The Politics of Critique, University of Brighton (July 18th 19th

2012)

Lifes What You Make It:

Vitalism and Critique

Benjamin Noys (2012)

In a 2009 pamphlet issued out of the student occupations in New

York we find what we might call the standard rejection of critique:
This

activity

of

producing

novel

recommendations

for

the

submission of the population is called critique. (2009, III) The

activity of critique is treated as one that is indissolubly bound to
what it rejects, and hence always constrained and always available
for recuperation: Critique illuminates all the errors of a society
that its managers have overlooked. (2009, III) What we find is the
rejection of critique founded on a rather unstable amalgam of an
immanent thought of affirmation which would charge critique
with always being secondary, dependent, and a symptom of
ressentiment coupled to a post-Situationist model of perpetual
recuperation in which critical activity is a mere corrective or, as
the pamphlet puts it, [a] release valve for intellectual dissonance.
(2009, III) The solution to this impasse is one of radical
separation, which aims to sever the relation to power: Critique

must be abandoned in favour of something that has no relation

whatsoever to its enemy, something whose development and
trajectory is completely indifferent to the nonlife of governance and
capital. (2009, III)
The reference to nonlife gives a clue perhaps to the nature
of what has no relation to the enemy, what has a different
development and trajectory: Life. It is the power of Life that will
substitute for the impotence of critique. This is made explicit in the
appeal to a form of life which no reason can govern (2009, IX),
and the closing assertion: Our task, impossible, is to seize time
itself and liquefy its contents, emptying its emptiness and refilling
it with the life that is banned from appearing. (2009, XI) Of course,
what justifies and supports this discourse is the work of Giorgio
Agamben. Its initially somewhat surprising that the supremely pofaced and hyper-refined thought of Agamben, in which the
paradigm of modernity is the concentration camp, should be so
prevalent in licensing radical discourse. No doubt, the work of
Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee has been influential in
encouraging this take-up through the redemptive reversal of the
transformation of bare life life everywhere subject to sovereign
power into a transfigured life of glory. I will say more about this
transfiguration later, for the moment I want to pause for a while
on the vitalism subtending this take-up.

Comedy and Critique

I want to turn to what might perhaps appear an unlikely topic the

comic (dont worry this wont be funny). It is the comic that will
allow us to explore the continuing vitality of vitalism and, in
particular, how vitalism attempts to replace critique. Henri
Bergsons work Laughter (1900) contains a famous definition of the
comic as something mechanical encrusted on the living (Bergson
2009). One key example of this repetitious mechanism deployed by
Bergson is the jack-in-the-box:
As children we have all played with the little man who
springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps up
again. Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher.
Crush him down beneath the lid, and often he will send
everything flying. It is hard to tell whether or no the toy
itself is very ancient, but the kind of amusement it affords
belongs to all time. It is a struggle between two stubborn
elements,

one

of

which,

being

simply

mechanical,

generally ends by giving in to the other, which treats it as

a plaything. A cat playing with a mouse, which from time
to time she releases like a spring, only to pull it up short
with a stroke of her paw, indulges in the same kind of
amusement. (Bergson 2009)
This example indicates the two tendencies that Bergson traces: the
elasticity of life, represented by the act of playing, and the
inelasticity of the comic, represented by the jack-in-the-boxs
mechanical and thing-like repetition. The function of laughter is to

free us from this inelastic machine-like existence and return us to

the social normality of elastic life to prevent us from merely being
jack-in-the-boxes, we might say.
This is, of course, equivocal because the return to social
normality can itself seem like a return to something machine-like
and repetitive the routines of social life being hardly more elastic
than the comic (Luisetti 2012). Therefore, Bergson himself notes
how laughter can free us from the machine-like, but also risks
returning us to the limited forms of social life:
Laughter comes into being in the self-same fashion. It
indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. It
instantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance.
It, also, is afroth with a saline base. Like froth, it
sparkles. It is gaiety itself. But the philosopher who
gathers a handful to taste may find that the substance is
scanty, and the after-taste bitter. (Bergson 2009)
The bitter taste of laughter is this limited critical function and the
difficulty of finding a true elasticity of Life. In finding the elasticity
of Life we aim to replace the merely negative function of critique
by affirming that elasticity. Yet, the result is still equivocal,
seemingly as bound to the social as critique is supposed to be. On
the one hand, laughter threatens to return us to the rote routines of
social life, to what Federico Luisetti calls the founding mechanisms
of late capitalisms violent entertainment compulsion (2012). On
the other hand, laughter also incarnates a possible detachment or

