Come back, my friend! We are all waiting for you. – Ghassan Kanafani, “Letter from Gaza” (1956) 

This requires something on the order of revolutions, and also a revolution in thinking – Jean-Luc Nancy, Experience of Freedom

In the last occasion when we gathered here to address democracy (1), we discussed the relation between critique, revolution and democracy. Democracy is that gathering which gives reasons for its own conditions and actualises the democratic conditions while bearing the responsibility for the critique of these very conditions. Critique in this sense is not classical, or Kantian, namely the science that determines the regularities and irregularities that are possible in a system, be it any system. Politics is not the terrain where the rules of a system in general—of any system whatsoever—can exhaustively give us an account of all the possibilities for all times; and possibilities are not sufficient for politics since it has actualities and tendencies as its conditions. Instead, critique here refers to the tolerable regularities of life that are actual or are in a tendency towards their actualisation, and critique then develops the theory of the actual conditions according to which these realities and tendencies can be given new regularities towards a people without exception. This is the work of reason in politics: to determine the end according to which a ratio is found between that telos and the tendencies.

The presupposition of democracy by critique shows that as one moves away from democratic conditions, critique and the work of reasons come to an end. The phenomenon of the decline of the work of reason manifests as the fear of the people—demophobia. In two different but not distinct manners, it can be witnessed in the United States of America (and many of its vassals) and in the countries in West Asia, and it is already tending towards the development of a new global techno-totalitarianism of the Musk kind, can appear in confusing forms in its inception. 

We should mark out at least some of these tendencies before proceeding further. Since the 1970s, the United States of America determined what is called “Islamic fundamentalism”, its infrastructure and its soldiers (2). Today, the US creations of the ISIS (3), Al Qaeda and other newer offshoots of this form have been assembled by NATO member states into a global army against the third world states, and what will never be Syria again has come to be their first state of control. But these groupings can, at any moment, turn towards European states as well, which may not be perceived as an unwelcome development by the demophobes who can use such an occasion to institute the new techno-totalitarian order.

Only people are free

To talk about liberty and freedom is nice, lovely, but the important thing is to allow people to act in liberty and freedom. – Hassan Nasrallah 

On the previous occasion (4) we had found that democracy has a revolutionary principle within its very conception: to institute democratic conditions where they are lacking as well as to reactivate democratic conditions when they are betrayed from within or without. Democracies are founded by a revolutionary people, who will have to resort to revolutions again in order to restore democracy. The freedom that designates the people is that which restlessly guards the democratic conditions. For this reason, we had opposed god, gods, caste, race, force, avarice, and the One to democracy and to the people—people are never those determined by god or the one, but only those who are free as the community which guards the freedom to determine their ends endogenously. For this reason, revolution is the real power of creation in a people, who create the maximum faculties for all the other domains of creations through democracy. 

Heidegger said of Kant that in his conception, freedom is the name appropriate for man. However, this “the man” does not exist. Instead, what exists is the actual people, who are always more than and less than anything that can be captured by the general concept “man”, who live unendurable lives to their deaths in our societies. Neither is an individual human life free; the myth of individual freedom—the freedom to choose between two colours in an election as in the USA and most other countries—is often used in Americanised discourses to deny the people the power of solidarity, that is, their ability to constitute communities which seek liberation and enhancement. After all, Hassan Nasrallah was killed for his solidarity with the Palestinian people who are now being exterminated (5). The laws of freedom are concerned with politics and not with the moral life of an individual in the way it was for Kant— “The Laws of Freedom, as distinguished from the Laws of Nature, are moral Laws” (6).

Target by Laila Shawa; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut.

The drive in people to give themselves their own ends along with the critique of these very ends—with respect to the image of a certain polis, that is, a place that can realize these ends, say an x-topia or even an a-topia—is reason. Through it, that which they are able to constitute is freedom. The relation between the image of the future that is qualified as “better than now” and the drive towards its realisation remains the determination of a human life from Siddhartha to Aristotle, and Kant to Heidegger. However, the conceptual and political investments through which a certain transcendental—the conditions of possibility said to be immanent to some one or some people—is set in place as a blockage or stasis in these same thinkers of freedom. One of these forms is the racialisation of the concept of a realisable world that is limited only to some racialised people, as was the case for Aristotle, Kant and Heidegger (7). On the other hand, the unrealizability of such a world for anyone at all is the trait of the systems of both Siddhartha and Gandhi through their distinct conceptions of the “nothing” (Siddhartha) and “zero” (Gandhi), which are both species of nihilism. Instead, freedom takes place when people are driven towards the image and the realisation of a set of regularities which are comprehended by the principle of their reciprocal endurance or tolerance (without such a comprehension itself being a function or another regularity) that creates a liveable life on the minimum. We should therefore acknowledge that Man is unfree, only people are free.

The people who fight for freedom, to be understood as the power to endogenously give themselves their own ends—and refuse any transcendent orders, be they the order of god or of the USA—are revolutionary. Without a revolutionary people no democracy can exist. This fact is often nominally represented in the constitutions of what are called “democracies” by way of the provisions made for the freedom of expression and the freedom of assembly, which are negated in these very constitutions through their subjection to “limits” and “security” of the oligarchs. These limits are now ever increasing in, for example, Germany (where Baerbock makes one wonder about the meaning of ‘denazification’ (8)), India (where protests and conferences are now cancelled by the so-called left belonging properly to the right), and USA (where protests do not have any effectivity). 

