°Fistful of dollars
Following on from recent posts, and to grasp something of the particularity of Virno’s concept of the ‘frontier’, and perhaps also the Spaghetti Western, re-reading Althusser’s “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza”, from Montag and Stolze (eds), The New Spinoza. An extract:
I came to Machiavelli by means of a word, ceaselessly repeated, of Marx’s, saying that capitalism was born from the “encounter between the man with money and free laborers,” free, that is, stripped of everything, of their means of labor, of their abodes and their families, in the great appropriation of the English countrysides (this was his preferred example). Encounter: Again a ‘casus,’ a ‘case,’ a factual accident without origin, cause or end.
I would rediscover the same formula in Machiavelli when he speaks of the ‘encounter’ between the good occasion (fortuna, or good conjuncture) to comprehend that the good occasion presents itself, and above all having enough energy (virtu) or excess vigorously to exploit it for the benefit of his vital project. What is most astonishing in Machiavelli, in the theory that he made of this new prince before founding a new principality, is that this new man is a man of nothing, without past, without titles or burdens, an anonymous man, alone and naked (that is, in fact free, without determination - agains the solitude, first of Machiaveilli, next of his prince - that bears down on him and could impede the free exercise of his virtu). Not only is he like a naked man, but he finds himself intervening in on place as anonymous and stripped of every outstanding social and political determination, which could impede his action. Whence the priveliged example of Cesar Borgia. Of course he was the son of a pope, but one who did not love him and, in order to extricate himself from him, bequeathed to him a plot of land in Romagne, really in Cesena - a part of the papal estates.
Yet, one knows, Machiavelli sufficiently insisted on it: the church estates were absolutely not governed, without any political structure, governed only and still, he says, by religion, in any case not by the pope, nor by any serious politician: it was the total political void, another nakedness, in short an empty space without genuine structure able to obstruct the exercise of virtu of the future new prince (Hobbes will say: freedom is an empty space without obstacle). It is from the encounter of a man of nothing and naked (that is, without obstacle to oppose Cesar’s virtue) that his fortune and success arises.
Althusser goes on to discuss “how to guide one’s virtu in order to produce a real continuation of fortune”, or as Machiavelli put it, “a principality which lasts”. He notes that Machiavelli advises that the prince must be half-beast, half-man (centaur), capable of both violent force and “human morality”. The allegorical figure Althusser opts for, however, is that of the fox: Machiavelli, he says, “thinks of the fox not in terms of its internal nature as ‘cause’ but only in its effects of semblance.”
Now, Virno clearly takes a lot from Althusser’s later writings, adding Marx’s discussion of the ‘American frontier’ as a circumstances that swayed the encounter between the the “man with money” and “the free labourer” temporarily in the latter’s favour.
But it has to be said that Althusser’s slide between “the free labourer” and “the prince” rather strangely removes the instance of money. The relation between the fistful of dollars, as it were, and land - or, maybe just money as, to paraphrase Marx, the social bond that one carries around in one’s wallet, the property that might be bequeathed. Again, then, landed property, terra nullius, the bourgeois subject. Therefore, not least, that the model of sovereignty (”the prince”) is only iterable, at best and as Nancy might say, as absolute iteration, or democracy in its non-constitutional forms. Which is to say, yuk.
Addendum and backtracking: I excerpted a slice of it before, and so for those looking for the online version of “Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution … ” (online version via)
