The Double Face of Privation

Tony C. Brown’s Statelessness is an ambitious work that moves forward the terms of the entire debate on statelessness and its geopolitical, juridical, historical and metaphysical foundations. This work is ground-breaking as it is refreshing in several respects: it goes beyond the present-day discourses on legal recognition, citizenship and human rights, and reframes instead statelessness as the long-standing issue for political philosophy and (state) metaphysics from Aristotle onwards. It goes beyond a legal framework, and addresses instead the issue of statelessness in relation to the fundamental questions concerning being and the human. It goes beyond Hannah Arendt’s influential study on the origins of mass statelessness after the world wars and collapse of empires in Europe and substantiates instead a claim that Europeans first came across mass statelessness not inside of Europe but outside of itself in the newly discovered New World, the Americas. It takes a genealogical approach that reads closely philosophers from Aristotle to Arendt and conceptualizes statelessness in terms of vita via privitiva. Considering all that, Statelessness is a landmark work that will be of great interest to readers across the social sciences and humanities.

Statelessness is divided into three main chapters. The structure of the book allows the reader to grasp the three stages in the movement of Brown’s thought from being to states to stateless persons. The first section, “State Being,” examines the reason of state tradition, the chain of being tradition and social contract theory tradition, demonstrating how “the state becomes the quasi-transcendental ground of human being, the theos to the human’s ontos,” one of the names for being as such (94). A human existence that is inherently oriented toward the actualization of the state is in essence a state-based existence. The statist considerations of what being human means largely fit into two general paradigms: the first argues in the tradition of Aristotle’s naturalism that the human is by nature a state-based or, to use Brown’s neologism, “enstated” being, and the second theorizes in the modern tradition of the Enlightenment’s political antinaturalism the genesis of the state apparatus.

The second section, “The State of Anthropological Security,” focuses on how social contract theories from Thomas Hobbes onward envisage a passage from the natural condition to the civil political state. The tendency to transcend the confines of nature is thought to originate from fear, sociability, reason, history or nature (154). Central to the politico-metaphysical reflections on the genesis of the state is the interpretation of human being as a state-based being, whether it be “by nature, by God, by its social disposition, or by its historical (and so distinctively human) achievements” (2). As the ultimate ground of what we, humans, truly are, the state is the eschatological destiny of humankind. To be truly human means to be a part of a larger social formation. However, the supporters of the idea of the state as the ultimate vocation of human beings run into trouble when confronted with living beings who, rather than negating nature, remain one with it.

The third section, “Being-Almost-Absolutely-Without,” focuses on the New World as the place where Europeans several centuries ago came across living beings who—according to the European worldview—had not stepped out of the bosom of nature into the civil, political state. Through the lens of Enlightenment political philosophy, natives had failed to attain the secure anthropological grounding of human being. The supposed condition that results from this failure is the wretched condition of savages. In this worldview, the figure of the stateless savage looks like a human but is not a full-fledged human being. The figure of the stateless savage lives like an animal but is, in fact, not animal (191–99). Stateless savages therefore do not fall neatly under the category of the human or that of the animal.

This indeterminacy explains why native cultures, encountered in the New World, left Europeans profoundly perplexed. When confronted with radically distinct ways of living and very different social formations, it was commonplace for Europeans to draft long lists of all things that the Amerindians lived without. In the eyes of Europeans, natives in the Americas lacked everything–government, commerce, history, literary tradition, and money among many other things–that human beings in the full sense of the term were thought to have achieved by virtue of being full-fledged citizens of the state (161–72). Savages, poor in almost everything when measured in this way, present a form of life as lived without a territorial, centralized state. This privative mode of a being-absolutely-without that Brown calls a vita via privitiva is central to his understanding of statelessness.

The linguistic analysis of the word “statelessness” gives a first glimpse into the vita via privitiva. The suffix “-less” in the adjective “stateless” indicates a not-having, a being-without, a lack, which can be interpreted either in the sense of a negation or a privation. Brown sets aside the negation, claiming that the living being who is stateless is so by privation, just as a cat is “toothless by privation (it could have teeth but does not, such that it is without contingently)” (17). The second suffix “-less” that turns the adjective “stateless” into a noun “statelessness” refers to the condition of a not-having, the very state of being stateless (17–8). The unity of the negative “-less” and the positive “-ness,” or a not-having and a state of being, refers to the state of being prior to the legal state, “a condition of being-almost-absolutely-without” (18). Statelessness in an expanded–i.e., politico-metaphysical–sense is for Brown a condition of those who exist necessarily without a state.

