3/7/23, 6:57 PM Seven Theses on Destitution (After Endnotes) • Ill Will

Seven Theses on
Destitution (After
Endnotes)
Kiersten Solt, V.I.
February 12th, 2021

Other languages: Français, Deutsch, Español, Italiano reading, the socio-economic and political fields of
today thus appear as the negative images of what they
were sixty years ago.

Thesis 1: The retrospective We are told that contemporary struggles are

“identitarian” because of their past, a past that is lost
projection of an intact today. What does this mean for partisans? If we translate
political identity to explain the argument into the terms of lived experience, the
picture we get is a melancholic one. Today’s insurgents
our present obfuscates the are processing the loss of a once-intact and legitimate
working class identity. We are nostalgic for a once-
truths of our time.
functioning and legitimate system of classed political
representation that our world can no longer offer, we
We have recently been told that in light of the ongoing
are told. But are the death of the workers’ movements
crisis of political representation, the persistent
and a coincident collapse of effective political
identitarian thrust of contemporary upheaval is
representation truly the animating problems of our era?
“rational.” What rationality is this? In “Onward,
No. The frontliners of last summer are far too young
Barbarians,” Endnotes situates our present in the
and hardly sufficiently “educated” to experience
aftermath of the demise of the workers’ movements, a
nostalgia for an absent working-class identity. If we find
line familiar to some strands of contemporary
ourselves worried by the lack of viable careers, it is
revolutionary thought. The argument proceeds as
much more due to our inability to pay rent and our
follows. In the era of the workers’ movements, the
debts than because we long to link arms with our
economy determined the political. The antagonistic
absent fellow workers. Nor has any human condition
structure of capital manifested as a social antagonism
proved itself stable enough to conclude — alongside,
between proletarians and the bourgeoisie. The
we might note, Francis Fukuyama’s own recent reading
economic determination of the political thus enabled
of the identitarian turn in American politics — that an
rebellious energy to take shape as a movement waged
objective and ahistorical longing for belonging has
by the working class. Today, the argument goes, socio-
suddenly found itself without any positive form. The
economic dynamics continue to determine the political
demise of the workers’ movements and the crisis of
field, but principally as forces of dissolution rather than
political representation are more akin to pre-conditions
construction. Thus, in lieu of class composition we find
than live phenomena of our time, scores settled long
the decomposition of class, in lieu of the socio-
before we came on the scene. Hence, an explanation of
economic basis of democratic representation we find an
both the persistent identitarianism and demands for
absent basis of democratic representation, and in lieu of
state recognition must begin somewhere other than in
workers’ movements we find “non-movements.” On this
the decomposition of the workers’ movements, whose

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aftermath began over a century ago. It could begin, system of economic determination and political
perhaps, in the forms of power enabled by claims to representation. When capital, the state, and the politics
identitarian commonality and what makes such amenable to them are accorded the weight, the
formations desirable, and not just rational, in our positivity, and the continuity of the real, it is merely by
present. But explaining the origins of persistent logical extension that contemporary movements appear
identitarian conflicts is not precisely my task. in the negative, as nothing more than “feeble alliances”
and “generalized disorder.” Certain theorists even affirm
Instead, here, I pursue what is obscured by such this analytic outright (“It is the consciousness of capital
romantic portrayals of the present. I call Endnotes’ as our unity-in-separation that allows us to posit from
argument romantic — romantic, that is, positing a within existing conditions — even if only as a
kernel of truth in an imagined past, a kernel to be photographic negative — humanity’s capacity for
rediscovered and restored anew. Is the dialectical view communism.” (52-53 fn. 32, emphasis ours)). Capital is
not opposed to romanticism? I insist on the term, attributed the positivity of “unity,” even if a modified
because what romanticism and crude dialectics have in one, against which upheaval appears solely in a negative
common is the structure of presupposition, negation, mode.
and the subsequent positing of a new, positive, and
unified universal. Positivity lies either in the past or on the side of capital,
or both; the present is destined to appear in the
negative. The next theoretical step is equally
determined. What is needed will assume the doubly
Thesis 2: So long as one clings inverted shape of what has been lost. For this reason,
futural proposals for revolutionary action that arise
to the perspective of the from frameworks such as these appear as positivities.
spectacle — the regime of For instance: “The non-movements point to a need for
a universalism that goes beyond the ruins of the
visibility that dominates in workers’ movements.” (12) We ought to “envisage means
commodity society, the by which the non-movements might eventually seize
control of capitalist stagnation/deindustrialization,” and
whitened regime of even consider “the prepar[ation] of an under-
production plan,” we are told. (24, 26) Again, what is
visualization — our present is
available elsewhere, in the past or on the side of capital,
destined to appear in the is found missing in the present and dictates the shape
of what ought to come (though not what will). When
negative, that is, as lack, one is intent upon framing upheaval in the negative,
absence, and negation. As a what is called for will always be a new and currently
absent positivity, a novel and presently absent
consequence, the future of commons, a new and unthought universal. But this is
revolutionary activity will be all to say that what they find missing is the unity of the
proletariat, the universal, a revolutionary agential
framed as a need for a new subject, and that they tell us it is toward this we ought
universal or a new positive to organize.

