Waiting for the Unexpected

Work, Action, Intellect: following the line of a tradition that goes back to Aristotle and that was still "common sense" for the generation that arrived in politics in the 1960s, Hannah Arendt sought to separate these three spheres of human experience and show their mutual incommensurability. Albeit adjacent and sometimes overlapping, the three different realms are essentially unrelated. In fact, they exclude themselves by turns: while one is making politics, one is not producing, nor is one involved in intellectual contemplation; when one works, one is not acting politically and exposing oneself to the presence of others, nor is one participating in the "life of the mind"; and anyone who is dedicated to pure reflection withdraws temporarily from the work of appearances, and thus neither acts nor produces. "To each his own" seems to be the message of Arendt's The Human Condition, and every man for himself. Although she argues passionately for the specific value of political Action, fighting against its entrapment in mass society, Arendt maintains that the other two fundamental spheres, Work and Intellect, remain unchanged in their qualitative structures. Certainly, Work has been extended enormously, and certainly, Thought seems feeble and paralyzed; however, the former is still nonetheless an organic exchange with nature, a social metabolism, a production of new objects, and the latter is still a solitary activity, by its nature extraneous to the cares of common affairs.

As must be obvious by now, however, what I am arguing here is radically opposed to the conceptual schema proposed by Arendt and the tradition by which it is inspired. Allow me to recapitulate briefly. The decline of political Action arises from the qualitative changes that have taken place both in the sphere of Work and in the sphere of Intellect, given that a strict intimacy has been established between them. Conjoined to Work, Intellect (as an aptitude or "faculty," not as a repertory of special understandings) becomes public, appearing, worldly. In other words, what comes to the fore is its nature as a shared resource and a common good. By the same token, when the potentiality of general intellect comes to be the principal pillar of social production, so Work assumes the aspect of an activity without a finished work, becoming similar in every respect to those virtiiosic performances that are based on a relationship with a "presence of others." But is not virtuosity the characteristic trait of political action? One has to conclude, therefore, that post-Fordist production has absorbed within itself the typical modalities of Action and, precisely by so doing, has decreed its eclipse. Naturally, this metamorphosis has nothing liberatory about it: within the realm of'waged labor, the virtuosic relationship with the "presence of others" translates into personal dependence; the "activity-without-finished-work," which nonetheless is strongly reminiscent from close up of political praxis, is reduced to an extremely modern servitude.

Earlier in this essay, then, I proposed that political Action finds its redemption at the point where it creates a coalition with public Intellect (in other words, at the point where this Intellect is unchained from waged labor and, rather, builds its critique with the tact of a corrosive acid). Action consists, in the final analysis, in the articulation of general intellect as a non-State public sphere, as the realm of common affairs, as Republic. The Exodus, in the course of which the new alliance between Intellect and Action is forged, has a number of fixed stars in its own heaven: radical Disobedience, Intemperance, Multitude, Soviet, Example, Right of Resistance. These categories allude to a political theory of the future, a theory perhaps capable of racing up to the political crises of the late twentieth century and outlining a solution that is radically anti-Hobbesian.

Political Action, in Arendt's opinion, is a new beginning that interrupts and contradicts automatic processes that have become consolidated into fact. Action has, thus, something of the miracle, given that it shares the miracle's quality of being surprising and unexpected.19 Now, in conclusion, it might be worth asking whether, even though the theory of Exodus is for the most part irreconcilable with Arendt, there might be some usefulness in her notion of Miracle.

Here, of course, we are dealing with a recurrent theme in great political thinking, particularly in reactionary thought. For Hobbes, it is the role of the sovereign to decide what events merit the rank of miracles, or transcend ordinary law. Conversely, miracles cease as soon as the sovereign forbids them.20 Schmitt takes a similar position, inasmuch as he identifies the core of power as being the ability to proclaim states of exception and suspend constitutional order: "The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology."21 On the other hand, Spinoza's democratic radicalism confutes the theological-political value of the miraculous exception. There is, however, an ambivalent aspect in his argumentation. In fact, according to Spinoza, a miracle, unlike the universal laws of nature that are identified with God, expresses only a "limited power"; in other words, it is something specifically human. Instead of consolidating faith, it makes us "doubt God and everything," thus creating a predisposition to atheism.22 But are not these very elements--a solely human power, a radical doubt regarding constituted power, and political atheism--some of the characteristics that define the anti-State Action of the Multitude? In general, the fact that in both Hobbes and Schmitt the miracle is the preserve of the sovereign in no sense runs counter to the connection between Action and Miracle; rather, in a sense, it confirms it. For these authors, it is only the sovereign who acts politically. The point is therefore not to deny the importance of the state of exception in the name of a critique of sovereignty, but rather to understand what form it might assume once political Action passes into the hands of the Many（责问得好！）. Insurrections, desertions, invention of new organisms of democracy, applications of the principle of the tertium datur: herein lie the Miracles of the Multitude, and these miracles do not cease when the sovereign forbids them.

Unlike what we have in Arendt, however, the miraculous exception is not an ineffable "event," with no roots, and entirely imponderable. Because it is contained within the magnetic field defined by the mutually changing interrelations of Action, Work, and Intellect, the Miracle is rather something that is awaited but unexpected. As happens in every oxymoron, the two terms are in mutual tension, but inseparable. If what was in question was only the salvation offered by an "unexpected," or only a long-term "waiting," then we could be dealing, respectively, with the most insignificant notion of causality or the most banal calculation of the relationship between means and ends. Rather, it is an exception that is especially surprising to the one who was awaiting it. It is an anomaly so potent that it completely disorients our conceptual compass, which, however, had precisely signaled the place of its insurgence. We have here a discrepancy between cause and effect, in which one can always grasp the cause, but the innovative effect is never lessened. Finally, it is precisely the explicit reference to an unexpected waiting, or the exhibition of a necessary incompleteness, that constitutes the point of honor of every political theory that disdains the benevolence of the sovereign（这也是对至今为止的全部政治哲学议程的责难！难道我们就为了政治哲学没给我们出一个可接受未来，而继续傻等着吗？）。