Further, Brown clarifies this privative mode of being stateless with reference to a metaphysical truism: that where there is something, there is not nothing. In this truism, the two terms–something and nothing–are rigidly opposed, so that the one logically excludes the other. However, between something and nothing, there is another possibility presented by stateless savages who are poor in everything and so come close to being nothing, but despite of that, they are still something and not nothing. Here, then, we are dealing with that very minimal kind of being that is almost nothing; it is some-thing, what Brown terms “not-nothing” (213). The long list of what savages are lacking does not produce a proper negation. Nor–and this is also important–does it produce a positive determination, a differential distinction from other beings and persons. Being situated between a being’s negation and something determinate, stateless savages “are able to be without whatever it is they do not have (commerce or government or law or clothing…)” (214; original emphasis); they are simply out there uncannily indeterminate and un-limited, or to put it in other words, out there uncannily without any reason whatsoever.

In addition, Brown contrasts this being-absolutely-without with other related characters in Europe’s history. Specifically, there is no shortage of figures–like beggars, paupers, nomads, vagabonds and rogues–who are “cast out of, seeking refuge from, being an enemy of, or simply invisible to either a specific state or all existing states” (20). However, the respective condition of these abject, marginalized figures is somehow always linked with the state. Analogously, the figures of thought–Kant’s “rabble as the wild multitude” (wilde Menge), Hegel’s rabble (Pöbel), Marx’s Lumpenproletariat–are in a paradoxical manner included in the orders of socio-political representation through the very act of their exclusion, thereby constituting “the outside on the inside” (21). However, Brown maintains, the socio-political standing of a stateless savage is more radical in nature, since it constitutes the “outside on the outside–a nonaligned outside, that is, one that does not border the inside as the inside’s own limit” (21). What distinguishes the ethos of stateless savages from other kind of marginalized individuals and groups is that they do not have any kind of relation to the state.

The conclusion towards which Brown’s reasoning moves is the following one: the uncanny fact that here have existed stateless multitudes suggests that the state is not the inevitable eschatological destiny or authentic future of humankind. Europe’s encounter with the Amerindians in the New World several centuries ago punched a crack in the edifice of state metaphysics, more precisely, in a metaphysical postulation that the human is by necessity or by nature predicated on the state apparatus. In calling into question the modern reduction of the political to the state, the historical condition of stateless savage points toward the possibility of a political life beyond the state formation. What makes this radical possibility of living without a state identity all the more explosive is the fact that the denaturalization, de-inevitabilization, or de-necessitation of the state potentially discloses “the human to the possibility that it has no determinate end, no purpose, ground, or reason for being, in short (and as Kant would put it, unhappily) keine Bestimmung” (181).

In tracing the metaphysical standing of statelessness back to a life deprived of everything and thus reduced to the state of being almost nothing, Brown does not conclude his enquiry with a pessimistic note–quite the contrary! Like many recent efforts in political theory, especially, in biopolitical studies from Giorgio Agamben to Roberto Esposito, Brown points out an affirmative potential in the negativity of privation by drawing attention to the rarely noticed linguistic connotation of the term. Namely, besides the negative sense of being “deprived of,” privation can be understood affirmatively in the sense of being “free from,” meaning that it suggests “the freedom of life without limits–that is, without fixed territory, without sovereign power, without class or subjection, without a fixed future” (163). Hence, there is a chance that stateless multitudes awake the human to a previously unheard-of freedom—a freedom from the state, a sovereign authority and subjection (163). Europe’s encounter with the Amerindians uncovers a possibility that “state-based existence may not be inevitable, necessary, or even ideal” (2).

In connection with this claim, there arises the crucial question of how this radical affirmative potential relates to contemporary statelessness. Even when one grants that the European philosophical tradition, especially under the rubric of Enlightenment, still structures much of the socio-political discourses concerning stateless nations, failed states and refugees, it goes without saying that statelessness as it concerns Aristotle, modern philosophers and Arendt is beyond a doubt not the same statelessness that we have to confront today. Perhaps one of the primary differences concerns the fact that the entire globe today is divided up among nation-states, with the consequence that “[e]ach of the fifteen million people estimated to be currently stateless was born in, and continues to live within, a nation-state’s territory” (224).