vision. If we are left with a conception of revolution as a never-

ending cycle of violence, if we fail to develop an
When a past political configuration is accorded the alternative ambition, we cannot understand
weight of positivity, it is only logical that the present revolutionary movements as anything other than
will appear in the negative. If our present appears as a failures, and we risk our ambitions taking the shape of
collection of absences — the decomposition of class, what they set out to undermine.
the absent basis of democratic representation, the non-
movement of movements today — this is because it has
been forced to answer to a presupposed past, an intact

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revolutionary elements with a molar socio-economic
Thesis 3: Contrary to every
formation is and was their demise. In their most recent
spectacular perspective, the text, Endnotes casts rosy eyes on the past. There is no
way that people living in that past saw themselves
relation between living in the kinds of unities Endnotes invokes here.
revolutionary elements and How could we understand Jim Crow, Reconstruction,
or the world wars if the conflicts of the time were
their would-be indeed organized around a strong working class
representatives is that of a identity? The question answers itself.

persistent and asymmetrical Revolutionary elements are defined solely by their

vocation. They are allergic to representation,
conflict.
democratic or otherwise, and allergic to the state. There
is therefore an asymmetrical conflict within
While contemporary upheaval does not itself demand
revolutionary upheaval.
reference to the early twentieth-century workers’
movements, it is possible to keep them in view without
The asymmetry of revolutionary conflict is familiar in
producing romantic views of the present. A variety of
America, the liberal democracy and exporter of
sources offer alternative accounts of the movements’
identitarian politics par excellence. Here, the
demise; I take up Tiqqun’s reading of the Italian
asymmetrical nature of revolutionary upheaval is visible
autonomist period. It is in this time that the notion of
in the compulsory translation of rebellious energies
the “decomposition of class” — the “decomposition”
into the form of social movements — that is, a form of
that ostensibly characterizes our present — emerged.
contestation amenable to dialogue with the state. From
On Tiqqun’s reading, what many nostalgically call “the
revolutionary energies, gestures, practices and ideas,
workers’ movement” is not, in fact, the revolutionary
counter-insurrectional forces aim to extract a discrete
elements of the time, but rather their capitalist-statist
constituency whose grievances may be legibly
corollary. “The workers’ movement has throughout its
articulated to the state on the basis of an imagined
existence coincided with the progressive elements of
social contract. Hence, in 2011, we watched an
capitalism,” Tiqqun writes. “From February 1848 to the
ensemble of articles in Adbusters, heads of media
Commune and the autogestionary utopias of the 1970s,
committees, demands committees, and general
it has only ever demanded, for its most radical
assemblies produce “the 99%” that “wanted corporations
elements, the right of the working-class to manage
out of politics” from the occupations, blockades, and
Capital for itself.” (This is Not a Program, 30-31)  Upon the
love affairs that erupted across the country. In 2014, we
recognition of the distinction between proletariat and
watched Alicia Garza and Fox News, black clergy
the working-class, the equation of revolutionary
members, activists, and the national franchise named
elements with the working class is an error. 
“Black Lives Matter” produce “Black Lives that Mattered”
from the riots, looting, occupations, and acts of
The revolutionary element is the proletariat, the rabble.
communization in places like Ferguson, Milwaukee,
[…] Every time that it has attempted to define itself as a
Baltimore, and Charlotte. In 2016-2017, we watched the
class, the proletariat has lost itself, taken the dominant
ensemble of David Archimbault, the Bureau of Indian
class, the bourgeoisie, for a model. As a non-class […]
Affairs, the legal entity that is the “Standing Rock Sioux
the proletariat is that which experiences itself as a form-of-
Tribe,” the lawsuits seeking to block pipeline
life. It is communist or nothing. In every age the form
construction, and the US Army Corps of Engineers
in which the proletariat appears is redefined according
produce an “indigenous people” seeking “recognition of
to the overall configuration of hostilities. The most
their rights to autonomy and the land” from the
regrettable confusion in this regard concerns the
encampments, shared meals, destruction of
“working class.” (ibid.)
construction equipment, the stampede of buffalo, and
the pitched battles with police at Standing Rock. And
The significance of this period is thus the historical and
conceptual dislocation of the proletariat — that is, the last summer, we watched an uprising sputter out into a