Revolution as interpretation

They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. – V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution

On another occasion we had argued that one of the essential tasks of contemporary politics is to constantly test and verify these limits (9). There, we moved away from the popular conception of ‘democracies’, or the dominant propaganda about those systems which are falsely termed ‘democratic’, and of ‘revolution’ as the mere overthrow of one head for another as we find unfolding in what will never be Syria again, and which was preceded by many countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya through the American instrumentalisation of Islam and through that as “Islamic terrorism” (10). Any militia and priests paid for and organised by the USA and Britain—as it happened in Iran in the coup d'état which overthrew the democratic government of Mosaddegh in 1953 (11) or the ongoing NATO operation that is balkanising Syria—cannot be called ‘revolution’. When these events are referred to as ‘revolutionary’, they are aimed at destroying the very sense of this term. 

Now, revolution also serves an intermediate but necessary function in politics. Revolution is the act of interpretation in politics (12). The physical, theological and metaphysical position of the power that regulates societies, or prevents the conditions for other regularities, expresses itself in formal terms— ‘democracy’, ‘rules based international order’, ‘freedom’ (13)—veiling the real conditions of this power. The real power is always a component of the social system, which subverts all the other regularities towards its self-conservation, and projects its own interests into the future as a super tendency of societies: the upper castes of India, the heads of the confessional system of power in West Asia, and the “wealth-creation” of the capitalists, oligarchs and the aristocrats of Europe.

We Shall Return, Imad Abu Shtayyah, 2014; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut.

Now, there is a reason for the insistence on pretence which accompanies the exercise of oppressive and genocidal power (and its attendant extermination wars) in the names of philosophical problematics: ‘freedom’—“they hate our freedom” (14), said Bush who committed mass murders in West Asia; ‘democracy’—Regan would lie about the incomparable war crimes of the USA, while accusing others of neglecting ‘democracy’—“it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia” (15); and, ‘rules based’—“to oppose the threat Putin’s actions pose to the rules-based international order that underlies the strength of the global economy and the international financial system”, by which Janet L. Yellen meant the dictatorship of the white first world countries on all the relations possible among all the people in the world, while the USA, Israel and Britain continue to commit genocides and unpardonable crimes against humanity in the third world (16).

Hence, we find that the depleting universities are burdened with the opposite of discovering the endogenous ends of education. They are still exhausting thought for the sake of reading and interpreting the texts of ‘democracy’ (17), ‘rules based international order’ and ‘freedom’ to vote in order to generate propaganda for genocides and extermination wars. It is evident from this that the hermeneutics of texts cannot give us the distinction between the real power and the formal power, and the character of their relationship; in terms of Marx, “the reality and power” cannot be discovered through the weighing the reality against the formality of thought laid in the texts through their interpretation. But, for that Marx himself should be corrected and rescued from putrid Marxist parties and theologians. This was already happening to Marx during the Russian revolution: 

Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. (18) 

Here, revolutionary acts alone can discern and secern the causes of the wreckage of life that is this world and from whence our miseries flow. Revolution is a scientific act of experimentation and discernment and hence Lenin said, “it is revolutions that show us at every step how the question of where actual power lies is obscured and reveal the divergence between formal and real power.” (19) This is the clearest exposition of the 11th thesis of Marx— “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (20). Unlike Heidegger’s opposition to Marx in favour of some more interpretation before any action, which followed from a division between thinking understood as interpretation and action/change understood as politics, Lenin had already understood revolution as the thoughtful act of intervening-analysis in politics (21). Marx himself had insisted on the meaning of what he called “materialism” in the inseparability of revolution from critical activity— ‘the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity’ (22). That is, revolution is a critique, in the sense of the discernment of power and concepts, in politics.  

The rule of the few 

… the economic man exists only if other things are equal. The labour leaders have forgotten this ceteris paribus. – B. R. Ambedkar, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol 17.

But then how do we discover the “enemies of democracy”? The enemies of democracy had been keeping democracy in chains at least since the time of the so called “Greek model” of democracy. It is true that this word was used for the first time in the context which has recently come to be named “ancient Greeks,” when it was subordinated to that construction of history which invented “western civilisation”. However, today we no longer return to the old Greek texts to ascertain the meaning of terms such as physics and energy. Because there is no ‘original sense’, but only older concepts. In that context, the term “democracy” appeared through a theoretical determination of the quality of power which corresponds to the quantity involved in the exercise of power: One ruler, tyrant; many rich men, oligarchy; add some middle class, democracy. The household is composed of the husband as its head, the wife and children as subordinates, land, and slaves. The polis is theorized “as if there were no difference between a large household and a small city” (23)

However, the polis is not a large household. Instead, it is where shared common ends determine the conduct of its people, while the character of the end and those who decide it reveal the quality of the polis and simultaneously who its rightful people are—"somebody who would be a citizen in a democracy is not a citizen under an oligarchy” (24). It was evident to Aristotle that it is unjust for oligarchy to prevail, “But is it just that the minority and the rich should rule? Suppose therefore they also act in the same way and plunder and take away the property of the multitude, is this just?” We gain a sense of the limitation of what is meant by Greek democracy when Aristotle says at the same instant: “If it is, so also is the plunder of the rich by the multitude.” 

