizens to participate in militarism and warfare. By perpetuating and exploiting the narrative that these racialized subjects “loved their country so much . . . that they were able to look beyond the discrimination they experienced and in time overcame racism,” militarism and racism work hand in hand to sustain racial hierarchy and domination and exploit them for warfare (Fujitani 262).
 
The military has an intimate connection to formal citizenship as well as to symbolic citizenship. Military service can expedite naturalization processes for both non-citizen green card holders/permanent residents and non-green card holding immigrants.⁵ According to the Department of Homeland Security, service in any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces can also qualify service members for waivers of certain general naturalization requirements. During peacetime, one or more years of service counts as qualifying service, while during “Periods of Hostilities” any length of service qualifies, even for those who are not permanent residents. It is worthwhile noting that this provision—requiring no minimum period of service—was authorized after September 11, 2001, and that we have been in a “Period of Hostility” since that date.⁶ The Pentagon also announced in 2008 plans to begin recruiting immigrants with temporary visas, not just green card holders or permanent residents, for the military.⁷ While the initiative itself is not specifically geared towards racial and ethnic minorities, given the patterns of immigration to the U.S. in the past several decades, it would be safe to assume that this initiative has the potential to attract and increase the number of recruits from minority communities. Significantly, a New York Times article reporting on this initiative notes that the program specifically aims to attract and recruit native speakers, including Arabic-speaking immigrants, as language specialists (Preston).
 
The affinity of militarism, citizenship, and racism is also illuminated through the genealogy of power that Michel Foucault outlines in his 1976 lectures.⁸ The decline of sovereign power and its “right to take life or let live,” as Foucault argues here and elsewhere, came to be transformed into “the power to ‘make’ live and to ‘let’ die” (241). The difference between the two is, in short, power over death versus power over life. Under biopower and disciplinary power, management and regulation of life become the primary modes through which individual bodies and populations are governed. We might also understand citizenship as a technology or mechanism of regulatory State power. The nation, as Foucault theorizes, is not determined by its ability to exercise domination but by “its ability to administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and State power” (223). In other words, citizenship is one site or technology through which the State exercises biopower.
 
The military is a central apparatus for managing populations on the margins of the national community—that is to say, those whose citizenship, formal or otherwise, has always already been in question—and their relationship to the nation-state. The military, especially in times of war, has offered itself as a vehicle through which various communities from which it solicits manpower might gain the rights and benefits of citizenship. But if we understand that the military exists primarily to provide State security, we must understand that it operates in the interests of the nation-state.⁹ Citizenship, at its simplest, names a juridical status within a particular state, with attendant rights and benefits, yet its operation suggests much more. That various populations (including women and African Americans) with formal citizenship status within the nation have been consistently denied the rights and benefits that other citizens enjoy, while others (Asian Americans, Latina/o Americans) have consistently been seen and treated as foreigners and non-citizens regardless of formal citizenship status, speaks to the dynamic operations of citizenship and citizenry as technologies of State power for the management of people and populations. The history of the so-called second-class citizenry in the United States reveals the ideological and social domains of citizenship that have implications far beyond one’s legal status in the State. The promise or guarantee of citizenship is always and necessarily conditional. Especially in times of war and national crises, such promises are at once powerfully seductive and dangerous, revealing the precariousness of citizenship and belonging.
 
The racialized citizen-soldier exists at the uneasy intersection of biopower and disciplinary power, and consequently at the intersection of life and death. If, as Foucault suggests, racism is the limit of making, controlling, and managing life, if it is “the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed,” then the racialized soldier exemplifies the paradox of how technologies oriented toward making live also make die (256). Because of biopower’s commitment to life, only racism permits the State to kill, and racism makes it possible for subjects to be exposed not only to literal death but also to forms of social death such as rejection and expulsion (256). Racism here, as Foucault explains, has two functions: it allows for distinction, for “the break between what must live and what must die” (254). But it does not simply authorize death. Racism also enables war by authorizing the logic of biopower, which dictates that the destruction of one race is necessary for another race to live and regenerate itself (255). In other words, war is not simply waged to kill enemy races but also to continue and maintain one’s own race. War and racism are twin expressions of a murderous state that is otherwise obliged to preserve and guarantee life.
 