revolutionary elements — from its traditional

confusion with the working class. The confusion of

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sloganistic desire to defund the police and yet another revolutionary tendencies abound. But an uprising, an
electoral charade. This time, however, the managerial insurrection, an ungovernable situation is marked by
process has been far less complete. the feeling not just that anything is possible, but that
one can act in whatever way one wills without the
Again: there is an asymmetric conflict within slightest hesitation. May 26 through June 1, 2020, USA,
revolutionary upheaval. When it is spoken of univocally, for instance.
whether as “movements” or “non-movements,” this
asymmetry — the conflict within conflict — is When possibilities such as these are on the table, the
obscured. process of constitution cannot set in through a single
act of repression or containment, but requires an
accumulation of gestures and hesitations. Someone
yelling “if you’re not black…” catches the ears of a
Thesis 4: Contemporary noticeable portion of a crowd, and not just a handful of
the more confused participants. A brawl or near fist
upheaval is the site of a fight between macho tough guys can stop a march in
conflictual encounter the middle of the street. Instead of a proliferation of
actions so extensive that it takes time to determine
between destituent gestures where one’s crew will start the day, actions are
and constituent forces. announced days in advance and sponsored by an
attached list of organizations. The same people
consistently appear to make speeches, with the effect
One cannot escape from one’s first riot unscathed and
not only of creating a sentiment or a direction for the
one equally cannot experience an ungovernable
crowd, but of slowly becoming recognizable
situation without learning its defamiliarizing cues.
Ungovernability carries with it the distinct sense that figureheads — indicated, these days, when they start
dropping Instagram handles for something other than
things are developing far too quickly for any party to
suggestions as to what should be played on the sound
achieve a totalizing grasp on the situation. This is as
truck. Eventually come the meetings. Not of crews
true in any particular riot as it is for the broader
situation at hand. Calls for action proliferate from debriefing or making plans or seeking to coordinate
across multiple elements that have only just met. All
innumerable and unknown camps; crowds gather by
these have their place in ungovernable confusion and
intuition rather than at publicized events; one hears of
can even be key means of expanding it. On the contrary,
unfathomable attacks after they occur. While one
crowd drags rubble into an already-burning building, it the process of constitution draws out meetings of
organizers and activists. “This is a movement, not a
is entirely possible that another is pitching tear gas
moment,” they have said over their megaphones the day
canisters at police across flaming barricades a block or
before. At the meetings, more than one attendee will
ten away. Meanwhile, bands of looters dance in and out
of demonstrations, while others may be laying waste to invoke a mysterious and never-present “people” —
people who want something, people who might be
a shopping district on the other side of the city.
“alienated” by this or that blockade or anything other
Inexplicable sights pop up and then fade back into the
than a peaceful protest, people who should be “brought
landscape: someone on a megaphone and someone else
on horseback, crews of builders eyeing how a certain on board” because the speakers are divesting themselves
entirely of their capacity to act on their own behalf, and
piece of plywood could fit together with that piece of
would prefer that everyone else there follow suit. After
ten-foot-tall fencing, circles of friends sharing a blunt,
far too much talk, the break-out groups will form and
someone else carrying a toddler on his shoulders make
the ephemeral scene. Sprinters and scuffles, flashbangs everyone will rest in peace in their given roles. Little
bureaucrats. Thus, a layer of managers begins to form. If
and fireworks, long and low jeers, an inane oogle trill.
riots, looting, and street battles are still underway, they
Things are not entirely joyous: now and then people
will call actions at a distance from these more unruly
shout out in pain or fall to the ground weeping; others
leave because they have been compromised or have events, leading crowds to what they call “strategic”
targets, which are always the empty thrones of power,
found themselves unprepared. And the situation is not
entirely amenable to revolutionary currents: desires
conflict, struggles over strategy ensue, and counter-

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the governors’ mansion, the courthouses, the federal are channeled and modulated into forms amenable to
buildings. Soon enough, they will be at the politicians’ the state. At stake in the concept is the ability to depart
table, where they wanted to be all along. from the landscape of the state.