The rule of a few rich men is even today the meaning of democracy everywhere, the few men rule in the name of the many whom they fear, lest they gather into a revolutionary people. Under the theoretical conditions of “materialism”, Marx was able to recognize the many marks of oppression that we find masked as ‘rule by god’, ‘in god’s name’, in the name of a racialised group, in the name of the ‘demos’, ‘irredentism’ (and many other ruses of rule) and that we find intolerable. That is, the unconscious of history is where the untold miseries of the majority of people, of all times and places, cry out to the present that they are intolerable. The Marxist imperative is to bring the intolerable to end.  

Antar-Kanafani, Ghassan Kanafani, 1967; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut.

The multitude who are a threat to the oligarchs are not the citizens of the so called democracies of the ancient world and even of today’s. For the Greeks, a certain type of individual alone could be the true citizen. There is a hypophysical limit to what constitutes an individual who has the right to be free. This limit of the human animal is the barbarian, or in today’s terms “the deplorables” (USA), “Vermin” (France), “Cockroaches” (India), and this list grows as we speak. Aristotle’s distinction of the Barbarian tells us about democracy, 

the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes nothing as the cutlers make the Delphic knife, in a niggardly way, but one thing for one purpose; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one. Yet among barbarians the female and the slave have the same rank; and the cause of this is that barbarians have no class of natural rulers, but with them the conjugal partnership is a partnership of female slave and male slave. (25)

There are three lessons to be taken from this text of Aristotle:

1. A living or non-living thing must have only one end, and thus only one regularity which refers to the law of the thing. For example, women are meant by nature—the hypophysical position of women—for the end of leaving a progeny for the man—"the union of female and male for the continuance of the species […] but with man as with the other animals and with plants there is a natural instinct to desire to leave behind one another being of the same sort as oneself”. That is, things lack polynomia as the power to legislate more than one regularity at a time; rather, polynomia must be denied. 

2. The slaves by nature are those who have the end of being subjected to the will of the master, but so are women and animals. The conduct of the master, who uses the slave as the instrument without exception, is the very means through which “the form”, or the end, of the slave as a human being born for enslavement—slave by nature—is conserved and transmitted to the next generation of the slave. The system where means and ends obtain a unity, denying polynomia, is the object of calypsology.

3. Barbarians are those who observe equality of all and are threatening the functional isolation of people by introducing or by revealing the power of polynomia in all things. 

In this sense, of the subordination of women and slaves and the suppression of polynomia, politics all over the world is still Greek. The quality of the ruler, or the higher in a system of people—whether household or polis—is defined by the possession of the anticipatory system concerned with the zone of power, or desire in the Kantian sense—“for he that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and he that can do these things with his body is subject and naturally a slave; so that master and slave have the same interest” (26). The denial of this faculty for constituting an anticipatory system, either through the hypophysics of racisms, or through the denial of the conditions for imagination and desire (privation through force) constitute the two components of democracy—those who rule and those in whose names the ruling legitimises itself. 

For Aristotle, only some Greek men are natural rulers in this sense, and all those who are not Greeks are fit to be enslaved (27)— ‘This is why our poets say “it is proper for Greeks to rule non-Greeks”, implying that non-Greek and slave are in nature the same. Greek demos was composed of exceptional men (only Greek and men) who possessed the virtues or the faculties of owning properties—slaves, women, children, land, and animals. And hence, they possessed the conditions under which dianonia prooran—the faculty of imagination and desire which together constitute an anticipatory system—can be developed and exercised. According to this Greek model, democracy is the power of a quantitatively larger oligarchy of exceptional men. If we translate this term into Arabic influenced Italian, it is mafia, those who are exceptional and are excused (28). 

All are vanguards

Our epoch is a birth-time – Hegel, Phenomenology of Sprit 

It is clear that what is meant across the world by democracy is not this ancient concept, while unconsciously we remain the subjects of that very ancient democracy and its norms. If democracy has to gain reality—and not the mere formality suited for propaganda—the demos will have to be conceived anew—people without exception. Here, we should begin to think of that which constitutes such a people without exception, who cannot appear magically after a revolution towards democracy if it is to be a real democracy. People without exception is a quality which can create its own quantities in politics. Real democracy is, instead, the creation of a people without exception. In this regard there are no vanguards of democracy who will form the oligarchy that will initiate a democratic revolution and bring about the democratic conditions though their judicious exercise of power; all are vanguards or none at all. 

The people who are able to form a democratic gathering should already train together in freedom. Freedom is the power to give oneself the ends or telos for a life lived together. Here, telos refers to the people who are the conditions for each other to exist, and for each one to contemplate the very ends of life. The telos of democracy also calls for the piety of democracy.

Now, such ends may include the end of ecological crises; the end of poverty and hunger; the end of wars; the beginning of education for all; the beginning of anti-racial societies; and the beginning of societies free from exploitation and oppression. The act of thinking such ends refers to what is called the faculty of imagination. Imagination is not day dreaming but the creation of a plan to constitute a new order that is precise and testable, and hence contestable. The faculty of desire in politics corresponds to the realisation of the plan, and not merely “wishing”. Now, we hear of desire in many vague senses in political and theoretical discourses, often to obfuscate that which determines this faculty, or the conditions of desire. A child in Palestine today cannot desire a world without bombs and bullets from Israel-America. A girl in what was Syria must fear for her minimal freedoms, and even fear being sold as sex slave while the European feminist minister applauds the present rulers who came to power by killing and selling women. These rulers are the fruits of the “Islamic terrorism” invented as a ‘supreme’ weapon by the USA and now ruling over the pieces of Syria. An Adivasi (tribal) man in Kerala cannot desire a year without hunger. Unless through lottery or other such accidents (‘hard work shall set you free’), no poor woman in the first world can desire a life without the terror of powerful men. Of course, this is not the familiar use of “desire”, which is often used in place of “wish I had …”. 

Children light candles in a tent in the middle of the bombed-out houses to mourn the souls of the martyrs who were destroyed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza City by Sanad Abu Latifa; Image Credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut.

Desire and imagination are not given to all, because they do require material conditions. The poor and the middle class who work, bereft of the time it takes to think, are forced into the poverty of imagination. To constitute an image of the world of democracy requires that one possess the knowledge of the means through which the prevailing regularities of the world are created, regulated, and are subordinated to those who comprehend these many regularities. This may include the knowledge of economics, such as the effect of the transition from gold standard to free floating currencies. It would also require the knowledge of histories through which the people of many regions of the world are subjected to brutality by the first world or white nations. For example, the people of West Asia are prohibited to imagine and desire democracies. Whenever democracies appeared in West Asia, the people of the region took back their national resources away from their white colonisers. The first threat to democracies, and to the very fragility of democracies, comes from American subversions and destructions of democracies; the USA prefers subservient regional dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar. 

The conditions to develop both desire and imagination are systematically denied to the people everywhere, so that they may never appear as people without exception. The people who terrorise the oligarchs who hold power, are the unborn waiting to be born, from out of the masses who are enslaved across the world as the people without exception. The fear in the oligarchs is not of what we are today, but what we can become, which we must become if there is to be a world at all. The demos in demophobia is the people without exception. These conditions will not be allocated to us through the process of voting, which has long since stopped being concerned with the well-being of the people. Such conditions will have to be developed through the organisation of active political communities which educate, organise and agitate at the same time. But we should remain alert to the tendencies developing towards a new form of dictatorship, and the discarding of the very word democracy. We can hear it everywhere; we are being told that there is too much democracy, and that democracy is messy for the oligarchs of the world.

The materialism of democracy

When the concurrences, motions, order, position and shape of the atoms are changed, the objects too must change – Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

It should not be taken for granted that the present order of oligarchic power which continues to name itself as capitalism (29) is in a necessary relationship with democracy. In fact, this is a recent equation between capitalism and democracy that was necessitated by the cold war as shown by Wolfgang Streeck (30) and others— “Capitalism and democracy had long been considered adversaries”. Votes do not determine wages, taxes, education, health, wars, ecology, oppression, food, and genocide. We vote for colours, such as blue and red in America. We are no longer in even a mixed democracy where the technocratic economic order is subjected to the scrutiny of democratic will. Rather, all the histories of failed protests against wars, poverty, ecological destruction, racisms, and inequalities show that the demos have no relation to the decisions that regulate their ever-shrinking political life. That is, that freedom without which no people can be said to exist, is “breathless” (31). But the coming of this reality was known to the critiques of what is called democracy since the 19th century, including Lenin and Gandhi (32) in their distinct ways. 

It was Lenin who made it clear as to who the enemies of democracy were, 

The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, undermine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion. (33) 

The power of democracy lies in its materialism then. The “enemies of democracy” are less invested in ending our voting rights, but they seek to annul the power named by “materialism” once and for all. Here, we should minimally outline what is meant by “materialism”, through the lessons we learned from Aristotle. Materialism is opposed to Idealism. But if we get lost in the Germanic debates on matter and Idea, we will remain entrapped by the hermeneutics of the texts, which will prevent us from preparing to intervene and interpret politics politically. Rather, we must prepare for intervening-analysis. The term “matter” designates the negation of the possibility which we found with Aristotle— “one thing for one purpose”. Matter names that which can be otherwise, that which is capable of more than one regularity and hence can receive many laws—matter refers to the polynomia of all things. The opposite of what is named by matter is calypsology. (34) 

Polynomia is denied through the assertion of the concept of a “ruling factor” that denies the otherwise than itself to things, or it suppresses their anti-conatus. Aristotle had proposed the concept of “ruling” or identity-giving function in all things as their principle which limits what they can be; that is, this principle functionally isolates things: “in every composite thing, where a plurality of parts, whether continuous or discrete, is combined to make a single common whole, there is always found a ruling and a subject factor.” (35) If by matter what is understood is polynomia—the faculty to be otherwise than what it is—then, materialism is the assertion of anti-conatus in politics—it must be otherwise. Anti-conatus is the very realism of politics. This assertion of anti-conatus—the tendency in everything to enjoy being-otherwise-than-oneself, and to be elsewhere—is not so simple in its implications. It took until Marx to make its first appearance; that is, to reveal to the people that history is the history of oppression, and that it is intolerable. The anti-conatus, or the desire that arises from out of polynomia, is one of the drives of reason that is intolerant of all oppressions. The liberal call for the tolerance of all incompatible positions of politics is meant to create the ethos of the tolerance of our own intolerable miseries. Anti-conatus is the drive that sees through the veils of the so called “tolerance” of liberalism, which demands of us to “tolerate” our miseries, and against it, calls for a new epoch of profound intolerance of reason. 

The intolerance of reason is visible in the protest movements of the past year against the genocide conducted by Israel in Palestine with the support of white or first world countries led by the USA, often called ‘the west’. From the tendencies of this visible intolerance a fear is also developing among the oligarchs in most white countries—as visible in the fascistic police actions in Germany (which clearly shows a Nazi character) and the USA—that the anti-conatus of democracy that is beginning to shape may inaugurate a world that is otherwise than what it is now. The most common class war of our era—the war of the rich and the oligarchs against the oppressed—may introduce a phase shift. While being alert to this possibility, the fight for freedom and the creation of the conditions for freedom, should commence in haste. Otherwise, we will be helpless before the impending extermination wars. This is the hour of existential rebellions.  

The componential laws of democracy

The youth are kept as fast asleep – Taxi driver in London

Aristotle said of the ends of distinct pursuits,

But as there are numerous pursuits and arts and sciences, it follows that their ends are correspondingly numerous: for instance, the end of the science of medicine is health, that of the art of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of domestic economy wealth. (36)

The end of democracy is the endless. But we should pursue the meaning of democracy through what its pursuit can deliver. It is certainly not an instrument to achieve something else, such as regime changes or the theft of the natural resources of another country. 

Democracy cannot be instrumentalised, but the achievement of democracy on its way achieves much that is promised to a few, but always denied to the many: a good life, which is presupposed by all religions as undeliverable, for they go on and on about the miserable life that can find solace in the deliverance of a wealthy man’s life as the after-life or next life. In this regard, we cannot admit the notion attributed to Solon that only after the death of man, as quality of the summation of all moments of a finished life (lest he comes to have an end like that of Priam), can there be a verdict on a good life. Instead, we are concerned with a good life here and now for all, and for all those who will follow.  

Democracy too requires conditions or has its reasons; that is, there are certain instruments through which we play democracy. They include time, peace, fearlessness, food, health, ecology, education in imagination, friendships, gatherings, freedoms, training in desire. These instruments are both the necessary conditions and the very promises of democracy that are given to all in its pursuit, for the end of democracy is democracy itself. Rather, there are functions and components which are comprehended by democracy, without which democracy cannot be except as mere Idea. The very conditions required to play democracy are the same as those that are needed to play a good life. Such a play of democracy is the life appropriate to the human animal, and its height or perfection is the achievement of the very contemplation of ends; for the specific difference of the human animal is reason, says Aristotle. Of course, we are now playing with the term “play”. Let us limit the uses of this profound concept for now to the analogy of musical instruments. 

When we say that someone is good at playing the guitar we mean that this person has mastery over both the scales of music—which can be represented non-musically as stave notes—and also the fret boards and the tension of the strings, through the manipulation of which tonal distinctions are produced. From the point of view of the guitar player, music is the function of the knowledge of tonal differences in various organisations and their production through the controlled manipulation of the tension of the strings. A guitar player without the guitar is potentially a musician, but she cannot become the kinesis of music. It is as if the musician lies fast asleep (37) in her now that she is without a guitar. Aristotle would bring our attention towards it in this way:

it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. (38)

If we expand on this example, though, we find something closer to our time, or to all times. For an orchestra performance, several musicians are needed who must train in a place together, and have instruments of great quality, a conductor, sound engineers, an acoustically suitable hall for their performance and so on. This is, of course, very expensive to produce. In the Greek context, the one who contributed to the expenses of the chorus was called the chorus-leader (χορηγός). That is, the rich man is the cause of the music, and he is its leader although he neither trains in nor plays in the chorus. If we move away from this example to the terrain of electoral politics, everything becomes clearer. The super rich who pay for the chorus of politics without playing it, keeping themselves out of all the labours and troubles of politics, are the chorus-leaders of politics. 

The Way To The West Bank, Lina Khalid, 2023; Image credit: Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut.

Democracy is the orchestra of the people’s desires and their pursuit of happiness. But the pursuit of happiness is not given to all but only a few, and this fact is often masked through the noise of ‘democracy’. For Aristotle, the teloii of politics and of ethics form a resonant system, and the components required for leading a good life are immediately implicated in politics, 

Nevertheless, it is manifest that happiness also requires external goods in addition, as we said; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to play a noble part unless furnished with the necessary equipment. For many noble actions require instruments for their performance, in the shape of friends or wealth or political power […](39) 

These components, such as ‘networks’, wealth, and political power can be acquired. Often, these components necessitate one another; wealth brings ‘friends’, and through the ‘friends’ wealth is protected or is increased. Political power is bought by the chorus leaders of politics deploying their wealth and networks. These components can be inherited, and often are, but are nevertheless acquirable. However, when we speak of the acquirable components, they by their very definition presupposes the distinction between the few and the many. Wealth is by definition the possession of resources which the majority are prevented from having; if all are wealthy, none are wealthy. Power, too, presupposes the possession of executable actions that the majority are deprived of. If all are powerful, none are powerful. The components which are by definition the apportionment of the good for the few, apportion all the miseries upon the majority of the world. Wealth and power are merely inequalities which presuppose the division between the well-apportioned and the ill-apportioned. We have been taught to accept this form of apportionment as ‘natural order’. These miseries are, more often than not, inherited inequalities. 

Daimons and inherited communities

For they well know what kind of cry this is,

They recognize the footfall of the Furies. — C. P. Cavafy, Footfalls 

There are unacquirable components that are given to those in an inherited community. An example of an inherited community of power and ‘good fortune’ is the upper castes of India, who are born as the minority ‘above’ the majority they trample upon, many who are considered untouchable. Racial and racialised religious communities are inherited communities, such as the sectarian groups of West Asia, the continuing aristocratic orders of Europe, and under some other names the feudal lords of America. Democracy is impossible without the destruction of all inherited communities. Now, we should quote Aristotle at length, 

Also there are certain external advantages, the lack of which sullies supreme felicity, such as good birth, satisfactory children, and personal beauty: a man of very ugly appearance or low birth, or childless and alone in the world, is not our idea of a happy man, and still less so perhaps is one who has children or friends that are worthless, or who has had good ones but lost them by death. As we said therefore, happiness does seem to require the addition of external prosperity, and this is why some people identify it with good fortune (εὐτυχία, good luck), though some identify it with prosperity (ἀρετάω). (40)

Of these unacquirable components, we should note that the couple “good birth” and “low birth” which presuppose what we had found earlier, that these are the components that accompany inherited communities and inherited inequalities, which condition the pursuit of what is called Eudaimonia, often translated as “happiness”.

These terms through which ethics and democracy are discussed come from a strange and older system, and we should approach all the systems of the ancient worlds with distinct cautions. If we take the Greek word eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία) towards its older meaning, we return to inherited communities. Happiness is to belong to the inherited community of those who are well-apportioned. At first glance, the prefix “eu” suggests “good” and “daimon” refers to the fortune that comes through a supernatural power, that is, something that is not in man’s hands. The term “eu” is opposed to κακός, commonly translated as evil, and it varies in meaning according to contexts. Κακός itself may have meant “defecation” much earlier. The more important term for now is daimon (δαίμων) as it is the one capable of daiomai (δαίομαι), dividing and apportioning between the few and the many. From the resultant inequality of the division it creates the qualities inequality, of both “wealth” and “power”. Daimon and “τύχη” in εὐτυχία, are not separable. Tukhē is the act of a divine being, such as a god or a daimon, which can result in good or bad events in the life of people. These meanings are still present in our expressions “good luck”, “bonne chance”, “break a leg” among the many which imply the values that are the very nature of all things. The etymology of the Greek arete, which is translated as “virtue”, is homologous to the name of the war god Ares. The Greek image of democracy is one of a play of powers among those who have been well-apportioned by the supernatural being, which is not that far from the world of the Iliad, in the Foucauldian sense of “politics is war”. 

The words “eudaimonia” and “daimon” indicate the caution needed in reading ancient texts of philosophy, which we are conditioned to approach as rational metaphysics, whereas a certain older systematic of hypophysics lies beneath the metaphysics. Hypophysics is concerned with the consecration of a value to a thing or an activity—small is beautiful, slow is good—and the distinct systematicity of such things. The classical logic of determination, which guides metaphysics, does not work in the system of hypophysics. Instead, the nature of a thing is understood to be the very value of a thing, and as one deviates from the value of such a thing, either the value-thing begins its destruction because it is not something determinable, or a daimon comes to prevent such a deviation, as it occurred often with Socrates. Daimon is among those powers that binds a thing to its value; with humans, it often prevents us from deviating from the value of the nature that we are. For this reason, destiny of a thing and its nature are both entrusted to the daimon. For Plato’s Socrates, daimon is a being that is in-between, between gods and men— “[…] stands midway between the two, being a great daimon; and the function of the daimon is to mediate between gods and men”. (41) The consecration of value and things as one, that is nature, is achieved by daimons— “the whole is combined in one”. The binding of the meaning of each thing in its identity is gathered into the greater identity of the totality of all things and is achieved in metaphysics through the systematics which are grounded in the acceptance of the law of identity. The impossibility of this process to achieve such a unifying sense for the totality of all things (without the unifying sense no totality) is called the “history of Being” by Heidegger, which is revealed through the deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. However, in hypophysics, the unities of individual things and the totality of all things are achieved through the equation of value and nature: nature = value. The unity of the All under the One is not achieved through metaphysics, but hypophysics, and the guarding of the unity is the task of ‘politics’ understood as the value in those born to exercise oppressive power. 

The life and death of Socrates are guided in accordance with his nature by the daimon that is his own. The daimon of Socrates—for there are daimons of individuals, places, and even of hours (42)—often performed apotropaic functions, of holding him back from venturing into those actions that are not in his nature; the movement of Socrates away from his value/nature was prevented by the personal daimon. In the Apology, Socrates speaks of this voice of the daimon who holds him back from becoming otherwise-than-he-is, rather of the voice of his conatus (… μοι θεῖόν τι καὶ δαιμόνιον γίγνεται φωνή). It is the same voice that prevented Socrates from participating in politics, understood as the struggle for power and wealth. But not only that, it is the absence of this voice that convinced Socrates to accept his death,

as you have heard me say at many times and places, is that something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. (43)

The concept of the daimon explains what we encountered in Aristotle as the functional isolation of each according their natures, 

“[…] the female and the slave are by nature distinct (for nature makes nothing as the cutlers make the Delphic knife, in a niggardly way, but one thing for one purpose; for so each tool will be turned out in the finest perfection, if it serves not many uses but one.”

