c hristian P. h ainEs Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception, or, Exhaustion and Endurance in Russell Bank’s Continental Drift Perfumed by gasoline and ocean salt, a haze of heat rises from the asphalt, stirring through a trailer park in which the homes, arranged haphazardly, compose a geometry of lives struggling to make do; in the cramped, sweaty space below deck, refugees long for another life, as Haiti retreats in the distance, buried in the boat’s wake; in the unrelenting chill of a New England winter, snow piles up in what used to be a mill town, as men and women gather in narrow bars, drink cheap beer, gossip over crumbling marriages - these are the settings, the affective milieux, of Russell Bank’s fictions. They draw a geographic triangle whose points are New England, Florida, and the Caribbean� There is an echo of the slave trade in this triangle, a reverberation of the plantocracy, that institution of social death through which African bodies became disposable commodities and land became raw materials for industry, capitalist modernity etched into the soil, but not without patches of wilderness refusing to be tamed� Nor could the social death of slaves truly be achieved� The absolute elimination of agency could only be a fantasy in the face of slave revolt and marronage� These milieux and the geography that they constellate are not only the sedimented histories of slavery but also of capitalism� Bank’s novels are humid with the aspirations and defeats of working class and un/ underemployed subjects for whom upward mobility is indispensable and impossible, the stuff of dreams and the hard wall against which satisfaction shatters� Yet, even for the proletarianized and the subaltern, there are moments of relief and escape, actions that push back against capitalism’s libidinal blackmail� Banks channels the energies of submerged, half-expired social agencies as they rattle against the system’s constraints� Banks writes in the not-so-narrow threshold between freedom and bondage, autonomy and subordination, the human and the non-human, the willful subject and environmental determinism� In novels such as The Book of Jamaica, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, and Lost Memory of Skin, Banks populates this threshold with figures including the maroon, the drop out, and the schemer, as well as modes of agency such as making do, taking flight, and working the system� This threshold troubles the structural oppositions of a liberal social ontology in which freedom equates to autonomy defined in negative terms (freedom as freedom from dependency) and in which society rests upon a conception of individuality anterior to relationality (the atomistic individual)� Bank’s characters and settings defy these terms, insisting on 80 c hristian P. h ainEs a gradated spectrum of capacity and incapacity, connection and individuation� Situating Bank’s writing in relation to neoliberalism, this threshold also constitutes the disavowed sociality of the present, the dense weave of filiation and affiliation that has not yet been completely subsumed by the entrepreneurial recoding of subjectivity or by strategies of accumulation by dispossession� In other words, the substance of Bank’s writing consists of a sociality immanent, yet irreducible, to contemporary capitalism� This sociality constitutes a zone of limbo in respect to the political, because it fails to align not only with the identifications of party politics but also with left-wing and right-wing imaginaries of non-parliamentary politics, including social revolution and fundamentalist visions of community� This limbo is not apolitical but prepolitical; it is a state of nature, not an idyllic space outside of history but rather the condition of possibility, or social ontology, through which politics emerges in the first place. In the critical discourse of biopolitics, this state of nature has come to be known largely through Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception� Agamben’s thinking remains productive, I would suggest, because of its willingness to grapple with the foundations of politics� Agamben’s attention to sovereignty’s dependence on that which is included within the juridicopolitical only insofar as it is excluded (bare life) has offered an important resource for reckoning with those forms of detention, profiling, and killing that operate in the shadows of the law� 1 At the same time, Agamben’s political theology tends to reduce politics to the decision of the sovereign, offering a model that can be strikingly one-dimensional in its insistence on a singular nomos or matrix of the political� As Achille Mbembe, Jasbir Puar, and Alexander Weheliye have argued in distinct ways, Agamben’s choice of the camp as nomos both homogenizes the content of politics and excludes the particularities of political paradigms such as the colony and the plantation� 2 In this essay, I expand the category of the state of nature, understood as the prepolitical sociality on which politics depends, through a Marxist revision of the state of exception� Drawing on Paolo Virno, Gilbert Simondon, and Marx, I show how the state of exception names a phenomenology, ontology, and politics of crisis in which the suspension of dominant practices of governance gives rise to the potential for reorganizing the form and content of the political� This expanded conceptualization does not exclude Agamben’s thinking of sovereignty but reframes it as a subgenre of the state of exception, decentering the political theology of the king’s body - the king’s body as synecdoche and synthesis of the body politic 3 - in favor of a more complex 1 For Agamben’s formulation of bare life and the sovereign state of exception, see especially, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and State of Exception (2004)� 2 See Mbembe, “Necropolitics, Public Culture 15�1: 11-40; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), especially the Introduction; and Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)� 3 On the legacy of the body of the monarchical sovereign for biopolitics, see especially, Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (2011)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 81 social ontology� Instead of a dialectic between the body politic and political bodies, or between sovereignty and citizenship, this social ontology turns on the processes of individuation through which preindividual potential and transindividual relations (the very stuff of sociality, I explain below) become the matter of politics� In other words, I am concerned with the way in which politics emerges from sociality without being reducible to it� This friction between politics and sociality unsettles the capitalist framing of ontology, showing how this ineradicable state of nature is irreducible to the regime of private property or to the neoliberal entrepreneurial imperative� In what follows, I show how Russell Bank’s novel Continental Drift excavates the state of nature in contemporary capitalism not only for the sake of critique but also in an effort to recuperate social potential against the predations of neoliberalism� This critical operation involves a reckoning with American exceptionalism, the latter understood not only as an ideological apparatus but also as a condition that informs life itself� I understand this condition in terms of a phenomenology of exhaustion, or a lived experience of being drained of life, reduced to an appendage of imperial fantasies of state control, confined to a treadmill masquerading as upward social mobility� The term exhaustion thus indicates how American exceptionalism facilitates the production of worn out lives, bodies fatigued by the tremendous energies involved in mere survival and nationalist affiliation. In this context, American exceptionalism names an ideological apparatus through which the libidinal impulses of subjects and non-subjects become tethered to the reproduction of neoliberal capitalism� I contend that exceptionalism (including American exceptionalism) designates the project of establishing a monopoly over the state of exception, of foreclosing practices of exception that contest the status quo� In opposition to exceptionalism, Banks stages practices of potentiality that dwell in a state of exception without succumbing to the temptations of state and capitalist monopolies over power� More generally, Bank’s fiction thinks the biopolitical in a way that attends to the production of the human - anthropogenesis - without falling into the trap of human exceptionalism - philosophical anthropology� It contributes to the imagination not of a new humanism but of practices that take exception to exceptionalism and, in doing so, articulate forms of life irreducible to the neoliberal regimes that govern our present� The Exhaustion of American Exceptionalism Continental Drift offers a phenomenology of the exhaustion induced by American exceptionalism� Before elaborating this phenemonology, it is crucial to articulate the connection between American exceptionalism and the state of exception in a precise manner, acknowledging their mutual imbrication but also their non-identity� American exceptionalism depends on the state of exception; it requires moments during which juridical regulation gives way to law-making force, which is to say that it requires moments when the letter 82 c hristian P. h ainEs of the law and the policing of the law become indistinguishable� These moments constitute the substance of exceptionalism� The suspension of governing procedures in the name of sovereign power testifies to a monopoly over the very force that brings the law and its administrative bodies into being in the first place. At the same time, as Donald Pease argues, exceptionalism also names the disavowal of the state of exception, the fantasies enabling the government of the United States to disregard established juridical norms without causing a crisis of legitimacy� 4 American exceptionalism and the state of exception thus enter into vicious circle in which exceptionalism provides an alibi for the state of exception and, in turn, the state of exception donates political substance to exceptionalism� Crucially, exceptionalism is not identical to the state of exception� Exceptionalism designates strategies that attempt to monopolize the state of exception, that foreclose practices that seek to revise the norms governing the production of social relations and political subjects� Banks situates the exhaustion of American exceptionalism within the context of a United States in socioeconomic decline� His 1985 novel intuits what has now become a difficult-to-deny fact of the U.S. position