That is to say, war and racism are not defined by a causal relationship. Rather, if we follow Foucault and understand both as “basic mechanism[s] of power” of the modern state, we might also see war and militarism as racism and vice versa (254). And if war itself is an expression and function of racism that makes possible the operation of State power, the racialized soldier is positioned simultaneously as agent and object of racism. As members of the military responsible for State security and waging war who are at the same time targets of the State power to let die, racialized soldiers occupy a paradoxical and precarious position between life and death. To put it another way, the racialized soldier is a figure at once for citizen and enemy. Cynthia Enloe shows how soldiers from minority communities reveal the ways in which imperatives of State security come into conflict with those of national community. As Enloe’s study notes, their inclusion and participation in the military can lead to demands for equal standing and rewards befitting full members of the national community. While such demands have led to some shifts in policy and public opinion, the ethnic/minority soldiers’ status does not necessarily shift accordingly. The perils of embodying both citizen and enemy simultaneously are perhaps particularly hazardous for those who are perceived as threats to State security.
 
Like the Japanese in America during World War II, Muslim populations in America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror” became racialized as foreign, suspect, and threatening.¹⁰ Similarly, the objectives of both wars were (and continue to be) articulated in racial terms, even while racism was disavowed.¹¹ It is significant to note that in this rhetoric, the Japanese and Muslims do not merely represent enemy nations during wartime; instead, the enemy is turned into fungible racialized categories that encompass populations abroad and at home.¹² The consolidation of “Muslim” as a racial category, as Leti Volpp and Muneer Ahmad argue, is based on the interchangeability of members of certain racial, religious, and ethnic groups with those who committed acts of terrorist violence on 9/11. This logic, as both Volpp and Ahmad note, is also nothing new. It recalls and reanimates similar logic from the past, most notably the logic that led to the incarceration of the Japanese in America during World War II. ¹³ Thus, any persons who merely appear to be Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern are consolidated together as “Muslim-looking.” (Ahmad 104). The material effects of being categorized as “Muslim-looking” have been particularly hazardous: in addition to petty acts of harassment and racial profiling by the government and the general public, many have been physically assaulted, killed, detained, and deported. As Ahmad has noted, many people who are not in fact Muslim, but “who are, for lack of a better descriptor, merely brown-skinned” (105), have been subject to this violence.¹⁴ American Muslims share with Asian Americans the dubious distinction of being turned into an enemy race as a response to war. In conjunction with their shared status as outsiders in relation to the nation and its citizenry, both groups also share histories of violence in relation to the state. In the rest of this essay, I will examine figurations of Muslim and Asian American soldiers in the context of recent wars in the Middle East as intersecting racial projects.¹⁵
 
Because their particular relationship to the state makes them especially subject to State discipline, racialized soldiers highlight the exploitation of racialized citizen-subjects that is in fact intrinsic to negotiations of citizenship and national belonging. That is to say, if the figure of the racialized soldier is meant to provide the proof of the promise of inclusion, it is also at the same time a reminder of the unfulfilled and continuously deferred promise of the same, and it reveals the duplicitous role of the military in the reproduction and maintenance of racial, gender, class, and sexual hierarchies. We should also consider that the crises and the violence of inclusion that are illuminated by war and militarism are not necessarily exceptional moments. Indeed, as America officially ends the war in and occupation of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan continues on, while the memories and narratives of earlier wars continue to be reanimated.¹⁶
 