The democracy of the Greek kind was grounded in the hypophysics of people, who were each functionally isolated according to their birth which assigns their nature, as those born to serve and those born with the nature/value to rule. 

The supernatural in this hypophysical system refers to the resistance of the few against parting with the wealth and power they inherited. But this resistance is experienced as the order of the divine and the daimonic. Even today, the qualities of inequalities grounded in the hypophysics of birth, perpetuated by inherited communities, continue to force the majority to inherit and bequeath miseries in the many names of the supernatural. But this cannot be the basis for the meaning of the word democracy! Democracy is impossible in a world of daimons who apportion the most to a few, miseries to the most, and create qualities of inequality. As we found earlier, democracy is the very creation of conditions for all to be equally the participants in the determination of the ends of a shared life, and it requires conditions and components which must be created and apportioned together, without perpetuating inherited inequalities. These componential powers, or the good fortunes, or eudaimonia, must be created and apportioned without ever re-introducing the qualities of inequality. When “good fortune” is accepted as good only when it does not constitute qualities of inequality, there will be no more daimons in philosophy and supernaturals in politics. The people who thus apportion together the conditions of life in the responsibility of reason to develop polynomia (44) are democratic; in any other sense this term “democracy” means shit. 

Democracy is eudaimonia for all; or democracy is the quality of the people who are without qualities inequalities.

NOTES

1. An earlier version of the text of the lecture delivered at École normale supérieure (Paris) in 2022. It was published as “Democracy and Revolution” in Dwivedi and Mohan, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Edited and annotated by Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2023. An excerpt is available with Protean Magazine, https://proteanmag.com/2024/03/19/indian-philosophy-indian-revolution-excerpt. 

2. See Christina Lin, “How the US Ends Up Training al-Qaeda and ISIS Collaborators”, ISPSW Strategy Series: Focus on Defense and International Security, Issue No. 461 Dec 2016, https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/resources/docs/ISPSW_461_Lin.pdf. 

3. The hypocrisy in opposing “Islam” by politicians across the world is evident, “The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place”. See Seumas Milne, “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq”, The Guardian, 3 June 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq. 

On the RAND reports which are leading to the extermination wars in Asia and Africa, see “How CIA and MI6 created ISIS”, MRonline, 03 April 2024, https://mronline.org/2024/04/03/how-cia-and-mi6-created-isis/. 

See https://www.politico.eu/article/syria-germany-annalena-baerbock-handshake-france-barrot-no-surprise/ for the meeting of Annalena Baerbock with the new rulers of Syria, who were formerly ISIS and Al Qaeda. For the treatment of women by ISIS (present rulers of Syria) see https://www.deccanherald.com/world/forced-to-eat-meat-of-babies-yazidi-woman-rescued-from-gaza-recalls-horror-meal-served-by-isis-3240586. 

4. See note 1. 

5. See the report “Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza”, Human Rights Watch, 19 December 2024, https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/19/extermination-and-acts-genocide/israel-deliberately-depriving-palestinians-gaza. 

6. Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Law: An Exposition of the Fundamental Principles of Jurisprudence as the Science of Right, trans. W. Hastie, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh,1887.

7. Freedom in Heidegger is complicated by the many locations and functions of this term, which is conceived differently each time. For example, freedom as that which precedes and makes possible causality is different from freedom as a relation to futurality. Freedom is also implicated in the “It” which gives time and being. 

8. “Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler”. See “Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?”, Al Jazeera, 8 Nov 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/8/why-is-germany-supporting-israels-genocide-in-gaza. 

9. See Dwivedi and Mohan “Testing the State of Constitutional Democracy in India Through 'Assemblies of Freedom'”, Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution, Ed. Maël Montévil, Hurst Publishers, UK, 2023. 

10. Hilary Clinton said with irrepressible glee of the sodomy with a bayonet that killed the leader of Libya and theoretician, Colonel M. Gaddafi, “we saw, we conquered, he died”. The Clinton video is available on the internet, which is as gruesome and the killing of Col Gaddafi. See https://globalities.org/2023/05/war-morality-syria-libya. 

11. See Mark Curtis “Iran 1953: MI6 Plots With Islamists To Overthrow Democracy”, 1 August 2023, Declassified, https://www.declassifieduk.org/iran-1953-mi6-plots-with-islamists-to-overthrow-democracy. 

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978LONDON18624_d.html?fbclid=IwAR0evrBYo3sa0qD4yyvw1lkJisXdUFizh2_ZLzJuuO-UsO3vwINRTLOXFx4https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978LONDON18624_d.html?fbclid=IwAR0evrBYo3sa0qD4yyvw1lkJisXdUFizh2_ZLzJuuO-UsO3vwINRTLOXFx4 and 

12. Provided we move away from the theories of the spontaneity and ‘grace’ of a singular event. 

13. Jean-Luc Nancy has criticised all the horrors—of colonialisms and wars—unleased in the name of freedom. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, Translated by Bridget McDonald, Stanford University Press, 1993.

14. George Bush, “Remarks by the Vice President at a Rally for the Troops”, 26 March 2004, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/text/20040326-2.html.  