in the global economy, namely, that it can no longer maintain its hegemony in respect not only to international affairs but also to the management of global capital transfers� 5 The novel presupposes as its affective base-line a nation experiencing economic stagnation as the failure of the American dream� The characters of Continental Drift live the exhaustion induced by American exceptionalism as a sense of defeat� Bob Dubois and Vanise and Claude Dorsinville - the novel’s protagonists - invest their libidinal energies in the fantasies of American exceptionalism only to struggle with the deflation of their dreams of success� Bob is a heater repairman from New Hampshire who moves to Florida with his family for the sake of new economic opportunities� Claude and Vanise flee Haiti because of harassment by the police; they head towards the United States (specifically, Florida), which they imagine as a place of refuge and promise� These characters imagine America as a utopian site in which one can depart from history and discover a new life� These pursuits of rebirth fail miserably, terminating in death, depression, failure, and exhaustion� At the same time, however, Continental Drift introduces a perspective of natural history from which even defeat and failure offer gleams of potentiality, hints of the social possibilities buried by dominant modes of governance� As I explain below, natural history implies a process of individuation, of subject production, through which states of nature involve a complex dialectic between what is and what could be, between ontology and history, sociality and politics� 4 See Pease, Ch� 1, especially pp� 12� 5 On the declining fortunes of American hegemony over the capitalist world-system, see especially, Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994); “Hegemony Unravelling - 1,” New Left Review 32 (March-April 2005); “Hegemony Unravelling - 2” New Left Review 33 (May-June 2005); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (2003); and Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: the U.S. in the World Economy (2002)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 83 Continental Drift first registers this exhaustion as a crisis in the life of Bob Dubois, specifically, in the unbearable disjunction between a fantasy of upward mobility and lived material conditions: The trouble with his life, if he were to say it honestly, which at this moment in his life he cannot, is that it’s over� He’s alive, but his life has died� He’s thirty years old, and if for the next thirty-five years he works as hard as he has so far, he will be able to stay exactly where he is now, materially, personally� He’ll be able to hold on to what he’s got� Yet everything he sees in store windows or on TV, everything he reads in magazines and newspapers, and everyone he knows […] tells him that he has a future, that his life is not over, for there’s still a hell of a lot more of everything out there and it’s just waiting for the taking, and a guy like Bob Dubois, steady, smart, skilled, good-looking and with a sharp sense of humor too - all a guy like that has to do is reach up and grab it� It’s the old life-as-ladder metaphor, and everyone in America seems to believe in it� Bob has survived in a world where mere survival is insufficient, so if he complains about its insufficiency, he’s told to look below him, see how far he’s come already, see how far he’s standing above those still at the bottom of the ladder, and if he says, All right, then, fine, I’ll just hold on to what I’ve got, he’ll be told, Don’t be stupid, Bob, look above you - a new car, a summer house down on the Maine coast where you can fish to your heart’s content, early retirement, Bob, college-educated children, and someday you’ll own your own business, too, and your wife can look like Lauren Bacall in mink, and you can pick up your girlfriend in Aix-en-Province in your Lancia, improve your memory, Bob, eliminate baldness, amaze your friends and family� (14) This passage merits lengthy quotation not merely because it so pointedly encapsulates the pitfalls of the so-called American dream but also because it anticipates in its form the exhaustion that the narrative calls into being� The almost banter-like voice of the narrator, in its imitation of the overbearing tone of advertising, combined with the syntactical overflow of this passage’s final sentence generates a quality of libidinal saturation: desire finds itself repeatedly enjoined by the equation between upward mobility and personal significance. To exist in the fullest sense means climbing the rungs of the economic ladder, scaling over the rung of mere survival not for the sake of a concrete goal but in order to experience the kinetic energy of economic progress. The cloying second-person (“you can fish to your heart’s content,” “you’ll own your own business, too”) may suggest the emptiness of this injunction to desire more, always more, but the passage does not offer alternative objects of desire, nor does it map a way out of this libidinal trap� Instead, it outlines the shape that life takes when held firm by this trap: a life caught between, on the one hand, paralysis, an immobility in which intense expenditure results only in treading water, and, on the other hand, a demand to reinvent oneself, to actualize one’s full potential in specifically capitalist terms. This split state of being amounts, the passage suggests, to a perseverance without vitality: “He’s alive, but his life has died.” 6 6 The phenomenology of exhaustion that I am describing here encompasses what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism. The latter names a specific instantiation of exhaustion belonging to the contemporary moment of neoliberalism� My theoretical generalization of the state of exception beyond the parameters of sovereign power suggests an 84 c hristian P. h ainEs This living without life names not only Bob’s existential predicament but also the specific relationship between embodiment and environment from which he suffers. The “old life-as-ladder metaphor” promises an open futurity; it carves out space for a manner of living predicated on materiality not as a constraint but as a source of possibility� The passage thus marks a difference between matter as limit and matter as potential, and this disjuncture, in turn, engenders a hierarchical division between manners of being in the world: one can live under the weight of material compulsions, or one can treat material conditions as a springboard towards success� This division presupposes a capitalist framing of ontology, according to which potentiality is always already economic opportunity, always already subject to private property� In this frame, the difference between actuality and potentiality collapses insofar as the latter comes to be defined solely in terms of actual movement up the “old life-as-ladder metaphor.” To live “in a world where mere survival is insufficient” is to live in a world where mere being is not enough, where personhood hinges on a ceaseless conversion of potentiality into actuality, of survival into striving, of getting by into getting over� This passage implies a state of nature akin to Robinson Crusoe’s island, a capitalist fantasy in which social ontology immediately takes the shape of the free market, in which life is measured by entrepreneurial success� Continental Drift devotes much of its narrative energies to working out the implications of this capitalist imperative to equate being with striving� The novel’s plot launches from Bob’s insight that, according to this capitalist frame, his family’s relative socioeconomic immobility is a kind of death: “We’re all dead� Like my father and mother, and like your mother too� We only think we’re alive” (30). Bob seeks out social resurrection in geographic mobility, moving his entire family to Florida so that he can work at one of the liquor stores that his brother, Eddie, owns� Bob’s motivation depends on Eddie’s promise that, if Bob performs his job well, he will eventually become a business partner� Unsurprisingly, the vision Bob has for his new life bears little resemblance to what comes to pass� Bob quickly grows tired of his position as a liquor store clerk; he shoots to death an African American man who attempts to rob the store and suffers from the guilt of having done so; he quits his job at the liquor store and joins his friend Avery running charter fishing boats in the Keys; the income from that job is insufficient to support his family, driving him to engage in illegally smuggling people into the United States; this endeavor turns into disaster when, in an encounter with the Coast Guard, Bob and his first mate push their human cargo overboard, resulting in the death of all but one of the smuggled persons; finally, Bob is killed when he goes into the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti in search of atonement� As this outline of the plot suggests, Bob’s search for a new life is exhaustive and exhausting; the relentless process of exchanging mere survival for socioeconomic promise - of “trading up” - wears Bob down until he elaboration of Berlant’s notion of lateral agency in an effort to move beyond both the suspended animation of political paralysis and the stultified routines of orthodox radical politics� See Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 85 can do little more than sacrifice himself. There is an inexorable quality to the events of the plot, a weight of narrative compulsion in which individualistic conceptions of agency seem not only besides the point but mystifying, a ruse whose only obvious outcome is the reproduction of capitalist ideologies of aspiration at the most intimate level� Bob’s condition of suspended animation - his fruitless and exhausting running in place - belongs to a state of exception, one defined less by political theology or sovereignty than by capitalism’s systemic tendency toward crisis and contradiction� In Continental Drift, the state of exception describes the crisis that opens up because of a contradiction between, on the one hand, the aspirational routes of capitalist success insofar as they have normative force (one thinks, here, of the neoliberal imperative to treat all of life as a series of entrepreneurial opportunities) and, on the other hand, material conditions (including deindustrialization, global economic stagnation, and the international division of labor) that inhibit the execution of these norms� This crisis takes place on a microscopic level relative to the scale of global capital, so that Bob’s life allegorizes the capitalist world-system, suggesting if not the necessity then at least the likelihood