“But have we not always also been all?”

The poet Mahmud Darwish was once asked what influenced his widely hailed innovation in Arabic poetic form and his turn to free verse. His answer was defeat: "After 1948 we Palestinians who stayed in what became the state of Israel found ourselves in a state of defeat. It was a most perplexing time. There was nothing in the old forms of poetry that could help us express the state in which we found ourselves."1 This state of defeat—the almost total loss of an entire life-world—upended existing aesthetic and expressive forms. There was just nothing in them that could even remotely approach the new historical reality. The imperative of revolutionizing the form of expression was not, Darwish added, studied or even deliberate as such; it was spontaneous, like a sudden but necessary leap of faith.How then do we, today, write the state in which we find ourselves? What are the forms, textual or otherwise, that might begin to express our broader defeat: the planetary catastrophe that is already here? How do we face catastrophe without eliding not only the endurance of the dispossessed but also their creativity and vitality, even their majesty? Can our writing—so often, let's face it, an experience of defeat itself—ever mediate these forms of life without capturing them within the conventions of academic decorum and legibility?Neferti Tadiar's Remaindered Life is a book deeply aware of its own relationship to history and form. I mean form here both in the writing itself and the forms of life it mediates. For all its historical consciousness, for all its insistence on the adhesive entailments of the long arc of colonial history, the book draws its forms from the present, from searching the current state of defeat. It doesn't close off the possibility of recovering any past tradition; instead, it stakes its conceptual leap on reinvention rather than recovery. The book neither tarries with contemporary antihumanism nor lets humanism off the hook; it squares up to the violence of dehumanization without appeals to humanity. We can see the insistence on reinvention in the conceptual tension right at the core of the book between the "war to be human" and the "becoming-human in a time of war"; between, on the one hand, an indictment of the role that racial humanism has played in shaping the catastrophic present and, on the other hand, at once both a refusal to give up entirely on the anticolonial project of counterhumanism and an insistence that whatever promise that project carried has to be reinvented today. The question of what it means and what it takes to be human, Tadiar tells us, is "at once urgent and too late."2We see this grappling with form most of all in the book's affective discharge. This is a fierce book. But it's also a moving and moved book. It's a book of theory that also feels personal, even intimate. And yet it's never mournful or elegiac; somehow, it's heartbreaking but not somber. It's lyrical but always purposeful, politically incandescent, and totally committed to people—to her people, our people, to "the becoming-human," to the descendants of the wretched of the earth (which is why it reminds one of nothing so much as Dionne Brand's poetry). It's a work that never shies away from just how bad things are; it takes on the fully catastrophic entanglements of the present—imperial war, financialization, gendered global servitude, mediatic platforms of capture, climatic collapse—without ever being nostalgic for what came before. So many of our reckonings with the present slide almost unknowingly, if understandably, into nostalgia for a recent past, any past: the welfare period, or some kind of genteel New Deal liberalism, or, more convincingly, the immediate independence period in the postcolony. But for all its insistence that the catastrophe at hand was only made possible in and through the violent closure of the promise of decolonization, Remaindered Life never casts its gaze backward in a longing for reenactment; there's no trace here of the sentiment "if only it had stayed the same" or "if we only we could do it again." The political conceptual grammar in the book emerges from the chasm now and from those lives that inhabit and exceed the chasm—disposable but always indispensable and never entirely captured. It's a grammar attentive to long history, to its unfinishedness, but a grammar that stays close to the terrain of contemporary struggle and life. A grammar that emerges from remaindered life, not as some research object but as a way of regarding, as "a mode of attention or hermeneutic." It stays close to the lived terrain of those who have already been catastrophied, already survived apocalypse, but whose experiences we were told were too particular and partial to tell us anything about the disaster that is now everywhere—"But have we not always also been all?" (329).One of the principal concepts we've used to grapple with the wreckage of late capitalism (if that's what this still is) is that of superfluity. We know that the post-Fordist restructuring of global capitalism has produced above all not a surplus of social wealth, but a surplus of people. And by now we're well equipped with a certain critical vocabulary for thinking this through: "surplus humanity," "expulsion," "organized abandonment." And we can identify it, too, as both a structural and a historical feature of our contemporary accumulation regime; that is, not just the effect of cyclical crises (booms and busts) but also an effect of the historical restructuring and crisis of capital, a secular crisis—"a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labor relation itself."3 The historical conditions of the present—probably most decisively the historical stalling of the manufacturing engine of growth, but also the deepening of primitive accumulation and landlessness—mean that surplus populations are no longer reabsorbed in the same way, either in the city or in what's left of the countryside. What Karl Marx called the relative surplus population is becoming increasingly absolute. In turn there's no longer any direct equivalence between the category "surplus population" and the category "reserve army of labor."4In this image, our "planet of slums" seems teeming and overflowing with a mass of wretched humanity that