If that is the case, it looks like Brown’s reflections on statelessness are strictly confined to one definite period in history–namely, to the Era of the Enlightenment. Everything in his approach seems to go against how the issue of statelessness is currently perceived, conceptualized, problematized, and addressed. Unlike multitudes in the newly discovered Americas, stateless persons are nowadays not the outside on the outside; they are instead located at the outer margins of a juridico-political representation, where the most urgent issues at stake are human rights, legal recognition, and citizenship. Statelessness, understood in these terms, is predominantly dealt with as a detrimental malaise that must be annulled or, at least, relieved, “with that relief sought in the expansion of state-based liberal democracy and its international representatives and agencies” (19).

Under such circumstances, it is as if the affirmative potential that once surfaced in the historical condition of stateless populations in the Americas has fallen into complete oblivion. It has become difficult to imagine a stateless future, to think about the concept of the political beyond the state, let alone, realize a non-statist potential. To account for this present-day difficulty, I take my cue from Agamben’s work Homo Sacer, more precisely, from his remark that “the weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of” the arcanum imperii of power embodied by the figure of “bare life” (la nuda vita)–that is, a life that is stripped bare of all symbolic attributes and abandoned to the mercy of power (Agamben 1998, 12). Brown brushes up against the concept of bare life. Intriguingly, however, he argues against Agamben that “to be stripped bare is fate afforded the enstated, those who have something of which they can be stripped” (208). By way of contrast, so-called savages are those who once existed originally prior to the advent of the state, and because of that, they cannot be stripped of anything.

From my point of view, however, an alternative kind of reading is possible. The figure of the stateless savage can be understood as an example of a bare life that occupies the zone of indistinction between a natural life (zoe) and a juridico-political life (bios) or, even better yet, the animals and humans. The main function of the bare life of stateless savages is to facilitate the historical articulations of a complete–i.e., enstated–humanity in distinction from the animal and natural environment. On the other hand, the great merit of Brown’s study consists in the fact that it convincingly highlights the ontological implication of the state in this process of humanization. Against Agamben’s assertion that the zone of indistinction between the animal and the human or “the very threshold of the political order itself was never called into question” before the political turmoil of the 20th century (Agamben 1998, 12), Brown is right to argue that the presence of stateless multitudes first activated the deconstruction of the state (25). The uncanny appearance of stateless persons in the Americas is perhaps the first sign of the crisis of state metaphysics.

In the spirit of Jacques Derrida, however, I think we must proceed from an assertion that deconstruction is not destruction or negation. Understanding the peculiar persistence of the state despite the deconstructive impact of the Amerindians requires grasping how privation is ontologically tied to not only deprived form of life—but, and perhaps more importantly, with state power itself. From Carl Schmitt’s theory of state sovereignty to Agamben’s critique of law, it is argued that what ultimately founds the state is the power to suspend the normal operation of a juridico-political order in the case of emergency (Agamben 1998, 28). However, it would not be wrong to say that the state’s power to enforce itself in the suspension of law manifests itself in the moment when the power has lost its anthropological grounding, its theologico-political legitimacy, and sovereign brilliance. The Amerindians may have indeed initiated the de-naturalization, de-inevitablization, and de-necessitation of the state, but despite being hollowed out, the state does not just wither away; it rather demonstrates its capacity to capture the pure potentiality of human bare life in the separate sphere of the state representation, and so hinders the realization of a non-statist existence. Considering that, the task of thinking is to move from Brown’s idea of vita via privitiva to the consideration of privation in relation to the state power and law.

Political thinkers are grappling with this problem from various perspectives. In the effort to reinvent politics beyond the state apparatus, Agamben develops the figure of Bartleby, Antonio Negri and Micheal Hardt the figure of multitude, Roberto Esposito the idea of community, and Jean Luc-Nancy the idea of inoperative community. Brown’s take on the condition of stateless multitudes in the Americas can be a historical and philosophical point of reference for such politico-philosophical endeavors.

Janar Mihkelsaar is a Marie Curie post-doctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). His research was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant.