For an anti-predicative concept of recognition:

The autonomy of the political, the limits of difference, and the logic of
deinstitutionalization1

Vladimir Safatle
Universidade de So Paulo

In the philosophical and social debates that have taken place over the last twenty
years, we have seen the concept of recognition attain hegemonic status, functioning as a
central operator for any understanding of the rationality underlying political demands.
First revisited in the 1930s, through Alexandre Kojves reading of Hegel and its
development in, among others, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the
philosophical thought of Jean Hyppolite, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and,
later, Jean-Paul Sartre, the concept was not systematically explored in its properly
political dimension until the early 1990s. Still, none of the political theorists that
attended Kojves lectures on the subject, among them Raymond Aron and Eric Weil,
became known for systematically exploring the potentialities of the theory of
recognition; in fact, the potentialities inherent to its political application would not
receive a considerable boost of any sort until the publication of Axel Honneths
Struggle for Recognition (1992) and Charles Taylors Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition (1994). Starting with these authors, Hegels concept of
Anerkennung (Recognition) seemed, at long last, to provide a normative orientation to
the progressive development of social struggles.
Still, no adequate reflection on contemporary political applications of the concept of
recognition would be possible without an evaluation of the socio-historical context
surrounding its rediscovery in the 1990s. Such context is indissociable from the loss of
1 Conference presented at Birckbeck College, november 2014.

centrality, over the past few decades, of the class-struggle discourse as an interpretive
key when it comes to social conflicts. The notion of class struggle seemed to reduce
social conflicts to general problems related to the egalitarian redistribution of wealth
(problems that are not merely expressions of a theory of redistributive justice), thus
ignoring moral and cultural dimensions that could not possibly be understood as simply
echoing class structures. That being the case, it seems plausible to state that a certain
accumulation of changes has provided the conditions that allowed for a promotion of
the question of recognition to a central position as a political problem. Among such
changes, three may be said to be fundamental.
The first one is the weakening of the proletariat as historical agents towards
revolutionary social transformation; this has been an important issue for the Frankfurt
School at least since the 1930s, and a feature of its research into the sort of political
regression that ultimately led the working classes to support Nazism. The integration of
workers, starting in the 1950s, into social security programs, as well as into the
corrective policies of so-called Welfare States, doubtlessly contributed to the
consolidation of this particular diagnosis. Of particular note is the way Habermas
noticing the scarcity of candidates willing to operate as global agents for revolutionary
change after such working-class integration, and the subsequent weakening of the
Welfare State itself insists on reading the situation as an expression of the exhaustion
of a particular utopia that in the past crystallized around the potential of a society based
on social labour. It is this exhaustion that leads Axel Honneth to state, not long ago,
that belief in a privileged role for the working classes within revolutionary politics was
nothing but a historical-philosophical dogma. Once such assumption is accepted, any
and all investment in the class-struggle discourse as a central axis for the organization
and constitution of identities within political dispute is necessarily sapped of its
strength, and, consequently, space is cleared for new candidates willing to perform this
function.
Yet the current centrality of the concept of recognition could not be consolidated
until the aforementioned loss of faith in the revolutionary role of the proletariat was
accompanied by an additional phenomenon related to a transformation of the system of
expectations connected to something fundamental for the development of political
struggle, namely the universe of labor. According to Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,
such transformation, beginning with the May 1968 protests, may be understood to entail

the formation of a new capitalist ethos. The social critique that originates in the period
had labor itself as its most significant object, in its inability to meet social demands for
authenticity. Seen as a sphere of rigidity, of imposed schedules and controlled time, of
stereotypical entrepreneurial hierarchies and Taylorist alienation, labor had been
strongly devalued by the youth of 1968. The result of that critique would be the
reconfiguration of the ideological core of capitalist society, and the attendant
transformation of the ethos of labor. Values such as safety, stability, and respect for
functional hierarchy and specialization values that had once made of the universe of
labor a fundamental sector for the imposition of rigidly fixed identities gave way to a
different set of values, derived directly from the dimension of the critique of labor. Risktaking ability, flexibility, malleability, and the deterritorialization that results from
infinite processes of reengineering: all of them values that compose labors new
ideological nucleus. Through the change in question the universe of labor in capitalist
societies would be more apt in acknowledging demands for individual recognition, and
in altering the matrix of the experience of alienation, detaching such matrix from the
theme of economic spoliation so as to reposition it nearer to the theme of the imposition
of an inauthentic mode of existence, that is, a life bereft of the space where the
minimum requirements for self-actualization may be developed. This transition from
spoliation to inauthenticity at the heart of the critique of labor was an additional venue
through which the concept of class struggle could be made secondary, and the problem
of recognition given centrality as a political device.
Finally, it must be recalled how this change meets another series of changes
connected, in turn, to an understanding, first arrived at in the 1970s, that the struggles of
historically vulnerable social groups, groups often deprived of fundamental rights (such
as blacks, gays, or women), were struggles for the cultural affirmation of differences.
That is to say they were not merely understood as segments of a broader struggle
towards extending universal rights to groups that had, up to that point, been excluded,
but as processes engaged in the affirmation of differences in light of a supposedly
universalist framework ultimately committed to the perpetuation of norms and modes of
living peculiar to culturally hegemonic groups. Such changes owe much to the
development of themes connected to multiculturalism.
Still, this interpretation does not correspond to the historical reality of the
resurgence of the concept of recognition within social philosophy. As we have seen, it