of a breakdown in the dominant processes of individuation through which lives take shape under contemporary conditions 7 � In other words, life persists, but it does so without a surplus of potentiality, without a sense that possibility exceeds actuality: “He’s alive, but his life has died.” Simply put, capitalism cannot deliver on its promises, cannot translate fantasies of success into lived experiences of growth or even sustenance� This state of affairs does not mark the failure of exceptionalism but the success of it, for exceptionalism’s monopoly over the state of exception - in this case, its presupposition of a state of nature whose form is synonymous with neoliberalism - involves the negation of practices that hold the promise of making life livable� Bob indexes the circumscription of potentiality and relationality by the apparatuses (ideological, biopolitical) of contemporary capitalism� These apparatuses foreclose expressions of sociality that exceed the parameters of a competitive individualism, reducing modes of relation to means of getting ahead� In arguing that Bob’s exhaustion serves an allegorical function, that it constitutes an index of systemic processes productive of exhaustion, I am not implying the homogeneity of figures of exhaustion but rather acknowledging that the production of subjectivity is itself a systemic feature of capitalism� Without denying the force of the aleatory in the emergence of subjectivity, my argument insists on the ordinariness of subjectivity - on the ordinariness of “Bob” as a signifier for the banal tragedies of late capitalist life. Reminiscent of naturalist fiction, Continental Drift treats its characters as social types, as 7 For an extended discussion of the relationship between biopolitics and allegory, see Leerom Medovoi, “‘Terminal Crisis? ’ From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature,” American Literary History 23�3: 643-659� 86 c hristian P. h ainEs products of impersonal forces and conditions (both social and natural)� 8 The novel theorizes this treatment of characters in a long section in which the narrative suspends the third-person limited perspective, replacing it with a sweeping ecology of global life� While the passage is too long to quote in full, a portion of it should suffice to demonstrate the manner in which Banks shifts the narrative register onto a scale in which individual human life can only appear as the tiniest stitch of a much larger pattern: It’s as if the creatures residing on this planet in these years, the human creatures, millions of them traveling singly and in families, in clans and tribes, were a subsystem inside the larger system of currents and tides, of winds and weather, of drifting continents and shifting, uplifting, grinding, cracking land masses� It’s as if the poor forked creatures who walk, sail and ride on donkeys and camels, in trucks, buses and trains from one spot on this earth to another were all responding to unseen, natural forces, as if it were gravity not war, famine or flood that made them move in trickles from hillside villages to gather along the broad, muddy river to the sea and over the sea on leaky boats to where they collect in eddies, regather their lost families and few possessions, set down homes and become fruitful once again� We map and measure jet streams, weather patterns, prevailing winds, tides and ridges where the plates atop the earth’s mass drive against one another; we name and chart the Southeast and Northeast Trades and the Atlantic Westerlies, the tropical monsoons and the doldrums, the mistrals, the Santa Ana and the Canada High; we know the Humboldt, California and Kuroshio currents - so that, having traced and enumerated them, we can look on our planet and can see that all the way to its very core the sphere inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls in a lovely, disciplined dance in time� It ages and dies and is born again, constantly, through motion, creating and recreating its very self, like a uroborous, the snake that devours its tail� (38-39) The very syntax of the passage generates a sense of immensity, the sheer enumeration of geographical, meteorological, and geological features, as well as social formations and modes of transportation, resulting in a version of the mathematical sublime: an approach towards infinite complexity - the infinite complexity of the world ecological system - that cannot be captured, only indicated� 9 Put differently, the passage gestures towards what it cannot represent, relying on the conditional “as if” (“as if the poor forked creatures […] as if it were gravity not war)” to defer representational and narrative closure, to ward off what Heidegger calls the “world picture” (Weltbild): 8 I am not only thinking of nineteenthand early twentieth-century naturalist fiction by the likes of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, which articulate character systems in terms of evolutionary natural history and which represent characters in terms of the impersonal forces that condition them� I also have in mind Émile Zola’s theorization of naturalist fiction in experimental terms, especially in “The Experimental Novel.” For a recent argument echoing my own concern for the flows between inanimate and animate matters in terms of natural history, see Kevin Trumpeter, “The Language of Stones: the Agency of the Inanimate in Literary Naturalism and the New Materialism,” American Literature 87�2 (2015): 225-252� 9 I am of course referring to Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, as well as between the dynamic and mathematical versions of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 87 the grasping of the world as image so as to subject it to an anthropocentric empire� 10 The turn to choreography to describe the churning and whirling motions of the earth (“a lovely, disciplined dance in time”) does not merely suspend the world-picture but offers another way of experiencing globality, of apprehending subjectivity in relation to an ecological system� The syntax’s shift into a rhythmic parallelism, a linguistic two-step (“inhales and exhales, rises and falls, swirls and whirls”), suggests the mutual imbrication of subject and object, person and system, organism and environment� In a sense, this rhythm is no more than the stylistic equivalent of the content of this section of the novel, the linguistic feeling of ebb and flow a not-so-subtle mimicry of wind patterns, tides, and the circulation of human life from continent to continent� The sublime thus gives way to the beautiful, the encounter with unrepresentable immensity to the harmony of a cyclical pattern knowing no separation between organic life and inorganic conditions� All belongs to a vast flow of being, to a dance whose music never ends. On this scale, Bob’s existence seems not to register at all� The tragic air of the novel would seem displaced by a comedy of dimunition, as if scaling up could not help but reduce the seriousness of an individual character’s plot to Lilliputian proportions� 11 At the same time, however, Banks introduces a language of entropy (of breakdown, destruction, and disorder) that does not so much cancel as complicate the cosmic unity of the global dance: Revolve around points and rotate on axes, whirl and twirl and loop in circles, ellipses, spirals and long curves that soar across the universe and disappear at last at the farthest horizon of our human imagination only to reappear here behind us in the daily life of our body, in our food, shit and piss, our newborn babies and falling-down dead - just keep on moving, keep breeding and pissing and shitting, keep on eating the planet we live on, keep on moving, alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species: it’s the only argument we have against entropy� (43-44) The global dance continues, but the micrological scale of the individual subject (“the daily life of our body”), as well as the groups to which that subject belongs, interrupts sheer processual flow - continental drift, geological indifference - with epistemological and existential concerns� The parataxis of “alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species” creates a set of nested scales, suggesting a plurality of dialectics between one measure of social life and another, less an absorption of individual human life by deep time or immense space than the reverberation of distant spaces and times in the here and now� 12 This reorientation comes across 10 See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977), Trans� William Lovitt� 11 See Mark McGurl’s essay “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 533-553. Specifically, I am referring to its theorization of weird fiction as a “deflationary enterprise” in respect to the human species. 12 One cannot help but think of Gayatri Spivak’s moving account of planetarity (as distinguished from globalization) in The Death of a Discipline, Ch� 3� In quite different ways, Banks and Spivak both invoke the planetary as a “catachresis for inscribing collective responsibility as right” (102). I would also call attention to an increasing body of 88 c hristian P. h ainEs most forcefully in the passage’s imperative mood, which urges that “we” (a pronoun including not only the novel’s characters but also its readers) “just keep on moving.” Banks calls this ethos “constant heroism, systematic heroism,” phrasing that substitutes ordinary perseverance in the face of the grind (grinding tectonic plates, the grinding force of erosion, the daily grind of work) for the conventional dramatic structure of the heroic act qua narrative climax (45)� The implication of this perspectival shift is not to valorize individual bravery but to expand the affective spectrum of heroism so that it includes social practices of getting by and making do - “just keep on moving […] keep on moving.” In doing so, Banks presents a narrative version of Elizabeth Povinelli’s distinction between exhaustion and endurance� In Economies of Abandoment, Povinelli describes the exhaustion of contemporary global social life as the effect of a “careful weave of sovereign killing (capital punishment and assassinations), criminalization of life staples such as certain food, drugs, and forms of protective gear, and self-righteous neglect” (118)� Exhaustion names the becoming unlivable of life because of a deprival of the material means of social reproduction� As Bob’s case suggests, this deprival implies an existential condition in which potentiality (what a life can do) is not so much eclipsed as overcoded, captured by the logic of capitalist accumulation, by the conflation of being with striving, of perseverance with the “old life-as-ladder