This is one image of a constituent process at work in If the “classical social movement” is to be defined,
the twenty-first century USA. following Carl Schmitt, as “the mediation between
unorganized people and the state,” this is a definition of
the social movement as a process of constitution. A
potential taxonomy of the limit-forms of contemporary
Thesis 5: The process of upheaval unfolds from here. Not every social
movement is populist, but every populism is a social
constitution is the process at movement. Populist movements occur when a
work in every state — and in constituent people rebels against the prevailing
conception of bourgeois culture. Not every movement
every so-called social is identitarian, but every identitarian movement is
movement and every constituent. Identitarian movements posit a partial
people marginalized by or excluded from the popular
identitarianism, as well as dimension of the state. Their trajectory is thus doubly
constituent insofar as it aims at the constitution of the
every populism, fascism, and
excluded population and the reconstitution of the
civil war. popular totality. The distinction between identitarian
and populist social movements is less apparent from
Statist forces always present themselves as fully the perspective of the state, but important from the
composed conjunctions of a people, a territory, and a perspective of partisans, as each presents different
law to govern them all. But there is no “people,” no opportunities for exiting the constituent schema. Both,
“society,” no “nation,” no “body politic,” no however, involve the constitution of a people, both end
“constituency” until they are produced as such — up at the politicians’ table, and both are ultimately
always by way of a violent demarcation between the constituent. Moreover, a combination of identitarian
included and the excluded. There are no “interests,” and populist tendencies can, as the past five years have
“desires,” no “will of the people” until they are demonstrated, give rise to social movements
hammered out — always by flattening real desires to colloquially understood as fascist.
the lowest common denominator. And there is no
sanctification of that will into the form of law until the When a party of opposition takes on a form that is too
moment the law is applied — always by arbitrary force. discrete and too powerful for the state to respond,
Abbé Sieyès’ distinction between constituting and when the popular dimension of the state fractures
constituted power, Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory, beyond the possibility of reconstitution, and when the
Walter Benjamin’s distinction between law-making and state no longer holds its monopoly on legitimacy and
law-preserving violence, Deleuze and Guattari’s violence, upheaval that might otherwise have been a
“Urstaat,” Agamben’s “paradox of sovereignty,” and the social movement can assume the constituent form of
concept of constitution we mobilize here are all civil war. Civil war, as a limit-form of upheaval, remains
attempts—though with quite different motivations—to “social” insofar as society itself is at stake. A particular
render visible the process by which states come about line of battle comes to define the entire conflict.
while concealing the productive operations necessary Partisans become locked in a mutually constitutive
for their realization. Agamben’s unique contribution antagonism. An attachment to place–real or imagined–
was to gather this lineage and to assert, contra Negri, facilitates the closure of ranks. Militarized conflict
that the forms, activities, and potential proper to comes to stand in for all conflict, as when “guns became
constituted power cannot be isolated from it. the ersatz for strategy.” The conflict is no longer
Constituents, constituent potential, and constitutions generative, but shrinks to concern only what is already
themselves are secondary effects of a more fundamental present in battle. Civil war is defined by its use of
constituent process. “Constitution” thus names the
processes by which energies, desires, gestures, and life

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conflict as the predominant mechanism for [T]he notion of destitution…is necessary to
constituting a people — and in this sense, it is intervene in revolutionary logic, in order to
ultimately a constituent process. establish a division within the idea of
insurrection. For there are constituent
The classical social movement, populism, fascism, and insurrections, those that end like all the
civil war: while significant differences demarcate these revolutions up to now have ended: by turning
political phenomena, the motor of each is constituent. back into their opposite, those that have been
Put differently, fascism and democracy are linked on made ‘in the name of’ — in the name of whom
the same line of contiguity, indubitably established by or what? The people, the working class, or God, it
the events of the twentieth century. The classical social matters little. And there are destituent
movement and civil war are the extreme forms that insurrections, such as May ’68, the Italian
upheaval assumes when constituent tendencies creeping May, and so many insurrectionary
predominate. communes. (Now 76) 

Constituent insurrections are those that assume, one

Thesis 6: Processes of way or another, a form compatible with the state, either
the one in force or one still to come. Destituent
destitution differentiate insurrections — of which we have seen very few —
themselves from, and in so point elsewhere altogether and have for the most part
been subordinated to constituting tendencies.
doing undermine, constituent Destituent forces are intrinsically difficult to see.