Although the objects of my inquiry here are Muslim and Asian American soldiers, the figuration of Colin Powell himself as a racialized citizen-soldier is not unrelated. If African Americans have not historically been perceived as perpetually foreign or as enemy combatants in the way that Muslims and Asian Americans have been, African American soldiers have nevertheless borne similar burdens of contradiction, ambiguity, and precariousness.¹⁷ In other words, even as the symbolic narrative that Colin Powell embodies does a great deal of work to fix meaning for both himself and Kareem Khan, that work in itself is incomplete. The photo— which Powell describes in his interview—does the other part of this work. The photo appears as part of an online portfolio titled “Service” for The New Yorker magazine by photographer Platon. The series depicts members of U.S. military at various stages of their service, from graduating from West Point to lying under gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. In keeping with the logic of military multiculturalism that McAlister argues for, the series represents men and women of various races and ethnicities. What makes the portrait of Corporal Khan (which is more literally a portrait of his mother and gravestone) especially legible in the context of the series is, as Powell points out, the crescent and the star that symbolizes Islam and that marks the gravestone. Khan’s mother, Elsheba Khan, who sits behind and carefully frames the stone with her arms and head, provides an additional cue for Khan’s Muslim-ness as non-white. This framing places the gravestone at the center of the photograph, where the light is fixed on the stone and its inscriptions, which include Khan’s name, rank, dates, and medals.
 
The photo is made legible largely through two connected and overlapping discourses: the myth-making work of what historian George Mosse terms the “cult of the fallen soldier” and the iconography of the pietà. Instead of cradling the actual body of her dead son, the mother mourns by cradling the gravestone. And like the figuration of the Virgin Mary in classic pietàs, Elsheba Khan’s face appears “beautifully serene,” signifying “the transcendent purpose of maternal sacrifice” and “marking the magnitude and purpose of this death and the certainty of future life precisely in and through the face of her loss” (Tapia 16). Ruby Tapia suggests that “the essential constituent of the pietà’s timeless function as a fleshed-out screen is . . . the maternal body and its inextricable relationship to the threat of death and the promise of resurrection” (18). In this sense, the mother of the dead soldier is one of the most affective figures in times of war because she embodies most closely the meanings of the maternal in the pietà. Like the Virgin Mary of the original pietà, she sacrifices her son without protest, calmly accepting her role in the larger narrative of collective national suffering and the redemptive figure (the son/soldier) who would die in the place of others so that they would be saved.
 
Like the pietà the photograph reflects and recalls, the image invokes another powerful symbol, which also has roots in Christian iconography. The “cult of the fallen soldier,” which emerged during and after World War I, similarly relies on and reflects Christian themes of redemption and resurrection through death. Closely tied to the “myth of the war experience,” which rearticulates war experience and memory as a way to “transcend the horror of war and at the same time supported the utopia which nationalism sought to project,” the fallen soldier serves as symbolic martyr for the regeneration of the nation and calls on others to participate in this project (106). As a central motif to this figuration, youth mythologizes death “as not death at all but sacrifice and resurrection” (73). So while its work may be quite similar to that of the pietà (many images and depictions of the fallen soldier are, in fact, versions of the pietà), the cult of the fallen soldier, Mosse argues, is central to the glorification of war and by extension, the nation. But if the myth of the fallen dissipated by the time of World War II in Europe, as Mosse concludes, its power to evoke nationalist sentiment remains. Mosse suggests that the scale of death and violence that World War II wrought meant that war and its brutalities could no longer be mythologized in the ways they had been previously. However, the realities of war that European nations and people faced during World War II were very different from the realities that America and most of its citizens faced during two of the longest running wars in modern American history.¹⁸ Fought by strategically smaller armed forces made up of volunteers in lands many could not locate on maps, America’s military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan created burdens that were more or less borne solely by those in the military and their families. The wars in and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan still have a vexed relationship with the images of their casualties, however.¹⁹
 
Central to Tapia’s reading of the pietà in American culture is the argument for its work conjoining race, death, and the maternal in the project to resurrect the nation and national subject(s) at particular moments of rupture. As Tapia notes, these differentiated maternal bodies mean that “the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for (the) dead” (24). That the maternal or the mother is always already a raced figure can help us to see how the differentiated maternal bodies are deployed through visual culture to reproduce and resurrect the national body and the citizen-subject. The Khan photo by itself does not have the power to resurrect the national body through the raced body of the Muslim mother (although it is no coincidence that the actual body of the soldier is invisible in the image). Powell’s invocation of the soldier, the image, and his unequivocal American-ness does the supplemental work of securing the meaning of the photograph.
 