metaphor.” However, Povinelli crucially qualifies her diagnosis of late capitalism and late liberalism by recognizing “an entwinement of endurance and exhaustion” (125). Endurance names practices, habits, affects, and attitudes that enable survival in conditions that would seem to forbid survival; it designates tactics for making do on the part of forms of life devalued by dominant modes of governance� It indicates a surplus of potentiality immanent to exhaustion, and it draws a horizon of social and political change, because this surplus of potentiality articulates itself in forms of life yet to come� Bank’s refrain, “keep on moving,” entwines endurance with exhaustion. It gestures towards an ordinary heroism that, instead of transcending social and ecological conditions, manages to live in the face of what appears unlivable� Continental Drift situates this endurance within natural history� The “whirl and twirl and loop” of the global dance includes human sociality not as a negation or suspension of nature but as its complexification, its reflexive differentiation as culture� 13 Bank’s ecological interlude opens onto a problem of representation and narration: How does one account for the historicity of the individual, for the social history of the subject, without reducing characters to mere types? How can characters index the currents of history - historical materialiast theories of planetarity� See, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35�2 (2009): 197-222, as well as Jason W� Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015)� 13 I find Elizabeth Grosz’s account of the nature-culture continuum involved in natural history very compelling because of its insistence not on organic oneness but evergreater complexification. See especially Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (2005) and Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 89 including history at the largest scale, at the scale of “continental drift” - without the narrative apparatus becoming sheer taxonomy? How can we manage to navigate between the most discrepant spatial and temporal scales without losing a sense of their mutual imbrication, their dialectical dance with one another? Natural history might seem a strange solution to these questions, but this strangeness derives less from the proposition itself than from our ingrained habit of conceptualizing history as distinct from nature, of assuming that history implies a leap out of the state of nature and into the dizzying, forward flow of progress. In contrast, I want to suggest that the problem onto which Bank’s fiction lights is also a solution of sorts, provided we understand solution not to mean resolution but rather the production of new problems, new adventures in thought� Namely, the natural-historical bent of Continental Drift, its resituating of culture in the realm of nature, involves a thinking of subjectivity in terms of processes of individuation� In other words, the subject (or character) comes to designate the mutable product of processes that not only exceed its contours but also undermine its stability� Put differently, the subject/ character becomes no more than an eddy in an impersonal flow of social forces, a tentative composition in the geometry of history� Natural History and the Biopolitics of Individuation Continental Drift narrates social life as embedded in natural history, as immanent to an ecological web that troubles distinctions between nature and culture� In doing so, it asks its readers to adopt a perspective from which subjects, or forms of life, are not so much preexisting figures as contingent constellations of movement and matter� Natural history, I am proposing, should be understood as a mutation of an older philosophical problem: individuation� This problem, stretching back at least to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, asks how an entity distinguishes itself as such� 14 Beginning in the eighteenth century, it shifts from philosophical to biological grounds, not so much abandoning philosophy as discarding its theological trappings� In biological terms, individuation names the process whereby a species differentiates itself into members� It includes the evolutionary process of speciation, or the differentiation of species through natural selection, mutation, and adaptation� What should be clear, here, is that individuation is by no means synonymous with individualism in the liberal sense, for, as I explain shortly, it concerns itself not with individuality as a presupposition but with how distinct social figures (including collective formations) come into being in the first place. My larger claim is that contemporary biopolitical thought constitutes a renaissance of the problem of individuation, one which transforms individuation into a fundamentally political problem: the production of subjectivity by 14 On the philosophical problem of individuation, see especially, Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze and Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality (2016)� See also, Paolo Virno, “Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon,” Parrhesia 7 (2009): 58-67� 90 c hristian P. h ainEs relations of power� Foucault already implies individuation’s centrality in biopolitical thought when he distinguishes between an “anatomo-politics of the human body” and a “biopolitics of the population” (History 139)� Although Foucault initially describes this distinction as a “great bipolar technology,” he goes on to emphasize that life as a political object spans the distance between these poles, so that the significance of sexuality is that “[i]t was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life” (145). In other words, Foucault can only describe the emergence of biopower (the control of the “species body” on a demographic level) by introducing a mediating term (sexuality) that tracks the mutual imbrication of species and their members� Biopolitics thus names the politicization of life itself, with “life itself” denoting a complex array of heterogeneous terms including not only populations and bodies but also forms of life that fall in between these poles� Apparatuses of power are thus engines of individuation insofar as they produce forms of life as political objects� In what remains of this section, I examine the ways in which the critical theory of biopolitics supposes a state of nature, understood as a zone of preindividual potentiality and transindividual relationality through which politics emerges as a space of contested sociality� Put differently, what distinguishes biopolitical thought is that it brings the state of nature into play as the object of ongoing political struggle� The thinker who most explicitly grasps biopolitics as a problem of individuation is Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno. Virno defines biopolitics as follows: “Life lies at the center of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial (and in itself non-present) labor-power� For this reason, and this reason alone, it is legitimate to talk about ‘bio-politics’” (Grammar 83)� In line with Marx, Virno distinguishes labor-power from specific labors, noting that whereas the latter term denotes empirical activities belonging to actuality, the former term indicates potentiality as such� This separation between actuality and potentiality is crucial, because, under capitalism, it is possibility as such that gets bought and sold on the market: “Here is the crucial point: where something which exists only as possibility is sold, this something is not separable from the living person of the seller� The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in itself, has no independent existence� ‘Life,’ pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential” (Grammar 82)� One might object to the reductive quality of this definition, noting, for instance, that it offers only a thin basis for analyzing state power� However, even granting the validity of that criticism, the proposition that a politics of life itself entails a politics of potentiality is extremely suggestive� It implies that actual configurations of bodies do not in and of themselves constitute the object of biopolitics, for biopolitics more precisely concerns the potentiality incarnated in such configurations. “Life” - the object of biopolitics - designates neither a secret substance nor a withdrawn essence but rather the potentiality that is at one and the same time proper to a given form of life and in excess of it� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 91 This sense of vitality as an immanent surplus of potentiality depends on a conceptualization of forms of life in terms of individuation� Borrowing vocabulary from philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon, Virno describes the process of individuation as the production, never complete, of the individual and the transindividual on the basis of preindividual potential: “When we speak of a process, or a principle, of individuation, we should keep clearly in mind what precedes individuation itself. This has to do, first of all, with a pre-individual reality, that is to say, something common, universal and undifferentiated� The process which produces singularity has a non-individual, pre-individual incipit” (Grammar 76)� 15 The process of individuation consists in the resolution of contradictory preindividual potentialities into semistable forms of existence� Individuation transforms the relative chaos of the virtual, with its incompatible itineraries for being, into a set of actual conditions through a process of selection and differentiation� Risking an analogy, we might say that the process of individuation cultivates embryonic realities (preindividual potentialities; nascent and developing forms of life) into mature social creatures (individuals in the widest sense of the term)� This process, however, never reaches its conclusion, defying the simplicity of natural teleology� There is always a remnant of preindividual reality, a surplus potential that inheres within the individual as the possibility for change� If preindividual reality were to exhaust itself in the production of the individual, the individual would be no more than an inert thing, incapable of adapting to surroundings� It would be a tautological, self-enclosed being - a creature without history� Crucially, the preindividual always already involves the transindividual, or a sociality that is both the cause and effect of the preindividual� The content, if not the form, of the transindividual can be ascertained in Virno’s delineation of three zones of preindividual reality: first, “the biological basis of the species, that