becomes a way of breaking ties with those forms of interdependency that we value, what then follows? If independence returns us to the sovereignty of the individual or of the state in such a way that post-sovereign understandings of cohabitation become unthinkable, then we have returned to a version of self-sufficiency that implies endless conflict. After all, it is only from a renewed and revalued notion of interdependency among regions and hemispheres that we can begin to think about the threat to the environment, the problem of the global slum, systemic racism, the condition of stateless people whose migration is a common global responsibility, even the more thorough overcoming of colonial modes of power. And that we can begin to formulate another view of social solidarity and of nonviolence.
Throughout this book, I move between a psychoanalytic and a social understanding of interdependency, laying the groundwork for a practice of nonviolence within a new egalitarian imaginary. These levels of analysis have to be brought together without assuming the psychoanalytic framework as a model for all social relations. The critique of ego psychology, however, does give a social meaning to psychoanalysis that links it with a broader consideration of the conditions of sustenance and persistence—questions central to any conception of the biopolitical. My counter-thesis to the state of nature hypothesis is that no body can sustain itself on its own. The body is not, and never was, a self-subsisting kind of being, which is but one reason why the metaphysics of substance—which conceives the body as an extended being with discrete boundaries—was never a particularly good frame for understanding what a body is; the body is given over to others in order to persist; it is given over to some other set of hands before it can make use of its own. Does metaphysics have a way to conceptualize this vital paradox? As interpersonal as this relation may sound, it is also socially organized in a broader sense, pointing as it does to the social organization of life. We all start by being given over—a situation both passive and animating. That’s what happens when a child is born: someone gives the child over to someone else. We are, from the start, handled against our will in part because the will is in the process of being formed. Even the infant Oedipus was handed over to that shepherd who was supposed to let him die of exposure on the side of the hill. That was a nearly fatal act, since his mother handed him to someone tasked with arranging to let him die. Being handed over against one’s will is not always a beautiful scene. The infant is given over by someone to someone else, and the caregiver is conventionally understood as given over to the task of care—given over in a way that may not be experienced as an act of deliberate will or choice. Care is not always consensual, and it does not always take the form of a contract: it can be a way of getting wrecked, time and again, by the demands of a wailing and hungry creature. But there is here a larger claim that does not rely on any particular account of the social organization of motherhood or caregiving. Our enduring dependency on social and economic forms of support for life itself is not something we grow out of—it is not a dependency that converts to independence in time. When there is nothing to depend upon, when social structures fail or are withdrawn, then life itself falters or fails: life becomes precarious. That enduring condition may become more poignant in care for children and the elderly, or for those who are physically challenged, but all of us are subject to this condition.
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