has simply become structurally superfluous to both production and even consumption. Not a reserve army of labor but the absolute surplus of an "outside" to capital that is met with lethal disregard in the killing zones of the border regime or the dungeons of the carceral state. This is a surplus humanity that can never be absorbed: "It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons, marginalized in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war."5 Pure discard.But is surplus to formal employment really surplus per se? Is the abandonment and rendering of vast swaths of people into waste really just a problem of containment and confinement? What if wasted life is not the antithesis of value, or even simply its precondition, but often its very operation? This is in part the proposition that Tadiar extends in her book. Value—understood here not as a thing or a fixed substance but a social relation and regulative entity at the heart of exchange and commodification—need not always pass through formal exploitation and the wage relation. The generation, or the capture, of value can come from the active wasting of lives. In this reading, the capitalization of lives and the expending of those lives are often one and the same. It's not just that life is labor; that insight is clear enough. But this is not what's at stake. We are not all just "human capital." At least not in the same way. "Life as waste" is in fact the inverse of "life as interest-bearing capital" that is the modality of the neoliberal subject (the digital nomads, the netizens, the humanitarians of the world). Tadiar is after something else, and it's not just waste per se that she wants to hone in on, but the act of wasting itself: "Life as waste, on the other hand, is the modality in which the lives of disposable populations are dissolved into liquid life-times, which can be used by various kinds of capital as numerical units of capitalist temporality, measurable in terms of duration/endurance as well as of potentials/futures, to be expended as labor-times or sentencing times, calculated for investment and remittances, and packaged, priced and traded on derivative markets" (217).Think of the predatory inclusion of the poor in financial instruments, designed to fail. Think of microfinance that in its "solidarity lending" collateralizes the very sociality that had emerged precisely to collectively protect from market relations. Think of how reproduction and feminized labors of care get caught in a double bind: "On the one hand, social care is the only way to navigate plunder, but, on the other, care is the very thing being plundered."6 Or take the floating and transnational migrant worker populations in domestic and service economies in China or the Middle East that political elites can render surplus at any moment—that are in fact surplussable or disposable already—and that function in effect, Tadiar tells us, as "securitized assets" (117). They are not new waged labor or even a reserve army of labor but a disposable "life-time" (not as opposed to labor-time) that is a kind of liquidity that can be effectively dumped—the way you dump dead stock—and as such are the very means by which governments and investors engage in speculative maneuvers in the global economy.Tadiar here refracts how we understand the nexus between war, dispossession, finance, and land. The land question has never gone away; it's there at the heart of neoliberal financialization. But if primitive accumulation still deracinates and displaces millions every year, they won't become simply the urbanized armies of labor, reserve or otherwise. Instead, they also become part of the quantitative indices, the "inputs" and "assets" of ruling elites and financial actors in the postcolonial and postsocialist global South. "That is to say, in order for national developing states and economic elites to become viable players in the financialized global market, they must have at their disposal a population that can be made redundant to any particular lines of industry as dictated by the sudden vicissitudes of capital flows and that will ultimately shoulder the costs of fallout of any and all speculative maneuvers" (117).This shift to a political economy of life (and death) as the core of valorization moves us past the stale oppositions between productive and unproductive labor. What had been epiphenomenal, not "real" categories of analysis, take center stage: "What an older scholarship had seen as a site of unproductive, reproductive, hidden and supplemental work—a 'non-economic' relation that merely supplements the capital-labor relation comprising the central dynamic of accumulation—has become the primary site of value accumulation in the new financialized capital economy of life" (6). This gives us a way of reading capitalism's contemporary colonial question a little differently. It's a shift that can reframe the tension that runs across settler-colonial studies between an alleged overemphasis on land and elimination, on the one hand, and a corrective attention to questions of labor exploitation, on the other. Instead we can think about how populations (as opposed to "peoples") can be subject to elimination, immunologically separated, and excluded from formal labor markets, and still be part of value generation. Surplus to labor and nation is not surplus to the operations of capital. And the logics of elimination and separation are not inimical to the logic of value.Take the colonization of Palestine. For all of Zionism's historic location in broader British imperialism and its contemporary location in global circuits of accumulation, the Zionist project was never an economically rational project. It required no returns on its investments, and its drive toward commodification and marketization has always been uneven, tempered by both demographic and territorial imperatives and by the necessity of distributing material spoils across its settler class structure (its colonial compensation of its settler working class). The Israeli state's logic via Palestinians is not only exclusionary, it is overwhelmingly eliminatory, ultimately genocidal, even if its drive remains stunted and to some degree checked. And yet, if we move past the seeming antinomy between exploitation and elimination, the threatening surplus