is, the sensory organs, motor skills apparatus, perception abilities” (Grammar, 76-77); second, language, or “the historical-natural language shared by all speakers of a certain community” (Grammar, 77); and, third, “the prevailing relations of production,” which is to say capitalism as a mode of production in which “the labor process mobilizes the most universal requisites of the species: perception, language, memory, and feelings” (Grammar, 77)� In each of these zones, the preindividual blurs with the transindividual, that is, the production of individuality necessarily involves a collective dimension irreducible to individuality� The transindividual does not designate a super-organism existing above the threshold of individuality but rather a relationality that inheres within and even precedes the individual� Simondon articulates the point thus: “The transindividual is with the individual, but it is not the individual individuated� It is with the individual according to a relation more primordial than belonging, inherence, or 15 Simondon, it should be noted, is a philosopher of science whose two main areas of inquiry were the biological sciences and what he termed technical objects� On Simondon’s work, see especially Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2013)� 92 c hristian P. h ainEs a relation of exteriority” (193). It is “that which is exterior to the individual insofar as it is inside of him” (195). If the individual arises from a process of individuation rooted in preindividual potential, the transindividual arises from the gap - or, more precisely, the relation through difference - between the preindividual and the individual� The transindividual is that quality of being-with enabled by the constitutive openness to alterity of the never-entirely-individuated individual. The transindividual signifies not a particular social configuration but a relationality irreducible to intersubjectivity. It constitutes a primary sociality of which specific social formations constitute second-order derivations� With this in mind, I want to propose that the preindividual and the transindividual constitute, respectively, the potentiality and relationality of the state of nature� From this point of view, the state of nature is not a condition preceding the history of the political but rather the immanent cause of the political, the ineradicable social ontology on which politics depends� This extimacy of the transindividual, as Lacan might put it, stands in stark contrast to liberal political theory’s articulation of collectivity as an aggregation of individuals: “the people.” The principle of individuation suggests a path beyond the dichotomy of the individual and the collective: “By participating in a collective, the subject, far from surrendering the most unique individual traits, has the opportunity to individuate, at least in part, the share of pre-individual reality which all individuals carry within themselves” (Virno, Grammar, 79)� 16 This thinking of individuation stands in contrast not only to liberalism’s premise of the individual as the basic ontological unit but also to the inverse proposition of socialist thought: the attribution of authentic reality to organic collectivity� Individuation enables a thinking of commonality as neither the aggregation of individuals nor the embrace of an underlying social substance but rather as the constituent skein of relations through which individuals emerge� This third way, if I may be forgiven the term, should not be understood as a variant of social democracy but rather as a complex dialectic between two often-neglected terms in Marx’s lexicon: the social individual and species-being� Paraphrasing Marx’s Grundrisse, Virno introduces this dialectic by defining the social individual as “the relation between ‘generic existence’ (Gattungswesen) and the unrepeatable experience constituting the seal of subjectivity” (Word, 231)� Gattungswesen - usually translated as “species-being” - offers a useful point of mediation between broad discussions of the ontological implications of individuation and specific discussions of capitalism’s repercussions for individuation� Marx gestures in this direction in his 1844 Manuscripts, where he defines species-being with a great deal of elasticity as consist[ing] physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on inorganic nature; and the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of of inorganic nature on which he lives� […] The universality of man 16 For an excellent recent account of the significant difference the concept of individuation introduces into political theory, see Jeremy Gilbert, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (2013), especially Ch� 5-6� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 93 is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body - both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) his life-activity� Nature is man’s inorganic body - nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body� Man lives on nature - means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die� (75-76) Species-being is simultaneously in excess of nature and immanent to it� The embodiment of the species, which is to say its individuation, can only take place at the point of indistinguishability between the organic and inorganic, through the chiasmic “intercourse” (Verkehr: traffic, exchange) that alone enables the species to survive and sometimes to thrive� Marx constructs his critique of capitalism on the basis of the individuation of species-being, through analyses of the ways in which capitalism stunts the individuation of the human species� Capitalism estranges human beings not only from the products of their own labor but also from one another and from their connection to preindividual nature (Gattungswesen) (77-84)� As Marx puts it, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. - in short, when it is used by us” (107). This possessive mode of relation, which reduces all of the senses to the “sense of having,” amounts to a practical reduction of life to “the life of private property” (106-7). In other words, capitalism circumscribes the expression of the transindividual so that it can only take the form of private property relations� Given these premises, Marx’s formulation of revolution (the “transcendence of private property”) cannot help but constitute a biopolitical proposal, a transformation of the modes of species-being’s individuation, or, in Marx’s words, “the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes” (107). Marx’s analysis of the dialectic between species-being and capitalism demonstrates the historical and social dimensions of the principle of individuation� If individuation names the processes through which the state of nature translates potentiality into actual forms of life, then Marx reminds us that such processes of individuation are historically variable� Virno’s elaboration of Max’s thinking of individuation revolves around the linkages between species-being and language use� Virno’s theory of language is too complex to do justice to here, but we can still gain a sense of its distinctiveness through a consideration of the role of the state of exception in it� Virno wrestles with the same tradition of political theology as Agamben does, but he displaces the centrality of sovereignty by subsuming it under a broad set of “forms of decisionism” (Innovation, 13)� The state of exception arises from the ineradicable gap between a rule and the application of the rule� Since rules transcend particular empirical cases and since they cannot contain within themselves the guidelines for their execution, they require conventions (customs, informal norms) below the threshold of formal structures to determine their application. Borrowing from Wittgenstein, Virno articulates the content that fills the gap between the rule and its application as “the common behavior of 94 c hristian P. h ainEs mankind” (what I have been designating as the state of nature). 17 Whereas the tradition of political theology sees only a void, an absence into which sovereign power inserts itself, Virno discovers a “nonjuristic order,” a “radical blurring of fields and contexts” (Innovation, 116)� In Virno’s tripartite model, a state of exception occurs when the middle term (the common behavior of mankind) is not sufficient to enable a rule to decide on a case. According to Virno, innovation stems from this situation of crisis: “We find innovation, […] the abrupt deviation from the paths followed until now, when and only when, in applying a certain norm, we are obliged to sneak up behind that norm and to call upon ‘the common behavior of humankind�’ Strange as it may seem, the creativity of the linguistic animal is triggered by a return: by the intermittent return, demanded by a critical situation, to the ‘normal everyday frame of life,’ that is, to that grouping of practices that make up the natural history of our species” (Innovation, 118)� The state of exception sparks innovation by forcing one to grapple with the taken-for-granted matters of everyday life, or “that regularity of vital species-specific behaviors upon which rest the different norms” (Innovation, 121)� Decisions in/ on the state of exception intervene into the threshold between the preindividual reality of the species and the individuations of the species� Exceptional actions re-constitute species-being; they reconfigure the forms of life that compose or populate it. Virno contends that the sovereign’s monopoly over the exercise of violence describes only one manner in which such interventions occur� Whereas sovereign agents remain confined to “eccentric, surprising, and inventive applications of the given rule” - instances in which the law suspends itself only so as to reinforce its own foundations - non-sovereign agents “can also cause the transformation, and even the abolition, of the rule in question” (Innovation, 118-19)� For instance, the encampments of the Occupy movement (including not only Zucotti Park but also the occupation of foreclosed homes around the United States) can be understood as practices of exception insofar as they not only suspend the predication of social being on private property but also introduce new social bonds, new manners of being-with, in the midst of capitalism� To focus exclusively on the sovereign state of exception would be to miss the innovative possibilities opened up by the state of exception; it amounts to a conflation of species-being with the social parameters instituted by the modern nation-state� In opposition to such an approach, Virno’s analysis of language - an analysis that notably turns on minor forms of