In the remainder of this essay, I want to turn to another figure who, like Khan, is an American Muslim soldier who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Unlike Khan, James Yee, the former Muslim chaplain assigned to U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, is not racially or ethnically Arab or “Muslim-looking,” to borrow Ahmad’s phrase. Unlike Khan’s, Yee’s story would end neither with praise for his honor and courage nor affirmation of national belonging from the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. If Khan’s story and the context through which his story is made legible to us obscure this relationship between war, militarism and race, Yee’s story provides the necessary supplement to our understanding and reminds us of the precarity of the status of racialized soldiers. That Yee’s race is not one often associated with Muslims further highlights the shared racialization of Muslim and Asian Americans in the history of U.S. wars throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries.
 
In 2003, U.S. Army Chaplain Captain James Yee was taken into military custody and detained on charges of sedition, espionage, aiding the enemy, and failure to obey a general order following 11 months of service as the Muslim chaplain at Camp Delta, the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.²⁰ A third-generation Chinese American and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Yee converted to Islam shortly before the first Gulf War and pursued further study of Islam with the specific goal of becoming and serving as a chaplain in the Army. Yee was stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington in 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon occurred. In response, Yee embraced his new role not simply as a chaplain but as a spokesperson for Islam, who could educate the military as well as the general public about Islam and diffuse rising hostility and antagonism against Muslims. In fall of 2002, Yee was assigned to Camp Delta. In addition to the usual duties of an army chaplain, his duties included meeting the prisoners’ religious needs as well as advising other staff about the prisoners’ religion and culture. He was also frequently called on to speak to visiting media, fulfilling his role as “the U.S. military’s poster child of a good Muslim—a devout chaplain who comfortably served both God and country” (Yee 40).
 
Yet he would come under increasing suspicion from the camp’s security officer and staff for what they perceived as Yee’s undue sympathy for the detainees. Some of the suspicious evidence against Yee included his ridiculing a psychological operations poster with a detainee (overheard by one of the base’s Arabic translators) and his use of a security clearance stamp to circulate materials from the prison’s library. Compounded by suspicions of his close association with other Muslim personnel, a group dubbed by others as a “Muslim clique,” camp security and counterintelligence opened an investigation on Yee and others in the “clique” (including Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, a translator) in the spring of 2003.²¹ The mounting investigation eventually culminated in Yee’s arrest at Jacksonville Naval Air Station on September 10, 2003, as he prepared to board a flight to Seattle, where he was going to spend his leave with his family. Yee was placed in solitary confinement at the U.S. Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he remained for 76 days. Eventually, the cases against both Yee and Al Halabi collapsed as a result of insufficient and irrelevant evidence, mistranslations, and mishandling and misunderstanding of what constituted classified documents, among other irregularities. As the case for espionage and aiding the enemy began to crumble, all criminal charges against Yee were dropped, and he was charged instead with adultery and downloading pornography—charges which were also later dismissed. Yee was eventually able to leave the army with an honorable discharge. As Al Halabi’s lawyer put it: “The U.S. . . . oversold, overcharged, and overreacted” (Rivera).
 
While Yee’s race and ethnicity were not foregrounded in the case or in media coverage of the case the way his religion was, they were conjoined with religion in an anonymous military official’s reference to Yee as “that Chinese Taliban.”²² No longer the poster child for the liberal and pluralist nation, Yee as “Chinese Taliban” poses an external threat to the national body and the nation-state through his race and religion. Despite the “terribly American” markers of Yee’s biography—third-generation American, model citizen, graduate of West Point, etc.—the ease with which his race and religion became legible as external and threatening is a reflection of the racialization of both Asian Americans and Muslims (Yee 13). If Muslim and “Muslim-looking” people are racialized as terrorists who stand outside of citizenship and construct the citizen as its opposite, Asians and Asian Americans, too, have long been figured as outsiders to the nation. From the exclusionary laws that barred would-be Asian immigrants from entering the U.S. to the long history of America’s wars in and against Asian nations, Asian Americans have been “defined antithetically against those who enjoy citizenship,” regardless of their formal citizenship status (Volpp, “Obnoxious” 57).²³ The Asian American, at once perpetual immigrant and always already foreign to America, “remains the symbolic ‘alien,’ the metonym for Asia who by definition cannot be imagined as sharing in America” (Lowe 6). Yee’s Muslim-ness and his Asian-ness thus work to doubly mark him as a suspect and a threat. The precariousness of Yee’s racial identity in relation to the war on terror and to the nation-state is thus informed by his status as an Asian American Muslim and also as a citizen-soldier representing the multicultural military and nation. In fact, what marks Yee as “the U.S. military’s poster child” is the very same condition which marks him as a potential terrorist, and vice versa.
 
In this sense, the predicament of the racialized soldier is not unlike that of the translator or interpreter. Much of James Yee’s work in the army, like that of Arabic interpreters, involved serving as a cultural intermediary between the US military and the general public, and between the military command and the Muslim and Arab detainees. One of the commanding officers describes Yee’s predicament at Camp Delta as an “awkward position. . . . Because of his unique background, the scarcity of that religion in the chaplain’s service, we relied on him to do things, and actually put him in the middle of that.”²⁴ Acts of translation in wartime are, as Vicente Rafael eloquently explains, “weaponized for the sake of projecting American power abroad while ensuring security at home” (3). Those who possess strategic foreign language skills necessary for warfare abroad are called upon to serve as both linguistic and cultural interpreters and mediators; it is in that capacity that translators become the most suspect and vulnerable.²⁵ Accounts of events that led to Yee’s arrest show that initial suspicions emerged from the cultural briefings that Yee routinely provided the soldiers—that he, “in the subtle nuances in the way he was crafting things,” appeared unduly sympathetic to the detainees, speaking as if he were justifying terrorist acts in his explanation of cultures and worldviews of Islam.²⁶ Mary Louise Pratt’s reading of the predicament of the translator substantiates this dynamic:
 

When relations are adversarial, the people assigned to mediate become suspect because the adversaries cohabit in them. The knowledge that enables them to do their work makes them dangerous, because what it takes to become a linguistic and cultural mediator are long-standing, varied, nonadversarial relations with the enemy culture.

(1527)

But Pratt’s point offers only a partial explanation for Yee’s situation. While his religious commitment as well as his affinity with other Muslims and Islamic culture were central to the case against him, the prevailing racial ideologies that have long genealogies in American culture and its imperial wars have done just as much work to mark him as suspicious and vulnerable. So Yee (as well as Khan) is both like and unlike a translator in that sense: if the position of the Iraqi interpreter is rendered ambiguous because of his or her presumed belonging and loyalty to another nation-state (not the U.S.), the racialized soldier’s race marks the precarity of his or her position. Racialized soldiers in the U.S. military are tasked with an impossible contradiction. They are called upon to stand as proofs of the nation and empire’s capacity for tolerance and inclusivity precisely because they are always already suspects and enemies. But their labor, like that of the Iraqi interpreters, is vital for military and imperial campaigns. This inherent contradiction in the figure of the racialized soldier makes its meanings and positions radically unstable. And this is why so much work goes into representing the racialized soldier as either the unquestionable patriot and citizen (as in the case of Khan) or as the treasonous other, the enemy (as in the case of Yee and Al Halabi) with virtually no room in between for other possibilities.²⁷ They remain in some ways, to borrow from Rafael, untranslatable:

[T]ranslation is incapable of fixing meaning across languages. . . . Hence it is impossible for imperialists as well as those who oppose them to fully control its workings, much less recuperate them. The treachery and treason inherent in translation in a time of war are the insistent counter-points to the American notion of translation as monolingual assimilation, with its promise of democratic communication and the just exchange of meanings. In the body of the interpreter, translation reaches its limits.