that is Palestinian life is by no means beyond the operations of value. We can see this in the most primary source of value: land.The racialization of Palestinians as idle and itinerant is a value-generating legal-material practice because it is precisely what allowed and still allows for their removability from the land and that land's capture as state or private property. To become removable, they are first rendered disposable, rendered as entirely continuous with a mute nature that itself was of course always only ever a wasteland. And this operation is arguably the basis of all wealth, since it is precisely what allows for the commodification of labor and land. If value is always an abstraction, we know that in settler colonial orders this abstraction has historically functioned by bringing racial subjects and property together in a single taxonomy.7 We see it too, and in an even more literal instantiation of the value-waste dyad here, in the war-capital circuit. This same surplus and inassimilable population has today become the laboratorial target of an Israeli arms and security industry that sells its technology as "field tested" and that now constitutes a larger per capita share of the Israeli economy than ever before, and a larger share of the country's total exports than of any country on earth.8 In their very maimed, debilitated, and killed bodies Palestinians are part of speculative value generation on a global scale.9None of this should be seen as simply instrumental; racialization need not be economically rational to be a value-producing act. And yet the question remains of how to come to terms with all of this, with how disposability is formative of value, without imbuing an economic rationality to all of this. Or worse, reducing it all to certain laws of accumulation. In other words, while keeping open the reality of the gratuitous in all this.Dispossession endures. It never really gives way to the silent compulsions of economic power. It endures not as a historical stage, "not as a disavowed systemic condition of formal capitalist exploitation, but as its core strategy and cutting edge" (Tadiar, 34). We've learned this lesson by now. Or at least we should have. But its purchase is not always clear. For one, the lines of antagonism and struggle are often still muddled. We still regularly think of the class forces we're up against in the image of the maverick tech and finance overlords we get in the global North, driving productivity in techno-sublime innovation that pushes against the limits of state and capital itself. But the truth is, the robots aren't coming to get our jobs. Not because the tech lords wouldn't rather automate everything, but because those jobs are disappearing anyway, and because the creation of value from life and labor has less and less reliance on those jobs. What we're actually up against are not so much drivers of innovation as much as parasitic agents of capture. If they are still a bourgeoisie, they're closer to Gilles Deleuze's "birds of prey" that sweep into the fissures between feudalism and new forces of production than to Marx and Friedrich Engels's cold and venal but revolutionizing social force. These class forces don't reorganize productive relations as much as create choke points and obligatory passages, sites from which to capture activity and creativity that already exist—work, sociality, attention, time, life and vitality itself—and transform them into the promise of future revenue streams. This is in part one of the insights in the conceptual turn to "neofeudalism": the core of accumulation regimes today is not surplus value generated by waged workers producing commodities, but monopoly, rent, and coercion; and the global space of this capital is not the smooth flows of globalization but the fragmented, walled, and perforated zones or fiefdoms of layered partial jurisdictions and nested privileges.10Even here, though, Remaindered Life challenges the way we conventionally understand this relationship between capital and its "outsides." In the book it's not a precapitalist or noncapitalist world that is being captured, but a pericapitalist world that has already been shaped or primed through violence and ruination. Contra Rosa Luxemburg, then, who makes a strong turn in the first half of the book, there is no eventual self-defeating incorporation of the pericapitalist worlds into a universalizing process. If this is an outside, it's an outside that doesn't disappear, because new outsides are created all the time. This is in part what marks the "new imperialism" for Tadiar: it is a force that recolonizes its own unruly detritus—the territories, peoples, life forces, regimes that have already been spat out through deindustrialization, stalled development projects in the global South, or permanent counterinsurgency. In other words, imperialism today seeks "to re-absorb the very ruin and ruination of past accumulation into present process of valorization" (30). The competition is not for "precapitalist spoils" but for "capitalist leavings." War is but the most prominent political expression of this waste-to-value circuit. This is perhaps nowhere clearer today than in an Arab world that is arguably integrated into the global economy primarily through war and its adjacent extractive economies. Musing on what he calls "accumulation by waste" realized through imperialist war, Ali Kadri reminds us that "waste and militarism are principal elements in an accumulation regime that produces value by consuming not only the value of labor-power, but also the value inherent in human lives."11Seen as such, there doesn't seem to be an internal limit to capital at all—both the condition and the limit is remaindered life itself. If we see this world from the standpoint of remaindered life, "from the standpoint of the milieu itself," as Tadiar urges us, then we "see not the foretold disappearance of these noncapitalist lifeworlds . . . but their dynamic survival" (38). This is one of the binds of this world of capture. This is an order that is deeply rapacious, brutal, pernicious, and indifferent. "But it is also an order that, in requiring the survival and life activity of those human and nonhuman strata it would consume and destroy, has come to depend on what it despises, on forms of life that