Politics After the Individual: Abstraction, Individuation, Communisation
Most analyses of the individual’s role in politics are either framed around individualist ideologies, addressed to the problem of freedom, or directed within an ethical and moral framework to the choices and responsibilities of individual subjects. Against the idea of the individual as an ontologically given form, this thesis takes up the question of the subject and its relation to politics by placing it within the production of abstraction internal to the practical metaphysics of the capital-relation. Set around two overlapping objectives, the thesis seeks to first demonstrate how the figure of the individual subject is overdetermined by intersecting forms of real abstraction, and second to theorise the prospects for politics after the individual. Situating abstraction first in layers of computational capital, it then demonstrates how the individual is made real via modalities of abstraction that reach from value, through property and law, and into forms of financialisation. By analysing the multiple determinations of the abstract individual in this way, the thesis identifies an impasse of politics encrypted within the capital-relation by the dual form-determinations of value and the individual. The second objective is to consider an orientation to forms of thought and politics that interrupt, break down and exceed this limit. I move through this prescriptive frame by first offering an account of transindividuality as a strategy of critique for breaking with the false dichotomy of the individual and collective. Although the transindividual provides an essential analytic frame, it nonetheless leaves open the question of politics. Finally, by turning to the question of politics directly, I offer a theory of a political form that maps subjectivation and difference to the idea of communism.
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