interruption of these mechanisms, and the possibility of a new

construction.
We can find this latter kind of political (or anti-political)
vitalism figured in the comic turns of activism that aims to mock
the inertial repetitions of the 1% or capitalist capture. Laughter at
those in power is the affirmative replacement for critique,
indicating both how we can collapse into the social repetitions and
machine-like roles of our capitalist personas and how we can break
with these routines. The difficulty is that the very act of the comic,
the very attempt to break social norms, can itself become another
mechanical norm. The valorisation of the elasticity of Life
incarnated in lines of flight, exodus, and movement threatens to
become another rote routine of affirmation, if not to fall back into
replicating the ethical and social forms of a mutational capitalism.
The result is a perpetual conflict, a divine comedy, which serves to
enforce the perpetual power of Life. Life as affirmative operator
must also be returned to again and again to free it from any
becoming inelastic, including in the inelasticity of opposition. The
dread fear of recuperation, displaced onto critique, returns to
haunt Life that always falls short of the excess it is supposed to
figure.
What I am tracing is a strange mimicry and replication of the
operation of critique, and its fate, by this political vitalism. The very
stridency by which critique is condemned in the name of Life is
suggestive of the parallel by which vitalism comes to replace, or try

to replace, critique. The empowering effect of vitalism, and also

its comedy, makes it the signature gesture of the moment. It traces
a biopolitical populism that poses Life against a vampiric Capital.
This is an ethical discourse in which are actions are assessed by
their ability to live up to the elasticity of Life and condemned by
laughter at their failure to do so. We are perpetually comic
subjects, laughing at our own enchainment to the mechanical,
while repeatedly trying to conform to the vibrancy of Life. I want to
unpack now a little more just why the interchangeability of vitalism
and critique should take place and suggest a little more why this
should be problematic.

A Renegade Discourse
Donna V. Jones has noted the popularity of vitalism in the
contemporary moment as a replacement for the usual discourse of
critique:
As a radical or renegade discourse, vitalism represents
protest,

disillusion,

and

hope.

Life

often

grounds

opposition today, after the political disappearance of a

subject/object

of

history

and

scepticism

about

the

philosophy of the subject in general. A third way, Life

disallows bourgeois stasis as certainly as it makes
impossible the achievement of rational controls. In fine,
Life conjures up experience, irrationality, and revolt.
(2012: 17)

Obviously the slightly coy reference to the subject/object of

history indexes the absent proletariat, and so we might say Life
indexes a new populist subject that, true to its object, overflows
any class canalisation. Also, the reference to exceeding rationality
is the trope of anti-planning and anti-rationality that is driven also
by the claimed immeasurability and excess of Life over all control.
What Jones crucially indicates is that despite vitalism
claiming the status of an affirmative and primary force it in fact
always functions as a reactive banner, and should be defined less
affirmatively than as the negation of its own negation the
mechanical, machinic, and the mechanistic. (2012: 28) Life does
not come first, but (as we saw with the comic and laughter) can
only be recovered through and against the mechanical. It is for this
reason, I want to suggest, that the hostility of vitalism to critique is
a sign of what Freud would call the narcissism of small
differences. Vitalism constantly makes a claim on Life as primary
and castigates critique as reactive because it remains within the
same matrix.
Now, of course, one response to this could be to suggest the
complexity of vitalism as a critical discourse noting that it does
not involve a simple opposition between Life and mechanism, but
rather a complex and dynamic topology (Luisetti 2012). The path I
wish to explore is rather the strange interchangeability this
analysis sets up between vitalism and critique. Where we saw how