speech such as jokes - unfolds a much more variegated biopolitical terrain� Virno thus introduces a scalar plurality of exceptions, ranging from the everyday dilemmas with which individuals are faced (for instance, how to pay the rent after being fired) to national or global crises that call on all of our capacities for collective coordination (for example, emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina)� 17 Virno borrows both the concept of “the common behavior of mankind” and his understanding of the state of exception from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations� Virno’s innovation consists in making explicit the political dimensions of Wittgenstein’s theory of language� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 95 Virno’s theorization of biopolitics locates the possibility of political transformation and social change in the threshold between forms of life and life itself, or between the individuation of subjects and the preindividual potential of species-being� If Virno’s emphasis on human language as an exceptional feature of the species risks a resurrection of Man - the “Man” of the human sciences that Foucault so thoroughly dismantles 18 - his conceptualization of individuation offers a way around this impasse, namely, natural history� Virno calls attention not only to the rootedness of life in inorganic matters but also to the nature/ culture continuum through which the subject of “Man” gives way to a multiplicity of forms of life, unbound by human exceptionalism� The space opening up beneath such exceptionalism is the state of nature understood as the social ontology through which, from which, political orders emerge� This version of the state of nature temporalizes itself as natural history, in which (according to Virno) “[w]hat really counts is the immediate relation between the distinctive traits of the Homo sapiens as species and the most fleeting cultural dispositions, the ‘always already’ of biology and the social ‘right now,’ the innate disposition for language and a political decision dictated by exceptional circumstances” (Word, 173)� What I would highlight, here, is not the emphasis on a particular species but rather the intersection between preindividual life and socio-historical processes of individuation, the point at which history and nature, as well as society and biology, become indistinguishable� From this perspective, the state of nature unfolds itself as the history of states of exception, the history - irreducible to sovereign power - of practices that revise the norms of individuation� Virno does not offer an explanatory framework through which the narrative and representational problems that Banks introduces get resolved� Virno and Banks write the problem of individuation in different genres: philosophical anthropology and novelistic fiction, respectively. They belong to the same conversation, the same “disciplined dance in time” (natural history), though their voices are remarkably distinct� Distinct but not incommensurable: for Virno’s language of biopolitics reveals what in Bank’s novel might easily go unnoticed, namely, that failure - Bob’s failure to climb social ranks but also the greater planetary failure to devise a just and sustainable social system - is not definitive, that exhaustion meets the resistance of endurance, that exceptionalism cannot dispense with the state of exception, and that the state of exception implies the possibility of bringing other social systems into existence� Banks demonstrates this surplus of potentiality over the experience of 18 It is well known that Foucault declares that it is only with “the end of man,” in “the void left by man’s disappearance,” that thinking would again become possible (Order, 342)� The productive dismantlings of Man, humanism, and the subject by deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, and posthumanism (the list could go on) testify to the insightfulness of this proposition� At the same time, it is worth noting that in Foucault’s own work, the end of man took the form of genealogical inquiries into the constitution of human subjects� My point in this essay is that a posthuman theoretical horizon does not necessitate the negation of the specificity of the human species. Instead, it entails a thinking of the mutability of the species in terms of natural history� 96 c hristian P. h ainEs defeat in his representation of Vodou practices (analyzed in the next section), but even Bob’s stunted existence bears witness to an endurance that refuses the collapse of exception into exceptionalism� Paradoxically, the same aspiration for social mobility that kills Bob also transforms him into a restless cipher of social potentiality� This dialectical union of opposites becomes strikingly evident in the novel’s representation of Bob’s relation to the Belinda Blue, the fishing boat that he pilots in the last third of the novel� For Bob, the boat embodies the promise of autonomy and freedom, pleasures that he remembers from his time spent fishing on it in New England: “I guess that’s about as happy as I’ve ever been, days and nights I spent on that boat� It’s hard to say why, but that boat gave me a feeling that I owned myself. You know? I’d get a few miles out, and all of a sudden, my whole world was that boat� And I had it under control� I could take care of it, and it could take care of me” (192). Bob would seem to do little more than reiterate that stupidity Marx describes as the reduction of one’s worldly relations to a possessive mode� Bob owns the world insofar as he masters the ship, and insofar as he masters the world and the ship, he also owns himself. The pleasure derived from fishing has less to do with practical matters than with the fantasy of perfect liberty - a liberal and capitalist vision of self-sovereignty in which alterity (including the difference other people make) cannot intrude. At the same, the personification of the ship as care-giver (“and it could take care of me”) suggests another reading. The ships wraps Bob into its embrace, or Bob surrenders to the feel of the ship, and, in turn, the sea encompasses both pilot and ship, folding them into the swirls and whirls, into the dance, of continental drift� As much as the Belinda Blue constitutes a fantasy of capitalist and liberal sovereignty, it also offers the opposite, not the actuality of some alternative social arrangement but the intuition of its possibility and its desirability� In other words, it opens onto the horizon of natural history in a positive sense: the state of exception, or the suspension between one order of things and another, becomes the hope for a happiness beyond the constraints of present-day material conditions� That the novel’s plot dashes this hope by making the Belinda Blue into the fateful device of Bob’s downfall does not erase the reality of this potential� The ship serves as a placeholder for another world and another life; it constitutes a beacon of hope for the “casual observers on the causeway” who seeing Bob and the Belinda Blue out on the wide, blue ocean can only think the same thing: That man up there on the bridge of the fine white and blue boat should be me. I should feel the sea breeze in my hair, the sun on my arms, the flow of the boat through the soft Florida waters beneath me. […] I should be that man, who is free, who owns his own life simply because he knows whether to use live or dead shrimp for bait, jigs or flies, and where the bonefish feed, he knows where the basin narrows to a channel deep enough to bring his boat lunging in without touching its deepwater keel against the mudded bottom, he knows at sunup whether a squall will blow in from the northwest before noon, and he’s been able to trade his knowledge for power and control over his own life. […] We exchange our knowledge for mere survival, while that suntanned man in the captain’s hat up on the bridge of the Belinda Blue - out of Moray Key, Florida, it says on Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 97 the transom - that man rises above mere survival like a gull lifting from the sea, like the thought of a poet soaring the sun. Oh lord, wouldn’t that be a wonderful life! We think. But we do not say it, not exactly. (241-42, italics in the original) The poetry of this passage, the intensity that brings it to the point of ejaculation (“wouldn’t that be a wonderful life! ”), arises from the confluence of sovereignty and liberation, actuality and potentiality, exceptionalism and exception� Sovereignty - being the captain of one’s own ship - becomes the vehicle for a life defined not by mastery but by a loose flow, by the tides and by the wind, by the drift of natural history� This image breaks the capitalist imperative to equate being with striving by indicating a suspended potentiality, or a state of exception left unresolved and open� This scene is not actual but resolutely virtual, a reverie of life without work, a daydream of what it would be like if vacation never ended� If this sounds too much like that romantic longing for a return to oneness that Freud criticizes, if the fantasy of it appears no more than an alibi for capitalist command, a taste of imagined leisure to placate the restless and weary, that is perhaps because we have forgotten the other side of natural history’s dialectic: the historicity of nature, the reality of potential, the irreducible contingency of our given environment� Even the tides change, even the continents shift� This is not to confuse this image with actual emancipation but rather to acknowledge what Bank’s novel offers to a thinking of natural history: the undeniable gravity of hope and desire, a surplus of potentiality that eludes the “old life-as-ladder metaphor.” Enduring Exhaustion, or, Vodou as Potentiating Practice Continental Drift does not offer a systemic alternative to exceptionalism, capitalism, or the nation-state� At most, Bob’s narrative sets into motion a dialectic of natural history that troubles exceptionalism’s claims to a monopoly over the state of exception� It pries open the circuit of capitalism-nation-nature, revealing the irreducibility of the state of nature to dominant forms of governance� In doing so, it also provides glimpses of preindividual potentiality and transindividual webs of relations that might constitute resources for different ways of dwelling in the world� That being said, the novel does manage to go a step further in its imagination of social possibility through its representations of Vodou� These representations serve as a counterpoint to the striving of Bob Dubois’s plot line� This is not to say that Vodou is somehow autonomous in respect to global capitalism but rather