was only in the early 1990s, in books written by Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor, that
the concept was first revisited at the exact moment when the slow disintegration of the
economic achievements of the so-called Welfare States begins, with the progressive
dismantling of workers rights, the partial or complete privatizing of social security, and
the deterioration of education, health and other public services. Such disintegration took
place at a moment when several theoreticians stated we were about to enter a postideological era, that is, one marked by the demise of the belief in revolutionary social
transformation, with the consequent acceptance of the normative horizon of liberal
democracies as the endpoint of social struggle.
That may explain why those who are critical of the importance given to the
concept of recognition particularly (but not exclusively) Marxist critics have often
insisted that what we are faced with here is but a compensatory concept: for them, the
situation is one where, given the impossibility of implementing effective policies related
to wealth redistribution, or to radical attacks aimed at inequality, all that remains is to
discuss compensatory policies of recognition. Likewise, given the now-unquestionable
status of Capital as the sole instance capable of universal reach within the liberalism of
multicultural societies, there would be little left for us to do save for reinventing
demands for the recognition of communal identities in their various forms, in the
attempt to bestow upon our communities a greater sense than simply that of a delimited
space. Finally, given the impossibility of large-scale social transformation, there would
be little left to do apart from discussing the moral nature of our social demands.

The economy of individual identity

To demonstrate that we were not dealing with a mere compensatory device, but
rather one imbued with significant transformative power concerning social structures,
was a task to which several defenders of the political application of the concept of
recognition turned to in the past twenty years. Such task involved clarifying how the
emancipatory power of recognition was not unrelated to problems related to the
egalitarian redistribution of wealth, which meant reminding us that discussions on
cultural differences and social identities do not necessarily mask structural problems
connected to the struggle between classes for the redistribution of wealth. Towards

accomplishing such project, Axel Honneth, for one, has been led to state that even
distributional injustices must be understood as the institutional expression of social
disrespect or, better said, of unjustified relations of recognition; from that, he is also
led to defend, among other positions, that even the workers movement aimed in
essential part at finding recognition for its traditions and forms of life within a capitalist
value horizon.
Honneths strategy had at its foundation an attempt to assimilate the problem of
wealth redistribution into a broader framework of discussions pertaining to recognition.
Towards that end, it was required that the social sentiment of economic injustice be
understood as a potential expression of the motivational sources of social discontent
and resistance, clearing the way, at least as far as Honneth was concerned, for the
possible establishment of a unified motivational framework, centered on the idea that
what subjects expect of society is above all recognition of their identity claims a
rather unsurprising position, coming from an author who will also state that subjects
perceive institutional procedures as social injustice when they see aspects of their
personality being disrespected which they believe have a right to recognition. This
introduces a concept of personal integrity to the regulating horizon of processes of
recognition, a concept whose fundamental presupposition is the de facto naturalization
of the structures of the psychological concepts of individual and personality.
According to Honneth, political struggles, even those organized on the basis of demands
for economic redistribution, ultimately aim to ensure that concrete conditions exist so
one may build a personal identity. In other words, the very genesis of modern
individuality is seen as a pre-political foundation for the political sphere something to
be politically confirmed, rather than politically deconstructed. Hence the following,
decisive statement: I proceed from the premise that the purpose of social equality is to
enable the personal identity-formation of all members of society.
Such naturalization being accomplished, Honneth is free to avail himself of,
among other texts, studies by historians such as E. P. Thompson and Barrington Moore
in order to legitimize his viewpoint that the motivational structure of working-class
struggles was mainly based on the experience of the violation of locally transmitted
claims to honor, as feelings of disrespect concerning the demands of living beings for
recognition far outweighed material needs in importance. By insisting that the moral
experience of the feeling of disrespect is the central engine that drives political

