The western conception that one within the academy can kick-start movements and somehow activate a world-changing “event” is locked within a violent form of colonial Enlightenment based on the white man’s burden – instead we should recognize that the disenfranchised are always already creating futures for themselves through daily acts of survival and quotidian moments of resistance, rather than grand western narratives.

Indeed, it is a peculiar enterprise that we “critical intellectuals” engage in.2 We assume an audacious capacity to contemplate the “world” and read its signs and to interpret our present and imagine better futures. We think, perhaps, this a worthwhile social endeavor; the “thinker,” we might hope, serves as a catalyst to identify, to instigate, and to provoke otherwise merely latent potentialities of suppressed insurgencies against the ossification of the future in unsatisfactory and captured presents.3 With this self-assumed sense of purpose, perhaps it is understandable that many of us seek out the “street” for our thinking;4 it is here that we search for the extraordinary “event” that marks, as we see it, a rupture, the moment of catharsis, a transformation, the “new” born into the world. We see this tendency to philosophize the street clearly in recent intellectual work of the critical “post-Enlightenment” philosophers.5 Reading “uprisings,” “resistance,” and “revolutions”, interpreting the happenings of irruptions in the squares and bazaars of anger, ascribing meaning to voice as voiced in a multitude of vernaculars in multiple locales as these events are gazed upon and made audible to consuming eyes and ears, and investing hope and dispensing disappointment, indeed, we observe that much political–legal thought is so moved by the (variously conceived of) “political” projects to open up possible pathways of “rupturing” the present. In this fashion, the street has indeed come to be the primary locale from which philosophical contemplations are undertaken in this “age of resistance” as Costas Douzinas has named our present time: A sequence of uprisings will dominate the world political landscape in the next period. Ours is an age of resistance. The possibility of radical change has been firmly placed on the historical agenda.6 What inspires such fervor, such ecstatic celebration of the street, is a perceived, hoped for, emergence,7 here, the extraordinary event is the harbinger of hope, marking the (possible, nascent) becoming of a “political subject” as the one who emerges into the street, and out from the street, breaking free from the shackles of extant sovereign-biopolitical diagrams, heralding (with “fidelity”), as Alain Badiou would have it come to be, the “rebirth” of history.8 The street, thus, portends history. This, we see, is thinking fixed on the spectacular, the heroic, and the extraordinary of “radical change.” It is this philosophical tendency—to appropriate the street as the ecstatic site of extraordinary becoming—that is my concern in this essay. It is this heroic orientation of thought that is the subject of my critique. In what follows, I consider the philosophical–political heritage from which the preoccupation with thinking the extraordinary of the street originates and question the implications of such thinking. I argue that such thinking betrays the continued coloniality of critical post-Enlightenment philosophy.9 My intention is to provide a different reading of the “extraordinary” that emerges in the street—as a physical place of embodied presence rather than a reified space of philosophical aspiration—informed by what I argue to be a decolonial understanding of the presents (and presence) of already being in the world. The essay is organized as follows. First, I trace the foundations of what I name the “ontology of abandonment and resurrection” which, I argue, founds critical Eurocentric political–legal philosophy. Central here is the invention of the mythologies of the event and of “becoming.” I argue that for the philosopher of the European (post-)Enlightenment, betrayed by the idea and abandoned by the “revolutionary subject,” the quest for a new evental becoming is all consuming. I demonstrate that the street presents precisely such an opportunity for rescue, the irruptions there witnessed serving to revive the heroic moment of “becoming subject” through the event. But this, I argue, is a philosophy that perpetuates, still, colonial categories of being. Against this philosophy of the extraordinary, I suggest a twofold correction: firstly, an emphasis on the persistent ordinariness of the perceived extraordinary of the street in order that the many worlds of resistance against the normalities of coloniality are deinvisibilized to philosophy; secondly, and consequently, a cognition of the resilient extraordinariness of the “ordinary” everyday, so that the worlds of being-otherwise to “Europe” are returned to the philosophical register as present and real possibilities of being. What is intended by this “decolonial” correction, as I elaborate below, is to return philosophy from the street to the everyday locations, material conditions, and experiences of embodied beings in the world.10 In this task of rupturing the coloniality of philosophy, I suggest, we philosophers of rupture are ourselves implicated. On the Ontology of Abandonment and Resurrection (and Disappointment) We begin by directing our attention to the constitutive categories of the European (post-)Enlightenment. By this, I mean the fundamental concepts that found the ground from which (Eurocentric) political–legal philosophy is thought