that Vodou reroutes the energies and desires embedded in capitalism towards other ends, most notably, I would suggest, towards the power of endurance� I do not have the space to situate the novel’s representation of Vodou in terms of the general context of Vodou practices, but the following can serve at least as a placeholder for an extended discussion: Vodou constitutes a syncretic blending of African, European, and Carib traditions and practices; it takes shape in response to the history and institutions of slavery and colonialism, offering a milieu in which forms of collectivity irreducible to 98 c hristian P. h ainEs colonialism and slavery can establish themselves; it can function as a medium of resistance and revolt (for instance, during the Haitian Revolution), but it can also serve as an alibi for abuses of power (notably under the government of “Papa Doc” Duvalier); it includes a cosmological perspective in which the divine inheres in the natural not as an external force of creation but as a plurality of immanent causes (this immanence is perhaps most evident in rituals of possessions: practices through which the loa - the Gods - occupy the flesh of Vodou practitioners); and its conception of personhood crosses the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, as well as between the natural and supernatural, so that subjectivity exceeds the limits of both willpower and consciousness� 19 In this essay, Vodou describes an alternative to the capitalist equation of being and striving figured in the character of Bob DuBois� Instead of framing being as but the means of capitalism’s actualization, Vodou practices overload actuality with potentiality, converting mere being into the horse on which the possibilities of divine becomings ride� In Continental Drift, Vodou is a survival strategy� It takes place in the margins of the novel’s geography and in the interstices of its narrative� The novel’s representation of Vodou serves as the index of a counter-history, not a fully-fleshed out alternative to capitalist modernity but a subterranean tunnel within brutal processes of dispossession, oppression, and exploitation� The narrative line of Vanise and Claude Dorsinville charts a route from Haiti to the Bahamas to Florida, and the fractured line they travel exposes Vanise and Claude to violence after violence, including imprisonment (Vanise becomes imprisoned by a shopowner in the Bahamas and coerced into sex work), forced labor (they both work for no wages or low wages under the threat of being reported to immigration enforcement officers), and drowning (Claude drowns in the trip from the Bahamas to Florida and Vanise nearly does)� Vodou rituals offer a psychic salve for these characters, but they also offer another mode of dwelling in the world, a semi-autonomous cultural milieu in which species-being maintains its irreducibility to a capitalist model of subjectivity; in which the emergence of subjectivity operates by way of possession by natural-divine forces, rather than the negation of nature; and in which bonds of community come into existence on the basis of ritual� Put differently, Vodou becomes the means by which Banks recuperates the potentiality of species-being, its capacities for individuating itself in non-capitalist circuits of social reproduction� It is natural history against the grain of capitalism� When Vanise and Claude are dropped off on a small island in the Bahamas (instead of their intended destination, Florida), Vanise engages in ritual prayer not only to ward off fear but also to reconnect their subjectivities to the impersonal forces of being that make up the world: 19 I have relied especially on the following works for this account: Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953); Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997), eds� Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert; and Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 99 She passes the boy the sleeping baby, which he holds expertly in the crook of his skinny arm, and she breaks off a leafless branch of the tree behind them, squats in the dust and begins to draw� As she draws, she prays in a broken way that she knows is amateurish and incomplete, but it’s all she can remember from her sisterin-law’s teaching� She knows the names of the cardinal points, and she addresses them properly: to the east, À Table; to the west, Dabord; in the north, Olande; and in the south, Adonai� She draws a long horizontal line from east to west in the dust, then two verticals, one long and one short, that cut the horizontal into three parts� She crosses herself, and while she draws elaborations and curls, circles and lines around the crossbars, she salutes the two trinities, first the Christian God, his son Jesus and the Holy Ghost, then les Mystères, les Morts, and la Marassa, the sacred twins� Standing, she crosses her arms and examines the drawing at her feet, a vever [a beacon in the form of a ritual drawing] for Papa Legba [one of the central deities in Vodou; the God of the crossroads]� Now, she says, we wait� The boy relaxes and sits down on the low wall, the baby still in his arms� He’s no longer afraid� He did not know that his Aunt Vanise possessed so much rada knowledge, that she was a mambo [high priestess], or he would not have been frightened before, when he did not know where they were� They will wait now, here at the crossroads under the sacred cottonwood tree, for old Papa Legba to help them� (128-29) Vanise’s ritual prayer inscribes a planetary geometry of swirling impersonal flows; it copies the globe onto a two-dimensional plane in a manner that emphasizes a surplus of potentiality in respect to the dominant global order� Her mimetic practice appeals to cosmic principles in which the “crossbars” instantiate a brissure, a hinge around which the world swings, enabling traversals that break from, even as they interact with, the spatio-temporal linearities of Cartesian-capitalist modernity� 20 The ritual’s doubling of trinities, its casual refusal of monotheism, suggests that more important than the suturing closed of the cosmos according to a principle of differentiation qua unity (trinities are ontological engines of sorts, enabling conversions between the unity and the plurality of being 21 ) are the dérives (the “elaborations and curls”) that take flight from both nomos and cosmos. Being does not secure itself in a unitary principle, whether God or Man� Instead, the syncretism of Vodou implies what might be called a para-ontology, the imperial sway of logos giving way to the productivity of beings, to the polyphony of the modes through which being expresses itself� In other words, the grid of capitalist exchange, the ordering of the world as a set of resources for profitmaking, gives way to a sense of planetarity irreducible not only to quantification but also to the subject-object dialectic, to Heidegger’s world-picture� But what is perhaps most important in this passage is the conversion of waiting into an action: “She says it firmly, as if waiting were an action, like hiding or running away or building a house.” It would not make sense to refer to this 20 Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004) offers an excellent account of Cartesian-capitalist modernity, especially relevant for us because of its attention to colonialism and transatlantic slavery� 21 Agamben articulates this economy and ontology of the trinity in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011)� 100 c hristian P. h ainEs narrative lull as an act of resistance, let alone rebellion or revolution, but it nonetheless enacts a suspension of the capitalist-ontological equation of being with striving. Vanise finds herself in a state of exception, caught between two worlds (between her home in Haiti and her destination in the United States), stalled out in the interstices of a social matrix that predicates the right to exist on state-sanctioned identification. She is a refugee without refuge. However, this state of exception does not resolve itself through state violence (the decision of the sovereign)� Instead, Vanise prolongs it, expands the state of exception into a temporal abode in a manner akin to “hiding” or “running away” or “building a house” (as the passage suggests). These gerunds are in fact the constituent elements of marronage: a history of flight from slavery, indentured servitude, and imprisonment that includes the construction of new communities; a genre of practice in which flight becomes creative, in which escape fabricates new ways of living and new places to do so� 22 The solace Vanise and Claude find in ritual and prayer is therefore more than simple relief� This warding off of fear interrupts the colonial-capitalist-plantation assemblage of rules and affects and, in doing so, intimates the possibility of practices of exception without exceptionalism, the potential for decisionmaking that takes advantage of crisis without reinstalling a statist/ capitalist nomos� Continental Drift makes explicit the social power of Vodou in its representation of the rituals taking place on New Providence, an island in the Bahamas� Vanise and Claude participate in these rituals, but the rituals exceed individual intentions, needs, and desires� They take place in “the Barrens,” a marginal patch of land located beyond the tourist areas of the island, a place which “except for the sight and the roar of the jets coming in and taking off from the airport a few miles north […] could be in the wilderness” (229-30). This is a space of “squatters and shack people, whose lives are official secrets. They are the off-islanders, most of them, illegal immigrants from Haiti, wandering foreigners officially forbidden and unofficially tolerated, for they provide a considerable part of the huge underpaid, unprotected labor force that is required by the tourist industry on New Providence” (230). In this liminal space - below the threshold of state-sanctioned identity, in the cracks of the official wage economy - Vodou constitutes a quasi-institutional support network, consistent enough to gather the poor “off-islanders” into a community, loose enough to avoid police crackdowns� This loose community possesses a specific kind of reparative power. Of its value for an anonymous off-islander, we read that it “connects her sad, suffering moment on earth to universal time, ties the stingy ground she stands on to the huge, fecund continent of Africa, makes an impoverished, illiterate black woman’s troubles the pressing concerns of the gods” (231). The phrasing, here, reiterates the coordination of the immanent and transcendent, the earthly and divine, that we have already witnessed