vitalism starts to look like critique, I now want to briefly explore

where critique starts to look like vitalism.
This is interchangeability is posed by Jones. She turns to
Bergsons essay on laughter to track how Bergsons suggestion that
laughter is social therapy for action that has become mechanical
(Jones 2012: 52) can be used to understand the work of Judith
Butler and Pierre Bourdieu as forms of Bergsonian comedy. In the
case of Butlers theory of drag as parody the act of parody frees us
from the laughable mechanical repetitions of gender roles, while
Bourdieus analysis of the habitus becomes a comedy of class
society, a risible provocation. (Jones 2012: 55) These works of
critique can be seen as vitalist in the ways they encourage us to
mock routine and encourage invention and elasticity.
What we see here is how theories we might consider to be
anti-vitalist and critical turn back around to vitalism once we
recognise the critical function of vitalism. In this comedy we find
positions exchanged as critics become vitalists and vitalists critics
(admittedly this may be a comedy only found funny by a few sad
souls). In Joness reading the addition of Marxs analysis of
reification is that there we laugh at how inanimate things act as
living beings in the dancing commodity form. Marx inverts
Bergson to demonstrate living activity in inert things (Jones 2012:
55).
The effect of the deconstruction of the distinction between
the living and the machinic seems to problematise vitalism, but still

leaves it as a useful critical discourse. In fact, this speaks to the

difficulty of discarding vitalism, should we wish too. There is, if we
like, a kind of persistence of the living as norm secreted within
the critical apparatus (as well as a critical apparatus secreted
within the living). This is the vitality of vitalism referred to by
Georges Canguilhem, in which he stressed its ethical and
imperative function (Greco 2005: 17-18).

Critical Life
Despite, or perhaps because, of these parallels and fusions the
critique of vitalism seems all the more urgent. The very volatility,
promiscuity and dispersion of vitalism (which mimics its own
account of Life) threatens to leave no space at all for critique that
could not be re-absorbed into Life. Max Horkheimer, in a 1934
essay, accepted the element of protest against reification at work in
vitalism, but was critical of its elimination of history, evasion of the
material, and irrationalism (Horkheimer 2005). Now, while these
criticisms still hold good, I think, we might note the re-tooled anticritical vitalism of the present tends to embrace these exact points
of criticism.
If history is co-extensive with Capital and Empire, the single
catastrophe

to use Benjamins

oft-quoted phrase, then the

elimination of history is the only way to found the novelty of the

new. The crisis of capitalism and the exhaustion of left or social
democratic forms is taken as a given and as the sign of the release

of the repressed force of Life. In similar fashion the material only

incarnates the practico-inert slumped into the frozen stasis of the
commodity form. The alternative materialities of Life objects,
networks, complexity, et al. are the only hope against the dead
matter of the present. This is what Badiou, in Logics of Worlds
(2006), calls democratic materialism. Finally, irrationalism is to be
welcomed against the sterile rationalisms of planning and order
that are taken to encompass everything from state socialism to neoliberalism.
This is something of clichd presentation of the various forms
of political vitalism, but I would argue that there is some truth to it,
and some truth to it as an account for the attraction of biopolitical
populism. In fact, this kind of political vitalism precisely tracks
outside of the constraints of the present and presents itself as a
discourse

without

limits.

This

was

Michel

Foucaults

point

concerning what he described as the savage ontology of life in

The Order of Things (1966) (1974: 303; trans. mod.). The
galvanising force of this ontology lies precisely in its disregard for
the discourse of political economy. The difficulty is, however, that
the discourse of Life remains within the forms of capitalist and
state power as its essential support.
My contention, then, is that Life with a capital L opposed to
Power with a capital P is obviously a critical discourse, but an
inadequate replacement for critique. While it constantly tars
critique with the brush of being reactive and trapped by its

10

proximity to what it negates this supposed model of separation and

distance replicates the forms and functions of capitalist ideology
which separate off Life as the sphere of reproduction from
production. In that sense it operates as a replacement for critique
and founds its superiority on the affirmation of a productive value
on which capitalism depends, and which capitalism posits. It
mistakes interiority for exteriority, and also dissolves the difficult
questions of class structure into the simplicity of two opposing
blocs.

