Review: Dario Gentili, ‘The Age of Precarity’
Another Cosmos is Possible
Review of Dario Gentili’s The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government, trans. Stefania Porcelli in collaboration with Clara Pope (London and New York: Verso, 2021), 136 pages.
Abstract
In The Age of Precarity, which was first published in Italian in 2018 and now appears in English translation, Dario Gentili offers a compelling new genealogy of crisis from Ancient Greek medicine up to modern neoliberal political economy. To summarize its argument, what we call “crisis” today is not some political, economic, or medical contingency to be governed or mastered from outside but nothing less than the modern art (dispositif) of government itself. In this review, Arthur Bradley summarizes Gentili’s argument, draws out its original contribution to the field and explores some of the larger political and philosophical implications which emerge from this work.
Reviewed by Arthur Bradley
In many ways, it may seem that there is nothing less critical - more banal or exhausted - today than the ancient Greek idea of “crisis” (krisis). From economic crashes to terrorist threats, from public health emergencies to immigration scares, modern neoliberal governmentality appears to preside over a state of permanent crisis which, in turn, calls for an equally perpetual series of exceptional political decisions: constitutional referenda, economic austerity measures, health lockdowns and so on. Yet it is precisely this banalization of crisis that, perhaps, marks our epoch’s own singularity. To paraphrase Benjamin’s celebrated claim of 1940, we now live in an age where crisis has become the rule (xi). In The Age of Precarity, which was first published in Italian in 2018 as Crisi come arte di governo and now appears in English translation, Dario Gentili offers a compelling new genealogy of crisis from Ancient Greek medicine up to modern neoliberal political economy which concludes with a provocative Foucauldian variation upon Benjamin’s classic thesis: what we call “crisis” today is not some political, economic, or medical contingency to be governed or mastered from outside but nothing less than the modern art (dispositif) of government itself. What might it mean, then, to speak of modern rule as itself a form of krisocracy - a government by, of, and for the crisis?
To answer this question, Gentili furnishes a slim but authoritative and incisive history of crisis from its origins in Greek juridical, forensic, and medical judgement through to its neoliberal normalization as the defining form of government today. Firstly, he shows how Hippocrates sees a crisis as the critical moment of the natural body’s life-or-death struggle for self-preservation against disease. If this original medical definition persists for centuries, he argues, it eventually becomes politicized in the work of Rousseau, Sieyès and others who transformed it into the judgement concerning the health or morbidity of the body politic. For Marx, likewise, crisis in the economic sphere becomes the privileged symptom of the morbidity of capital and the corresponding vitality of the proletariat. In neoliberal economic theory, Gentili concludes, the original Greek concept of crisis assumes its final biopolitical form: Hayek famously claims that modern government should become nothing less than the “party of life” whose task is to maximise the spontaneous self-ordering of the market.
For Gentili, this history of our changing understanding of crisis (krisis) is principally a history of our changing understanding of political judgement (krinein). To begin with, Greek crisis was a judgement between two opposing elements which are not equal: life or death, health or morbidity, self-preservation or self-dissolution. However, what was originally an existential cut (de-cision) between life or death is now the modern cosmetic choice between like or dislike, with which we are all familiar from social media. If modern referenda are supposedly designed to resolve constitutional crises, for instance, they merely perpetuate them: what are presented to the electorate as choices - yes or no, for or against, remain or leave - are simply internal changes within the governmental machine or, still more insidiously, acclamatory endorsements of the political logic that produces referenda in the first place. In neoliberal modernity, political decision-making does not consist in a final decision which seeks to resolve crisis by restoring or overthrowing the existing order but “a judgement without a final or conclusive decision” (xi) which preserves that order: crisis thus becomes endless.
If Gentili’s genealogy progressively expands to encompass medical, juridical, economic, philosophical and biopolitical accounts of crisis, however, the final, and arguably most provocative, chapters of The Age of Precarity on neoliberal political economy take this argument onto the new plane of cosmology (106-130). For Gentili, what prior accounts of Hayek’s neoliberalism fail to take account is the cosmological dimension of the latter’s famous thesis upon the spontaneous “order” of the market: what we all too readily call the Hayekian neoliberal subject or individual who works to realize their potentiality in their own interest must be “inscribed within an order to be preserved,” Gentili argues, “so that the changes required by the evolution of forms of life must help to preserve that order” (80). In a curious and unstable melange of Sophocles and Darwin, Greek tragedy and evolutionary theory, Hayek’s neoliberal subject is simultaneously both tragic victim of inscrutable cosmic forces beyond her control and economic actor capable of adapting herself to such forces in her own interest: Oedipus the entrepreneur.