and the premises from which “critical” discoveries are imagined to be made;11 examples relevant to the present discussion include (human)being, sovereignty, the political, constituent and constituted power, and subjectivity. Variously, the attempt to reclaim some emancipatory meaning and content for these foundational categories of (presumed) human beingness in the world characterizes much of the preoccupation of critical philosophy. What we are concerned to do here is to reveal the coloniality of the ontological foundations of this cosmology of the “modern,” whereby the radical, “enlightened” potentiality of human beingness was projected as the Idea of Europe onto the world. I suggest that we can best understand this past, and present, of post-Enlightenment political–legal philosophy as being founded upon an ontology of abandonment and resurrection. The so-called French Revolution, as a philosophical invention, is a good place to start in this connection. It would appear that no critical, transformative, engagement with the worlds of politics, of law, of democracy, of hope for better human futures, in short, is possible, without some return and due reference to the “French Revolution” as the ruptural moment of European human imagination and enactment presented, as it often is, as an original, and originary, Event in history. This is the moment of the great birth of “man”-post-God, “degodded” as Sylvia Wynter put it,12 as “subject” and “citizen,” a being sovereign, author in and of the world. In this construction of the “Idea” of being in history is the French Revolution, for the post-Enlightenment philosopher of the European tradition, a constitutive Event, for with it, through it, is consolidated the advent of man as a necessary rupture from emptiness and darkness into fullness and belonging, the emergence from the abandonment and void of godlessness into the secular “word” and world of reasoned Enlightenment. This is a momentous becoming indeed. With the invention of the French Revolution, as event (quite aside and distinct from the temporal happenings and outcomes in France from 1789 and onward),13 the citizen thus replaces the “believer,” the “children of revolutionary sovereignty” thus replace the “children of God,” the violent “eventual” revolutionary-becoming thus replaces the portend of the (im)possible secular resurrection of the human-as-citizen into the world of words and meaning absent mediation by the divine ascription of placements.14 Indeed, a becoming into the world through an extraordinary event—a secular resurrection as it were—is necessary to birth the “rupture” and bring into “being” the modern promise of salvation, necessary to relegate the claim of God (and his priests) on humanity to the fringes of “premodern” superstition.15 Simply put, the French Revolution—as invented by the repetitions of political–legal philosophers—marks the recurrent moment and provides the repeated enunciation for a spectacular send-off for (the Western version of the Judeo-Christian) God by the philosophy of a new (En)Light(enment) and the “liberation” and “freedom” of sovereign man thereby rebirthed.16 Thus was invented the ontology of (colonial-)modern beingness that so many take as given: That human beingness is the possibility of becoming—being out of nonbeing. We see this defined by the duality of the believer and the heathen under Occidental Christianity, traced to an earlier distinction between the (political-)sociality/civilization of bios and the “naturality” of zoe in more “classical” Grecian rationalizations.17 That beingness—as being self as self with others—is, as such, haunted by the inherent and perpetual threat of abandonment to nonbeing from bios-community to zoe-bare life. It is the (constantly strived for) universal potentiality and responsibility of man therefore to become into the “public” as (ethical-)political subject.18 That this becoming, out of nonbeing (zoe-bare life) into the world of political-being-subject, is a process filled with ontological labor pains; theories of “social contract” enacted out of the extraordinary event thus serves as the modern philosophical vehicle for this transformation from the extraordinary moment to the normalized future. This is all well and good, no doubt significant for an understanding of the evolving cosmologies and philosophoscapes of the emerging “European man” out of his ages dark; the actual in the “ideal” of this emancipation of the modern subject was, however, something quite different.19 A decolonial telling of the philosophical biography of the political subject begins with remembering that we are not merely recounting a “European-modern” philosophical tale here. The birthing of the modern universal subject of the political was coeval with its coconstitutive colonial underside;