Mediations
I want to suggest that critique here finally turns on the question of
mediation. Part of the appeal of this political vitalism is its
deliberate dissolution of mediations. Mediations are bad. They
stand at the expense of the immediate expression of Life whether
those mediations are the forms of power of state and capital, the
mediations of organisation in the forms of party or union, or the
mediations that would impose rationality and direction on the
forms of Life. Now as I have noted one form of these mediations,
those of the organised left, have largely collapsed, or have certainly
been hollowed-out and significantly weakened. This, however, does
not license the complete removal of the problem of mediation.
Part of the difficulty here is that mediation tends to get
understood as the search for the happy median, for mediation as
synthesis, as stabilisation, in line with the usual clichs concerning

11

Hegelian or Marxian mediation. In fact, mediation is a work of

negativity and negation that does not propose to bring together,
but which splits, divides, and exacerbates contradictions. We might
say, and I would say, that the irony is that the seeming discourse of
separation, of the radical division into Two, that is the discourse of
the savage ontology of Life finds itself most subject to mediation in
the bad sense it decries. Its very division forces it back into
mediation.
My suggestion is then that mediation, in critical terms, traces
an impossibility of conjoining and integration. In precise terms the
mediation that concerns me is labour, as the very impossibility of
labour. So, a thinking of labour does not entail the function of
labour as mediator in terms of discipline and generation of either a
capitalist or revolutionary identity Marxs stern but steeling
school of labour. Rather, a thinking of the mediation of labour
suggests that even labour cant save us, that wageless life is a
future traced within the forms of labour as well as in abandonment
from them. Its precisely the collapsing of this mediation that feeds
the fantasy of Life as norm of excess, but also this impossibility that
reveals the form of Life with a Capital L as capitalist fantasy of
canalisable excess. Hence it is the political vitalisms that produce
the antinomy of Life as excess and Capital as vampiric that results
in a totalising (in the bad sense) discourse.
If the compactness of the class did not deliver then the
compactness of Life will not either. In fact, what is lauded is the

12

dispersion and volatility of Life beyond any positive or negative

point of identification precisely its lack of compactness attests to
its always revolutionary potential. I want to suggest that this folds
back into bad comedy in which Life is always about to succeed
but some final pratfall, last minute social or political blunder, leaves
us laughing at Life reduced to mere lives. Rather than this
perpetual comedy, I am suggesting that we look a little more
closely at how Life was already mediated by capitalist and state
power. This is not to sow a countervailing despair of everything is
recuperated. In fact, it is the discourse of Life as radically separate
that oscillates between the poles of Life as everything and Life as
completely mediated and recuperated. In contrast, mediation lies in
the patient work of insinuation and negation that reveals no
affirmative Life lesson, with its consoling comedy, but rather the
divine comedy of the purgatory we are in.
Marx remarked, in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that the
revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory.
It does its work methodically. (2010) I doubt we still have quite the
confidence of the teleology of the journey to paradise. That said,
Marx also remarked about the complexity of any revolutionary
process: while bourgeois revolutions storm more swiftly from
success to success they leave you with a terrible Katzenjammer
(hangover literally cats wail); in contrast, proletarian revolutions
constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the
apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew (Marx 2010).

13

This suggests that making life what we want it to be might be a

winding process, more purgatorial, still a divine comedy, but not
the storming to immediate transfiguration Life would promise.

14

Bibliography
Bergson, H. [1900] (2009), Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of
the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Project
Gutenberg e-book.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4352

Foucault, M. [1966] (1974), The Order of Things, London:

Tavistock/Routledge.

Greco, M. (2005), On the Vitality of Vitalism, Theory, Culture &

Society, 22: 1, 1527.

Horkheimer, M. (2005) On Bergsons metaphysics of time, Radical

Philosophy 131: 919.

Jones, D. V. (2012) The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy:

Ngritude,

Vitalism,

and

Modernity,

New

York:

Columbia

University Press.

Luisetti, F. (2012) On Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la

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Marx, Karl (2010) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,

Marxist

Internet

Archive,

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/

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