Exteriority, or, Living on the Threshold

Much criticism resembles censorship, a form of repressive power working negatively against freedom or desire, i.e., against negative liberty. It cannot establish or understand the way 'positive liberty' works, as it is reactive toward a problem that has already occurred. But notions of breakdown or fragmentation can only ever allow an image of a cracked whole to emerge - the lines that appear are irreversible and inseparable from the critique, like with a shattered mirror. As such, the critical procedure can aid, but can never substitute for praxis.

Agamben writes: "Be your own face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them." This is placed at the end of a short essay, "The Face" (1995), which begins with the premise that "the face is the only location of community, the only possible city." Bravo, Agamben, for pointing beyond the subjective-objective murkiness of 'self-reflection' and 'identity,' with all the implicit inner-outer assumptions. When I am just my own exteriority, when I am just my own exposure or relation to the world, I am not alienated, I am reunited with an 'essential' correlate of myself, which is precisely my other-than-self, a self-in-becoming. This is both spatial and temporal, and the two can be linked. When I become the way my body 'faces' the world, and not how it re-presents itself via conscious recognition (which, as the inverted mirror-image attests, is truly impossible), my potential 'appears' concretely in practice - my 'self' becomes unpredictable and uncapturable to those who would control me, while I retain a corporeal know-how which allows me to act in both self-defense and self-expression (which I cannot 'grasp' to represent, however). Exteriority allows ecstatic self-expropriation, and is opposed to all notions of appropriation or self-identity based on prior 'sense-certainty.' Instead, 'one' emerges as a singularity beyond both particularity and universality.

What I feel like I need is support or aid without creating chains of dependency. It is a lie, and an expression of extreme alienation, to say that the dominated want to rely on the dominant, or on an overarching system, for survival. This hurts our development and maintains the status quo. What we have to do is dissociate practices of mutual aid from the neglect of human needs which accompanies anti-welfare ideologies and discourses. There are forms of self-protection that enable new social needs and possibilities, as long as these are not totalizing. If needs develop at the dispositional level of habitus, and are never fully visible or representable as such, then we must question public recognition as an a priori criterion for aid. Too often, this externalizing and overbearing relation suffocates the very human potential it is supposed to foster. There is no such thing as equality of opportunity, since some come better equipped to 'run the race' on their home ground, but systemic imbalances need to be addressed in a way that doesn't overcode the relation between the dominated person and system of domination into a hard association, that leaves room for people to grow in relation to others, but not to a generalized Other. We need support and healing so that we can develop new experiences, but not a system to fall back on or 'fix' us. We need a non- "possessive individualist" autonomy.