it was an ontological birth whose origins lay in the violent gestations, both material and cosmological, of the colonial ordering of the world. I don’t intend to repeat the readings of the history of History through a colonial–modern lens; this has amply been done effectively elsewhere.20 My aim is more to draw out the constituting premises that connect the current preoccupation of extraordinary becoming of (Westernized) man with prior colonial philosophies of being that sought to deny and thereby annihilate the manifold actuals of already-(other-)beingness that constitutes the worlds of being (variously)human. We recall that the foundational assumptions and constitutive philosophical categories of being, sovereignty, subject, and political were invented alongside the material enforcement of colonial–modern politics and law.21 From the very beginning, the universal Man of the Enlightenment was constructed on a whole array of geo- and body political disqualifications;22 for all the assertions of the sovereignty of man, it was the bordering of “population” that marked the advent of the “sovereignty” of (biopolitical) “government.”23 This, to stress the point, was no “exception” but the very actuality of colonial–modernity.24 “Indeed, a matter of anguish for the Eurocentric philosopher of the Enlightened subject is the continuing realisation that the inflicted and perpetuated suffering upon the majority of the human population is a matter of everyday and ordinary reality, that the ‘exclusions’ and depravations that are daily witnessed as defining the ‘actual’ of human-beingness under national and global orders of (b)ordered populations are a constitutive feature of the condition of (colonial-)modernity.” Aside from the dire actualities of the biopolitics of “populationization,” the effects of “individualization” that has ensnared the subject perhaps pose a greater disappointment to the philosopher. The problem, simply put, is a crisis of the “present”: the apparent complacent condition of being that has come to define the settled present of a domesticated subject. As Zygmunt Bauman observed, the “imagination” that underpins the “postpolitical,” “postmodern” consensus of neoliberal “liquid modernity,” the result of the global consolidation of capitalism, is one whereby the much vaunted subject is concerned more with the “mining” of “disengaged” happiness and less with any historic mission for an enlightened humanity.25 It would appear, the enticements of consumerism and entrepreneurism, more than some resurrection of a political subject into history defines the (post)modern condition of being. And the consequence of this emptying out of “the political” from the subject? Precarious beingness and being “precariat” now are now recognised as the “normal” conditions of modern subjectivity.26 Through all this, the philosopher, it would appear, stands abandoned by her subject. The abdication by the subject of her “historic” responsibility of becoming-being-in-the-political is an ongoing disappointment for any critical political–legal philosopher who takes the universal promise of the “Enlightenment” seriously; it is after all the repudiation, by embodied actual beings, of the philosophically ascribed role of the political subject to be the maker of history. Rescue is necessary therefore; recovery of the foundational promise of the Enlightenment is, for the philosopher of rupture, imperative. And so, we understand the reasons for the following refinements to the original birth story of the political subject that we find in much current critical thinking: That to be denied being-(in the) political, is to be either in abjection or in stupor, in ontological nothingness as inexistent, or meaninglessness as a commodity, a thing not worthy of the legacy of the idea of Europe. The former is the state of “rightless” exclusion that concerned Arendt and her philosophical progeny, it is the condition of abandonment that preoccupies post-Agambenian philosophers of biopolitical sovereignty. The latter is the perceived condition of the contemporary biopolitical subject object of governmentality—the “counted” and the “accounted-for,” self-disciplining, held docile, and domesticated to be nothing useful other than as “entrepreneurial citizen consumers”—that is the object of disappointment if not contempt. And so, the crisis of the present necessitates efforts to revive, if not rescue, even resurrect, the political subject from either abandoned deprivations or hedonistic automatonity and consumptive banality. That becoming subject, therefore, is the continuing ontological potentiality of ruptural emancipation. Becoming subject, thus, is an ever incomplete project of becoming–being in history. With this critical reformulation of the idea, we arrive at the present problem to “invent,” as Badiou put it, the “problem of the present”;27 it becomes the task of the philosopher to identify the critical moments whereupon might history be glimpsed in events of rupture, of becomings. We see variously therefore that the intention to reclaim some presumed emancipatory content to these related foundational assumptions of human beingness permeate through the vast majority of critical thinking on the subject of the subject in the political. The question that is addressed in such contemplations of the present is: how to rescue the emancipatory potentiality of the subject from the normalizations, and banalizations, of the present?28 As Badiou poses it, “How are we to be faithful to changing the world within the world itself?” This becomes: How are we to weave in the world the political truth whose historic condition of possibility was the event, without it being able to be the realization of this possibility? How are we to inscribe politically, as active materiality under the sign of the Idea, a reawakening of History?29 And so we understand the particular preoccupation of the contemporary critical philosopher with the street. We witness the incessant search by philosophers of radical hope for such evental and heroic happenings; so is the world scoured for ruptural articulations, so are peoples’ struggles ascribed meaning vis-a-vis the constitutive categories of modern political–legal philosophy. From the past are the French and American Revolutions (and their enunciations of universal subject beingness) tracked through to the Russian and Chinese Revolutions (less so the Haitian and Mexican), the