15. Ronald Reagan, “The Westminster Address”, https://www.ned.org/promoting-democracy-and-peace/. 

16. Janet L. Yellen, “Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen at the Council on Foreign Relations”, 17 October 2024, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2654. 

17. As we know, what is true of the evil constituted by the name ‘freedom’ applies to democracy as well. It is in the name ‘democracy’ that its worst enemy—America—committed mass murders and genocides. However, there is no word in language without the possibility of such exploitations, nor shall there ever be such a word which would assure us “one word for one purpose”.

18. V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Tr. Gregory Elliot, Introduction Antonio Negri, Verso, London, 2024. 

19. Emphasis original. Lenin would go on to say, “The substitution of the abstract for the concrete is one of the greatest and most dangerous sins in a revolution.” In our time it is also the substitution of poor poetry for the abstract that is a sin. V. I. Lenin, “On Slogans”, 1917, Marxists, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jul/15.htm.

20. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, 1845, Marx/Engels Internet Archive, marxists.org

21. This division between interpretation and action-change as politics was grounded in the text for Derrida, and hence it led to the discoveries of the undecidables of texts in deconstruction as a method passing for—as if—politics. We had tried to retain the force of deconstruction while opening it on to the world of things, events, revolutions, experiments, and life through the addition of certain faculties to the history of deconstruction. See Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-politics, Bloomsbury Philosophy, UK, 2019. 

22. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”. 

23. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a. 

24. Aristotle, Politics, 1275a.

25. Aristotle, Politics, 1252b.

26. This faculty is διανοίᾳ προορᾶν (dianonia prooran), the faculty to predestinate according to the knowledge of the origin, in other words a certain relation between desire and imagination. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a 

27. This interpretation remains contested as a thesis about Aristotle’s oeuvre as a whole. 

28. It is possible that “mafia” comes from “māfi” or excused. 

29. Timothy Mitchel studied the theories of state that are deployed to confuse the demos about the real mechanisms of power, and the oligarchs of the United States of America. Through the examples of the coup against the democratically elected, progressive political leader of Iran in 1953 by the UK and the USA, and the Aramco case, Mitchel argues that these very discussions of political theory of the democracy that does not exist creates power. Timothy Mitchel, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, March, 19191, pp. 77-96. 

30. See Wolfgang Streeck, “How Will Capitalism End?”, New Left Review, 87, May/June 2014. 

31. Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Breathless …”, Translated by Sophie Galabru, Philosophy World Democracy, NOV-DEC 2020 , Volume 1 Number 1, 42-44, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/_files/ugd/5d53e3_2e51ac99f58a437e880c7d816bb0d6f7.pdf. 

32. See Étienne Balibar, 'Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter?', Radical Philosophy, 172, Mar/Apr 2012, pp. 9–17.

33. V. I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”, Marxists, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm 

34. See the glossary by Maël Montévil for “Calypsology” in Indian Philosophy Indian Revolution. For the political deployment of the concept see Aarushi Punia, “Calypsology of Caste through Metaphorization”, Philosophy World Democracy, 21 November 2020, https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/book-reviews/calypsology-of-caste 

35. Aristotle, Politics, 1254a

36. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a.

37. In Metaphysics sleep is considered as the analogy of the faculty that can come to presence, but is not yet presence; that is, a faculty has the actuality or ἐνέργεια in “the presence of the thing”. In terms of the analogy “so is that which is awake to that which is asleep”. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1048b. 

38. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099a.  It was one of the public duties of rich citizens at Athens to equip the chorus and actors of a drama at their own expense. One so doing was called χορηγός（chorus-leader, as no doubt originally he was, and the dresses, etc., he supplied, χορηγία.

39. ἀρετάω, meaning to flourish, or good fortune. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099a.

40. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1099a. Later in the text, Aristotle would reiterate the argument that being in an inherited community or otherwise, which presupposes inherited inequalities, is a component of being happy, “Happiness is essentially perfect; so that the happy man requires in addition the goods of the body, external goods and the gifts of fortune, in order that his activity may not be impeded through lack of them”. But these components are not the sufficient conditions, which often leads many interpreters to assume that these may not be the necessary conditions, “because Happiness requires the gifts of fortune in addition, some people think that it is the same thing as good fortune; but this is not so […]”. 

41. The functions of the daimon in Plato and other traditions are not exhausted by this account. In the Symposium, daimons maintain the regularities of the mortal world according to the divine laws, “Interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above: being midway between, it makes each to supplement the other, so that the whole is combined in one.” Plato, Symposium, 201 D-212 C.

42. See Eleni Pachoumi, “The Religious-philosophical Concept of Personal Daimon and the Magico-theurgic Ritual of Systasis in the Greek Magical Papyri”, Philologus: Zeitschrift für Antike Literatur Und Ihre Rezeption 157 (1):46-69.

43. See Plato, Apology, 31b – 31 e. 

44. This word “polynomia” was interpreted as a certain kind of materialism without submitting it to Marxism under the name “deconstructive materialism” by Reghu Janardhanan. See R. Janardhanan, "The Deconstructive Materialism of Dwivedi and Mohan:A New Philosophy of Freedom", Positions Politics, 2021, https://positionspolitics.org/the-deconstructive-materialism-of-dwivedi-and-mohan-a-new-philosophy-of-freedom.