(17-8)

 
Rafael’s analysis of the interpreter offers a way to think about the contradiction of the racialized soldier. Because the soldier’s meaning must be fixed in particular ways, it is, as Rafael writes, “impossible for imperialists as well as those who oppose them to fully control its workings, much less recuperate them.” The state cannot quite grasp or control the final meaning(s) of the racialized soldier. Kareem Khan’s story, as narrated by Colin Powell and memorialized in the photograph in The New Yorker, insists upon his loyalty to his country even unto death as the ultimate proof of his patriotism and belonging. It thus seeks to mask the threat of treachery that plays out in the case against James Yee. That the two Gulf Wars produced radically different narratives for Powell, Khan, and Yee reveals the precarity of these claims and identifications. Even as the two subject positions appear to be irreconcilable opposites, Khan’s and Yee’s stories reveal how they are not merely interchangeable but constituted together as part and parcel of the same racial project of war.
 
War is a crisis of citizenship because even as the line between citizen-subject and terrorist gets fortified, these terms are made tenuous.²⁸ Such racial projects of war and militarism do not only affect specifically targeted populations (in the case of present war, those identified as Muslim). Tram Nguyen’s aptly titled We Are All Suspects Now collects narratives that reveal how multiple immigrant and ethnic minority communities have been impacted by post-9/11 policy changes. Judith Butler argues that in the face of state-sanctioned violence that targets and differentiates particular communities, we need to “understand precariousness as a shared condition” and, in doing so, recognize all forms and conditions of life as precarious, challenging hierarchies of violence and grief (Frames 28). What Butler urges here is not quite so simple: for it is not that we should cease to recognize specific and differentiated precariousness, but that we should recognize and oppose “state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity for the purpose of profit and territorial defense” (Frames 32). Ahmad raises similar concerns when he points out the “inadequate levels of grief” for the victims of post-9/11 hate crimes and violence in contrast to the outpouring of mourning and grief for the victims of the 9/11 attacks themselves (107). The consequences of uneven hierarchies of grief do not merely demonstrate lack of empathy or collective emotional shortcomings; they demonstrate and perpetuate the otherness of racial others that casts their lives as unworthy of grieving, as un-grievable, to borrow again from Butler.²⁹ That such lives are and have not been regarded as human, and are “derealized,” as Butler explains, is not merely an abstract idea: “their dehumanization . . . gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture” (Precarious Life 34).
 
To be clear, here Butler is speaking specifically about the unnamed and ungrieved civilian and other non-American casualties of America’s wars in the Middle East. By virtue of their status as soldiers in the U.S. military, American Muslims and other racialized soldiers are, of course, made available for mourning in ways that Iraqi and Afghani civilians are not. But acknowledging one kind of death or violence should not necessarily preclude the mourning of another. In fact, Butler’s point speaks to the ways in which the conditions of life and death are shared. Military service has a long history of negotiating the price for immigrants and other minorities to enter into the nation-state. But the price it exacts—the state’s right to exploit and to kill for its benefit—is, and should be, repugnant, not just to racial minorities but to all. To recall Foucault again, the generalization of biopower as part of state function and power also means the generalization of the “sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people” (260). The recuperation of Kareem Khan as the loyal American Muslim soldier and the indictment of James Yee as the treacherous “Chinese Taliban” must both be understood as forms and results of state and imperial violence. One dead, one alive: it is no wonder that only the dead soldier is bestowed with the power to resurrect. But the power to resurrect and to recuperate only masks the very real violence that continues to make life precarious, not only for Muslims and Asian Americans but also for all others.