revolts of 1968, and now (jumping a few decades) to the antiglobalization movements post Seattle, the Occupy movements, the “Arab Spring,” all grist to the mill of the philosopher in search of signs that faith in the subject of the political may be redeemed, that history itself may be reawakened. For the purpose of the Idea, therefore, are the instances of irruptions sought to be revisited, read repeatedly, and referred to in their many and varied interpretations as (potential) instances of becoming—as Badiouian event, as Rancieriean “dissensus,” as Zizekian “truth–event/act,” as Douzinasian “resistance/insurrection.”30 The extraordinary is a constant preoccupation, we see. Yet, notwithstanding the philosophical investment in the event, life, when viewed through the lens of the heroic, inevitably disappoints. The event, in its materiality, is never quite as pure as its philosophical version, never quite enough to transform “History” sufficient for the philosopher’s satisfaction;31 moments of exalted extraordinary emancipation seemingly tire into languid returns to imperfection and corruption, domesticity, even “failure.” Zizek, for example, is quite clear: [W]e should avoid the temptation simply to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings that are doomed to fail.… What new positive order should replace the old one, once the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising has waned? It is here that we encounter the fatal weakness of the current protests. They express an authentic rage that remains unable to transform itself into even a minimal positive programme for socio-political change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.32 If only people who struggle, erupt, and promise such excitement to the philosopher could be truer to their calling, possess greater fidelity to their evental cause, be firmer in their resolve to fulfil the revolution. Still, despite the many inadequacies and failures of these uprisings, as Zizek judges them, the “radical emancipatory core” of such expressions of irruption is affirmed.33 Indeed for the Eurocentric “secular” philosopher, this fidelity to the idea is a matter of philosophical salvation/damnation. Without the extraordinary resurrection of some mythologized subject birthed through the extraordinary event, the post-Enlightenment philosopher of (becoming-)being is left devoid,34 absent a cosmology of human beingness that is able to withstand the abandonment of God, that makes such “degodding” meaningful. And so we witness: a foundational ontology of abandonment and resurrection informs the philosophical “discoveries” of critical post-Enlightenment philosophers of the street. To us who are nonbelievers of this parochial faith system, however—for those of us non-Europeans less entranced by the advent of the secular subject of becoming born out of the Enlightenment of Europe—a different reading of the philosophical “situation” of the present presents itself. With this unenchanted understanding of history, we turn now to see and read differently the street in the (extra)ordinariness of struggle. On the Ordinariness of the Extraordinary Unintended it might be, but radical readings of spectacular extraordinary becoming are premised still on prior constructions of human beingness based on a colonial–modern ontologic–epistemology of being/nonbeing. For the post-Enlightenment philosopher—Badiou is exemplary—what is assumed is that to “be” outside the political is to be abandoned to inexistence, whereby the political has come to be the ontological standard of a postdivine, secular normality of human beingness proper, a life desired, a life full; as such “inexistence” (nonbeing) in political subjectivity is the underlying abandonment that defines the condition of the captured present that requires recovery and rescue.35 The recovery and rescue of Eurocentric philosophy, that is, the ascription of extraordinary becoming to events of irruption serves precisely, it appears to me, to enable such a rescue, whereby the philosopher assumes that what is witnessed in these instances is the extraordinary ruptural assertion of the idea, of the subject, claiming a belonging in the political, out of absence, out of inexistence, out of nothingness, into (extraordinary-)being, a “liberated” entity—the subject—as the new in history. Badiou, again, is illustrative: “We shall then say that a change of world is real when an inexistent of the world starts to exist in this same world with maximum intensity.”36 The emergence of a new out of inexistence is the heroic core of post-Enlightenment political–legal philosophy. A simple counteraffirmation serves as our point of departure for a decolonial correction to “white ignorance.”37 We can state it simply thus: prior to the apparent extraordinary moment which draws the (critical) philosopher’s gaze to rest upon the manifestations and expressions of rebellious life, persists the daily maneuvrings of communities in struggle in their encounters with the totalizing desires of appropriative power. In this view, what is witnessed as the extraordinary becoming of the new into the world is but the material and exigent appearance of persistent, if largely “invisible” being(-otherwise) whose everyday is the ordinary struggle against extant orders of asserted normalities. It is this that I here term already-(other-)being that underpins a decolonial philosophy. And it is this presence, and persistence that is lost to critical Eurocentric philosophers of rupture; we see this, for example, in the philosopher’s apparent discovery of dissensus. We observe the following: the critical philosopher’s discoveries of ruptural becomings is informed repeatedly, to use Santiago-Gomez’s phrase, of a “point-zero” perspective on human life worlds.38 By this is meant a perspective whereby it is the “discovery” of the “other” (as imagined) by the philosopher that begets the worlds of meaning from whence history, as a projection of the idea, marches on. This we observe is commonplace in much recent thinking and writing on resistance and dissensus. For example, in concluding his analysis of the Tunisian uprisings which marked the start of the so-called Arab Spring, Illan Wall reflects thus: In terms of strategies of resistance then, I want to underline the importance of learning to live together without loyalty, without the everyday presupposition that the state is naturally and inexorably there. It is the interruption of everyday authority that is crucial.…this inoperativity is already there.…Let me suggest then, that the point of articulation between the critical legal theory of dissensus and the Tunisian events is the question: how to unwork sovereign power on an everyday basis, without reinstituting the same logics once more?39 Wall’s is a thoughtful, and respectful reading of resistance, rooted and influenced by Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “inoperativity”; indeed, he is mindful not to “appropriate the politics of the “postcolony” and put it to work for some “European” project.”40 However, as with all Eurocentric viewings of the worlds of “rupture/resistance,” the point-zero perspective is marked here. What I mean by this is that the analysis assumes a (dissensual) moment, an event, from which the extraordinary emergence/becoming of a new is discovered; a perspective that identifies dissensus in moments of “emergence” out of perceived absence or inexistence after all is one which assumes a prior “consensus,” a normality from which then the “interruption” is thought to be witnessed. From this point zero, then are “strategies of resistance” postulated, futures anticipated, as a new in the world. But let us pause. For whom this normality of consensus from which dissensus is celebrated? From whose location of thought this reading of the new of interruption? For whom, and from which moment on, the novelty of this discovery? Even as Wall’s account of the Ben Ali regime is nuanced, an assumption of a prior normality of the political as a consensus still persists here. A decolonial view instead, I suggest, begins precisely from a demystification of that assumption of consensus and a recognition of the many undersides of persistent refusal against such presumptions of normality. I explain below. Wall’s view and imagination suffers from a common inability of the well-intentioned Eurocentric philosopher to see a different normality when gazing upon the world, to comprehend that the “interruptions of everyday authority,” and the nonreification of the state, are perhaps, for social majorities the world over, the persistent everyday unsentimental normalities of their ordinary being even as they appear subservient; for them, the “importance of learning to live together without loyalty, without the everyday presupposition that the state is naturally and inexorably there” may rather be better understood and realized than assumed by the critical philosopher who earnestly exhorts such rupture based on some discovery of the extraordinary event. Indeed, such exuberance at fixing a meaning of extraordinariness to the eruptional manifestation of persistent refusals, however, “incompletely” as Wall claims to do, might well be to impoverish rather than enrich understandings of the extraordinariness of the normalities of resistance, it might continue invisibilizing the rich tapestry of actually present consciousness and experiences of (already-)being that refuse the consensus of the present as assumed by the critical post-Enlightenment philosopher. Let us be frank. Nothing is added to the actualities or the materialities of life and struggle by the philosophical naming of an eruption of anger or refusal as event or dissensus, neither are extant orderings of the political as bordered normalities of governmentality challenged by the invented duality of consensus/dissensus; all such ascriptions do is to attach to a given time and place particular abstracted categories based on presumed universal truths of beingness. In doing so, the pasts, presents, and infinite futures that define the materialities of life and struggle are conveniently subsumed under the celebratory reification of an instant that is read as “evental,” marking a progressive node in history as promised by the heroic mythology of the European Enlightenment; in this, Wall does not escape from the “appropriation” of the postcolony for the European project. A decolonial philosophical perspective might understand resistance and struggle differently, grounded as it is in the experiences of past and present struggles of ordinary human beingness outside of the privileging gaze of the post-Enlightenment philosopher: notwithstanding both the material infliction of violence and the ideological–biopolitical constructions of subject-ontologies, subjected human populations remain in their majority stubborn in their multiplicities of already being as other to the totalizing ascription of being-subject that is the biopolitical project of the sovereign assertion.41 What is significant in this other ontology of being—not fixated with tropes of abandonment and resurrection—is its rootedness in the histories and materialities of everyday resistance to the coloniality of power.42