remain and become what lies just beyond its control, what must and cannot be fully incorporated in it and therefore always defines its limits and the fraying edges of its command" (330).This is where the question of politics in the book seems to both appear and recede. This dynamic survival of the pericapitalist milieu also seems to be the opening for a kind of flight; it's the opening for uncaptured, or not fully captured, modes of living, or for practices of living that exceed the distinctions between a life worth living and a life worth expending. It's a world, Tadiar tells us, "of ignominious survival, but also a world of living with gratuitous splendor" (72), both a strife and a striving. There's a kindred resonance here with what AbdouMaliq Simone calls a "surplus life-making" in The Surrounds. For both Tadiar and Simone, these life forms of the dispossessed are in excess of both valorization and use and are a kind of disposition that is also its own gesture or figure of thought: for Tadiar a regard, for Simone a refrain.In both these books there's an insistence on moving past the presuppositions of political thought, past its staid dichotomies (resistance vs. survival, politics vs. life), and past its privileged localizations (the city, the square, the state). For Simone, it's the surrounds, the urban hinterlands within and beyond capture, that need thinking through; it's here we find forms of life that do not center on or concern the possibilities of inhabitation, but instead produce an eventfulness that constantly changes what it means to reside. These are lives in and of constant motion, the effects of impulsive but determined decisions to upend valued ways of living for more provisional circulations (8). And in part as a result, these lives hover at the edge of recognizability, maybe even at the edge of meaning. For in their nonabsorbability into productive life they are always close to "failing to fulfill the protocols of subjectivity and sociality under the political order of democratic life" (Tadiar, 103). Or put otherwise, they always "simultaneously succumb to and resist the gravitational pulls registered by dominant imaginaries of the good life, the effective or transcendent life" (Simone, 101).The question to me here is how we can, or indeed if we should, understand this as a politics, without falling for the temptation to read it as a claim-making sort of resistance, or even as an organizational potential just waiting to be mobilized, a premovement of a kind. What kind of political opening is there in a valorization process dependent on what it despises and cannot control? In the work of people like Vinay Gidawni, for example, the other side of the informalization of everything is the space it creates for autonomy or disarticulation: the growth of informal economies has made the disarticulation from the sway of value "both more necessary and more possible."12 The informalized—or better, the remaindered—have to inhabit all these different modalities of work and reproduction; they practice and inhabit so many multiple modalities of living, working, and getting by, and they are so dislocated from central sites of surveillance and discipline, that the work of value becomes uneven. This opens up a kind of relative autonomy, not to be naively celebrated or perfunctorily dismissed.With Tadiar and Simone the language of autonomy or freedom is markedly absent, even rebuffed. Tadiar begins by rhetorically cautioning against it: "What might it mean to live when such living drives the global economy, to fight for freedom when freedom is a franchise" (20). And by the end, she's unequivocal about resistance: "This is not resistance by any existing political measure. Nor is it a potential to be tapped, mobilized, and organized" (330). For Simone, what the dispossessed really have is accompaniment, the mutual possession of each other without guarantees, in enduring relationships in flight. If this is rebellion, it's rebellion without redemption, without end. Remaindered life, then, doesn't necessarily point to anything beyond itself, beyond its own happening, beyond its own gratuitous splendor. And for good reason. To read resistance into it is to put it back into a kind of social or political legibility for the rest of us; it is again to demote reproductive labors and life-making to a secondary concern; and it is to find consolation where there might not be any.And yet the question still remains: how do we understand remaindered life in relation to a present that seems synonymous with the condition of uprising? That is, in relation to our temporality of uprising, to a time that seems to be uprising itself, defined above all by a pervasive refusal and confrontation that moves past spectacular event and classical political movement increasingly into the capillaries of everyday life. A time in which the distance between the "open socialities of survival" and uprising, between life-making and revolt, shrinks. I mean here to point to the frequency and intensity of demonstrations, riots, strike waves, hunger strikes, occupations, and exits that over the last decade have been generalized. And generalized, we could say, precisely at the point of an understanding of the value-waste dyad and its dehumanizing degradations, which is in part why they've been thought of as existential uprisings, why there is so much emphasis on the body, and why the concept of dignity has marked them from the start. Both Tadiar and Simone are of course in one sense trying to move past precisely overarching schemas like uprising, and yet the worlds they so powerfully mediate seem today that much closer to the forms of generalized refusal I can only think of as uprising. As much as we live in an age of manmade planetary catastrophe, we also live in an age of renewed and constantly renewing planetary-level uprising. Uprising that is far from the previous organizing frames of revolution, but much more than episodic rebellion. Its social compositions are necessarily muddled, its demands often unclear or deferred, its prospects shaky, but it is self-explicitly a refusal, an accumulation of struggles with immensely disruptive power that exceeds, in its horizons at least, the sociality of survival. Where is remaindered life in this becoming ungovernable of the world?