forces in action. Destitution spreads power without accumulating it. It

is the process by which events and singularities make
To describe what takes place in upheaval apart from
use of forces and powers they neither possess nor
constituent tendencies, the term “destitution” has
embody. Destitution unravels both nations and states
appeared. In its significance for contemporary
by dispersing the powers they marshal back into the
revolutionary thought, the concept has developed in
world, dismembering and disaggregating armies and
light of a historical and political context defined by the
riches alike.
collapse of the workers’ movement and the crises of
representation, as well as a refutation of every
Endnotes objects that the term “destituent” is too
programmatism. The distinction between constitution
broad. “Every power is becoming destituent,” they write.
and destitution is not merely descriptive, but Every power is destituent “even when they lead to a
pragmatic: it aims to answer the question of what is to
(potentially) new constitution as in Chile… [T]he vote
be fostered and what is not.
[for a new constitution written by members other than
current politicians] itself was arguably a vote against
To be sure, a “destituent strategy” is not at all
the political system.” (54 fn. 38) Stretching a concept
revolutionary — provided, that is, the term “revolution”
beyond its usual reach can lead to its development, but
is reserved for those upheavals that install a new power
it can also, as with any lifeform, consign it to demise. It
in the stead of the one overthrown. “If to constituent
is Endnotes that has broadened the category beyond
power there correspond revolutions, revolts, and new
utility. And no one needs to take our word for it,
constitutions, namely, a violence that puts into place
because the French authors have explained it
and constitutes a new law, for destituent potential it is
themselves. A few lines below the Invisible
necessary to think entirely different strategies, whose
Committee’s aforementioned distinction between
definition is the task of the coming politics,” Agamben
constituent and destituent insurrections, they write:
wrote in 2014. (Use of Bodies 266) In 2017, the Invisible
“Despite all that was cool, lively, unexpected, Nuit
Committee developed the distinction as follows: 
debout, like the Spanish movement of the squares or
Occupy wall street previously, was troubled by the old
constituent itch…As long as one debates words, as long
as revolution is formulated in the language of rights
and the law, the ways of neutralizing it are well known
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and marked out.” (76-77) However much the unities, new movements, new commons, and new
constitutional referendums in Chile, Tunisia, or Sudan differences are already emerging — in the plural. It is
might be portrayed as votes “against the political system because there is a power in these “feeble alliances,”
itself,” in them, the constituent tendency continues to alliances we have elsewhere called “unholy.” They are
reign. not merely the weakened political forms of our time
that must be “transcended,” but the stuff of a new
If one can begin to see the destituent character of politics, well suited to an era marked by confusion and
insurrections even as they are routed by constituting disorder on every level.
forces, it is not due to a breakdown of terms but by a
step in the use of the concepts. By demarcating Our task is to demarcate these points of density —
constituent tendencies, the notion of destitution jump- between those which harbor possibilities for novel
starts the process of thinking at the point where ways of being and those which can only result in the
structuralist dialectics can only conclude: on the terrain proliferation of forms amenable to the state. Herein lies
of the event itself. If we are seeing the proliferation of the difference — which is, in fact, a battle line —
destituent movements across the world — provided we between, on the one hand, the new popular parties
have in mind the Chilean riots and soup kitchens, and with their socialist or fascist agendas, the revolutionary
not the vote — then we will be called to develop a struggles that culminate in territorial battles or fights
more fine-grained image of how they proceed. To each for recognition on the international political stage, the
her fragments. To state the point more decisively: the military dictatorships and the coups and, on the other,
failure to demarcate what I here call constituent and the molecular becomings of dropouts and frontliners,
destituent forces leaves us with an ambition toward sideshowers and artists born in and transformed by
revolution as nothing other than a never-ending cycle conflict. If the classical social movements, universalisms,
of violence, consigning another century to the fatal and constituent potential belong to the former, a
failures that structure our present. conceptual vocabulary of destitution, opacity,
insurrection, evocation, and consistency belongs to us.

To affirm the transformative character of our liminal

Thesis 7: The revolutionary epoch means to affirm that we live among experimental
endeavors. Some will succeed; others will be crushed by
forces of our time will not constituent tendencies, the organization of capital, and
develop in the form of a new the biopolitical crises of our times; others still will fade
away for reasons of their own. None of this is to suggest
unity, a new subject, or a new that all is perfectly well, nor to deny the limits of our
movement. Nor is it to assert that revolution is a mere
universal. On the contrary,
accumulation of struggles, a position I suspect I will yet
strategic thought begins as a again erroneously be charged. I assert that the powers
that compel us lie indeed within those life-forms that
demarcation within facilitate, emerge in, and are transformed by the
contemporary upheaval and upheavals of our time. Our task is to forge links in
order to cultivate — from here, and not from elsewhere
the polarizations that take — an ensemble of forces capable of abandoning
shape within it. themselves to the event.

February 2021
There will be no new universal. There will be no new
unity. There will be no convergence of struggles that
will organize itself into the shape of a subjective agent
of revolution that will take the capitalist state by force.
This is due neither to the collective weakness of a
communist endeavor in the face of a catastrophic
regime, nor to a fictional “end of history.” On the
contrary, it is perhaps because such new universals, new

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