in Vanise and Claude’s private ritual, but it makes explicit the social and historical gravity of Vodou� Vodou disseminates a 22 On marronage, see especially Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (2015)� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 101 power of endurance through which a fractured African disapora can at least imagine generative reunion with the motherland, an overcoming of natal alienation� 23 What we might call the novel’s Vodou imaginary exceeds therapeutic value, because it revises the parameters of modern subjectivity, breaking with the dominant tradition of defining personhood in opposition to thingliness. As Roberto Esposito argues, this dominant apparatus articulates the person as a master over things, including the body understood as the primary unit of private property, the first thing one owns (Persons 16-33)� It also implies, as a necessary corollary, a category of non-persons who, despite being perceived as sentient are diagnosed as incapable of mastering themselves and the world and therefore ineligible for freedom� This is of course a well-known rationalization for the transatlantic slave trade, as well as for a host of other social, economic, and political practices that have deprived social groups of freedoms� Vodou is remarkable because it conceives of personhood in a radically different fashion� As Monique Allewaert argues, rather than recover subjectivity on the model of the person-thing dichotomy, it unfolds a “parahumanity” in which “a person is not an insular being distinct from entities and forces outside of herself but an entity whose component parts are pulled into other exchanges� Here, subjects and objects, are recalibrated as assemblages that are animate and entangling� It then follows that personhood is neither an a priori category nor a mode of being oppositional to objects, but a composition produced through the relation of (para)humans, artifacts, and ecological forces” (119). When Vanise invokes Papa Legba, when she prays to the God of the crossroads, she recomposes herself as channel through which ecological forces flow and through which self-enclosure gives way to transindividual relations� When the anonymous off-islander rediscovers the fecundity of an African motherland, what occurs is not so much a fantasy of oneness or a jouissance predicated on return to the primordial wholeness of the maternal body� Instead, it constitutes a break with the person as master over things in favor of processes of assemblage, in favor of a power of composition in which potentiality traverses the boundaries between world and flesh. In other words, Vodou, as an embodied thinking of natural history, suggests a different process of individuation, one in excess of capitalism and exceptionalism� There is much more one could say regarding the Vodou imaginary of Continental Drift, but, for the sake of brevity, allow me to note only one more significant moment. During another ritual, Vanise comes to be possessed by Agwé, the loa of the seas� During this moment of possession, liberal autonomy (whose abject underside, I have argued, is exhaustion) gives way to what Joan Dayan describes as “the reciprocal abiding of human and god,” “ not a matter of domination, but a kind of double movement of attenuation and expansion� […] [T]he possessed gives herself up to become an instrument in a social and collective drama” (19). To be possessed means allowing 23 I am of course alluding to Orlando Patterson’s theorization of social death in terms of natal alienation in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982)� 102 c hristian P. h ainEs social determinations to fall away not in a negation of sociality but in a recuperation of social potentiality in excess of a given regime of life� When Agwé looks out of Vanise, he does so as “the very face of history,” with “no look of impatience and no look of patience, either: he was beyond the notion” (238). Suspending the very opposition between activity and passivity, mastery and servitude, Agwé offers “infinite compassion, as if for a moment a whale with a whale’s understanding of life had risen from the deep to view human life and had seen humanity’s busy terror, its complicated affections, its nostalgia and longing, its shame and pain and pride. Tears flowed down the face of Agwé” (Ibid.). Compassion (com-passio: feeling or suffering with) involves a watery domain in which tears are the traces of an impersonal process of individuation irreducible to the actual order of things� Agwé, loa of the seas, is a god of transformation and the distance that the figure of the whale introduces between the scene of ritual, on the one hand, and “humanity’s busy terror,” on the other, constitutes a state of exception, a re-opening of the state of nature so that other forms of life, beyond the hustle and bustle of the capitalist life-world, might yet be possible� Becoming-whale, we might say, names an interregnum between one genre of species-being and another, between the natural history of capitalism and some other natural history whose mode of production remains formless, virtual, still to come� The Vodou rituals in Continental Drift exemplify endurance, that irreducible double of exhaustion� Endurance implies not only survival but also experimentation: the articulation of alternative forms of life in an ontological state caught between potentiality and actuality, not so much the birth of a new world as the tentative sketching of ways of being and doing otherwise� Vodou reenters the state of nature through practices of exception so as to revise the norms of individuation� The practice of active waiting that constitutes a crucial component of Vodou (an active passivity that involves attuning oneself to the divine forces traveling invisibly through the material world) promises a break with capitalist imperatives and relations, marking the excess of potential that inheres not only in the object-world or environment but also in human and other species. I say “promises,” however, because active waiting cannot substitute for revolutionary action; it cannot take the place of building a new system or a new form of social existence� That being said, it nonetheless constitutes a figure, a crossroads as it were, between the actual and the potential, a figure through which we might begin to conceive practices of exception without exceptionalism: practices that suspend those habits so deeply ingrained that they appear to be simply the instinct of our species; practices that occupy the state of exception not as if it were a crisis to be stomped out but as a laboratory for inventing new rules of existence; practices that surrender a monopoly over potentiality in favor of egalitarian investigations into the otherwise� Notes for a Natural History of the State of Exception 103 Conclusion A practice of exception without exceptionalism: such is the aim towards which Continental Drift directs its narrative labors. The novel presents figures of life that endure, that sometimes (but not always) survive� It channels exhaustion, but it situates that exhaustion as a product of a global network of capitalist and statist forms of governance that differentially allocate conditions of being worn out and used up� Forms of life break down; the gyres of global capital overwhelm social formations that break from the norms of competitive individualism� Continental Drift nonetheless maintains a horizon of potential� It intimates a capacity for re-individuating the human species, for re-organizing life so that it exceeds the limitations imposed by neoliberalism. It does so not only through figures such as Bob and Vanise but also through a reflexive gesture that posits the novel itself as a Vodou ritual. The novel’s opening section, “Invocation,” frames the text not as representation but as a channeling of Legba, the loa of the crossroads: “Again, Legba, come forward! Let this man speak that man to life” (2). Banks allows himself to be possessed, to function less as author than as a horse to be mounted� The text acknowledges that “novels stories and poems stuffed with particulars” will not “set people like them [Bob, Vanise, Claude] free,” but it also declares that its own “objectives” are “sabotage and subversion”: “Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives - no especially wholly invented lives - deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself” (410). From one angle, this mission statement implies no more than an ethics of bearing witness to loss, an imperative to grieve each and every death, no matter social standing, but, more provocatively, it implies a desire to reinvent the human species, to reorganize the relations that constitute species-being, to abolish what Marx calls the “stupidity” of private property. Banks issues a radical task for aesthetic practices: they can take exception to exceptionalism, they can remind us of the potentiality for being otherwise, they can carve out a space between the species as it is - an exhausted mess - and a species to come� This call, I would suggest, is not only a task for aesthetic practices but also for the critical theory of biopolitics� Works Cited Allewaert, Monique� Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics� University of Minnesota Press, 2013� Banks, Russell� Continental Drift� Harper Perennial Classics, 2007 [1985]� Dayan, Joan. “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods.” Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean� Rutgers University Press, 1997� Esposito, Roberto� Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View� Trans� Zakiya Hanafi. Polity, 2015. Foucault, Michel� History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction� Trans� Robert Hurley� Vintage, 1990� 104 c hristian P. h ainEs -----� The Order of Things� Vintage, 1994� Marx, Karl� Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844� Trans� Martin Milligan� Prometheus Books, 1988� Pease, Donald� The New American Exceptionalism� University of Minnesota Press, 2009� Povinelli, Elizabeth� Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism� Duke University Books, 2011� Simondon, Gilbert� L’ individuation psychique et collective. Aubier, 1989 (1964)� Spivak, Gayatri� The Death of a Discipline� Columbia University Press, 2003� Virno, Paolo� Grammar of the Multitude� Trans� Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson� New York: Semiotext(e), 2004� -----� Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation� Trans� Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, Andrea Casson� Semiotext(e), 2008� -----� When The Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature� Trans� Giuseppina Mecchia� Semiotext(e), 2015