What, if anything, is to be done in the face of our modern biopolitical dispositif of crisis? To resist or overcome cosmological neoliberalism, Gentili’s genealogy concludes with the claim that we must first construct an alternative or contrapuntal cosmology which, he argues, can be found within a certain revolutionary astrological tradition stretching from Blanqui, through Nietzsche and Benjamin, up to Deleuze. For Gentili, we can find precisely such a cosmology in Benjamin’s elliptical account of the ancient Greeks’ common or collective experience of “rapture” [Rausche] which precedes and exceeds the individuated and aestheticized communion with the cosmos that is neoliberalism: “man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally,” Benjamin famously writes, “[i]t is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic infatuation of starry nights” (122). In his own brief conclusion, Gentili predicates the possibility of a new shared form of political life on this irreducibly common experience of the cosmos: “It is therefore necessary to think and act in another cosmos: not a cosmos for the life of the individual, but a cosmos of political life in common” (126).
In The Age of Precarity, then, Gentili not only offers a highly original and powerful genealogy of a concept about which we might naively have thought there is little more to say - crisis - but transforms the terms in which it has been understood until now. It is a clear and teacherly work that wears its scholarship lightly, but there should be no doubt that its thesis is ambitious and far-reaching. Accordingly, let me conclude by offering a few virtual footnotes to Gentili’s overall argument. To begin with his main thesis, I think Gentili’s genealogy of crisis as an art or dispositif of government exposes a possible lacuna or circularity in Foucault’s original definition of the dispositif. For Foucault, recall, a dispositif does not emerge out of nowhere but is a response to what he calls an antecedent “urgent need”: “I understand by the ‘apparatus’ [dispositif] a…formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need [besoin urgent]” (7). However, the origins of such urgency - what it is, where it comes from and why we are conceptually able to identify it as urgent in the first place - remains curiously underthought in Foucault’s account. If every dispositif responds to a pre-existing state of “urgency,” then arguably the dispositif of crisis - of urgency or emergency - cannot be one dispositif amongst others but must be a moment that inheres in the formation of the dispositif itself. What if the dispositif of crisis is actually a crisis of, and within, the theory of the dispositif?
Perhaps another necessary task that Gentili’s study opens up for us is a new genealogy of the political philosophy of “choice.” To state the apparently obvious, modern political economy - indeed modern political theory more broadly - is widely agreed to have its origins in a certain theory of the subject who expresses her freedom by exercising her capacity to rationally choose between a set of pre-existing alternatives according to her self-interest: Hobbes, Machiavelli and later Adam Smith constitute the philosophical foundation of what will later come to be known as rational choice theory. For Gentili, like so many other critics of neoliberalism, rational choice theory’s impoverished version of freedom ends up in the explicit coercion of Margaret Thatcher’s notorious promise and threat: “There is no alternative.” If The Age of Precarity is in some ways a quasi-Heideggerian story of the fall from an expansive Greek theory of political judgement or decision into a modern, restricted and predetermined political choice, however, what distinguishes it from preceding accounts is its startlingly original account of the violent, indeed tragic, condition of the neoliberal subject: what we call “choice” is not the expression of a free, calculative, and self-interested subject but, as Gentili’s reading of Hayek shows, a kind of tragic moment of hamartia. In future work, it is to be hoped that Gentili will bring rational choice theory into critical dialogue with rival theories of the political decision from Greek tragedy to Schmitt’s sovereign decisionism. What if neoliberalism is a genre of political economic tragedy and “There is no alternative” the modern equivalent to tragic fate?
Finally, I turn from Gentili’s diagnosis of the age of precarity to his proposed solution. To be sure, his highly Benjaminian appeal to a cosmological politics of rapture may disappoint readers impatient for a somehow more “urgent” response to the crisis of neoliberalism. It is this book’s claim, however, that the dispositif of crisis has so totally colonized political thought and action that the very demand for allegedly radical change - “something must be done” - is itself part of the problem. As Gentili persuasively argues, the many proposed alternatives to neoliberalism within the modern marketplace of ideas - such as left or right populisms and nationalisms - remain parasitical upon it and thus cannot be alternatives to it. If neoliberalism is ultimately grounded upon nothing less than a general theory of the relation between man and the cosmos, as he claims here, then it must be contested on this cosmological level, or nothing can change. Perhaps, and here I will conclude, Gentili’s fascinating reading of what we might call cosmological or astrological communism could go even further: Blanqui’s Eternity According to the Stars (1872), which is mentioned only briefly here, arguably constitutes a kind of hard materialist precursor to Benjamin’s own famous theory of the messianic redemption of history. For Blanqui, eternal recurrence is not merely a heuristic fiction or ethical thought experiment but something that is really built into the structure of the universe itself: “We are, somewhere else, everything that we could have been down here. In addition to our whole life, to our birth and death, which we experience on a number of earths, we also live ten thousand different versions of it on other earths” (Blanqui 2013: 125-6). In Gentili’s political universe, it seems that (pace the famous claim attributed to Jameson by Mark Fisher) we really must imagine the end of the world - indeed of the cosmos - to imagine the end of capitalism.
References
Blanqui, Louis-Auguste, Eternity by the Stars: An Astrological Hypothesis trans. by Frank Chouraqui (New York: Contra Mundum, 2013).
Arthur Bradley is Professor of Comparative Literature at Lancaster University. His most recent book is Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
Email: a.h.bradley@lancaster.ac.uk
