Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar

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 The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power.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.