struggle, promoting such feeling to the condition of motivational ground for the entirety
of human conflict, Honneth is able to relocate redistribution and all associated problems
to the general framework of moral demands. Thus, as social vulnerability is connected
to impoverishment understood mainly as the material expression of the ones complete
inability to make moral demands for respect , the path is lies open for the following
statement: the distinction between economic disadvantage and cultural degradation is
phenomenologically secondary, insofar as conflicts for redistribution are not to be
understood as being independent of experiences of social disrespect.
Among the many problems that result from this perspective, special
consideration should be given to at least two. First of all, once one admits that demands
for redistribution have a moral nature, preventing such demands from being
psychologized is no longer possible which is to say, treated as problems related to
limitations in the development of ones psychological individuality. This, in the final
analysis, turns the entirety of political discourse into one pertaining mostly to
complaints of a psychological nature; most significant, however, is the fact it turns
every response to demands for redistribution into a therapeutic action derived from
state policies that see political subjects as something akin to proto-subjects
psychologically vulnerable in what concerns their identities, whose appearance in the
public sphere is anchored on discourses peculiar to those who, deep down, expect to be
taken care of and supported. In the end, demands for social change become demands for
social care.
There is yet a second problem to be found in the perspective defended by
Honneth. By reducing the totality of social struggle to demands for the affirmation of
the conditions allowing for the construction of personal identity, his perspective
obliterates a dimension that is fundamental for a proper understanding of class struggle,
at least as far as Marx is concerned: namely, that powerful nonidentity that is peculiar to
the Marxist notion of proletariat. By seeing the revolutionary potential of the proletariat
as nothing but a historical-philosophical dogma, Honneth ends up losing that which one
might term the ontological function the proletariat holds in Marxs thought. Such
function makes the proletariat the social manifestation of a principle of nonidentity
and indifferentiation. In a sense, a kind of proletarian condition may be found in Marx
that operates as a regulatory horizon for his radical egalitarianism, a condition that
contemporary political reflection would gain much by revisiting.

A note on the proletariat

Let us remember how, according to Marx, revolution comes only from the
classes without qualities and without identity in a deeper way. A class constituted by
world-historical, empirically universal individuals in the place of local ones, a notion
with little connection to the perspective of workers struggling for the recognition of
their traditions and ways of life. To consider workers as world-historical individuals, a
certain experience of negativity is required, which is a fundamental condition for the
universality proposed since Hegel. Proletarians suffer such experience by the complete
self-dispossession described by Marx, in the following words:
The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no
longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industrial
labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as
in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality,
religion are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just
as many bourgeois interests.

As we can see, Marxs definition of proletariat derives not only from the extreme
impoverishment, but also from the complete annulment of its binds to traditional ways
of life. In fact, political processes of self-reaffirmation do not recover these binds.
Consequently, it is not the case to allow workers to constitute a nation, or a bourgeois
family, or a morality, or even a religion. Such normativities are denied by a no-return
negation. Nevertheless, this negation does not show proletariat as that whole
undefined, dissolute, kicked about mass that the Frenchmen style <la Bohme> which
Marx defines as lumpemproletariat. After all, this structureless indefinite anomic
constitution of the lumpemproletariat comes from who conserves hopes for the return to
the order or from who is unable to conceive some order beyond that which he knows
completely lost. Position that makes his political actions just as parodies of changes,
comedies or even masquerades: all terms that Marxs The Eighteen Brumaire uses
to describe revolutions, which are actually attempts to stabilization in chaos.
In the particular case of the proletariat, there is any expectation of return. In this
sense, the destitute of property, nationality, binds of traditional ways of life, or even not

trusted in established social normativities can transform his own lack of original ground
into a political force to radical change of the ways of life. Then, we cannot confound the
affirmation of proletarian condition with a certain form of claim for recognizing of
disrespected ways of life clearly organized in its specificities. On the contrary, the
affirmation of the proletarian condition generates the social classes of subjects without
predicate, which, according to German Ideology, will satisfy themselves hunting in the
morning, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after
dinner in a certain way (and that is the point) that they are not restricted to be only
hunter, or fisher, or shepherd, or even critic.That is, it can happen in a certain way that
the subject do not determine himself integrally in his predicate. It means that the activity
of fishing, rearing-cattle, criticizing cannot be simultaneously identification of subjects.
Similar to Hegel, the setting of subject (its exteriorization) shows something
radically anti-predicative animating the movement of essence. A conclusion not so
different to Marx if we consider workers as the class that is in itself the expression of
the dissolution of all classes () within present society.Working class dissolute every
other classes, because it represents the complete loss of humanity, something that
does not draw a figure in the present image of humanity. In this sense, and close to
Hegelian theory of subject (although Marx could criticize our assimilation, noting the
merely abstract elaboration of the problem), we can consider that the worker could only
overcome his own alienation bringing himself face to face to the deeply undetermined
character of his ground as well as conserving in himself something of this
indetermination. According to Balibar, the arriving of proletariat as political subject is
the appearing of a subject as emptiness, which is not absolutely without practical
determinations.
If it is the case, we can affirm that Marx struggle of classes are not simply a
moral conflict promoted by the defenses for material conditions proper to the
symmetrical appraisal among subjects able to conquer recognition from the perspective
of the integrality of their personalities. The abolition of private propriety must walk
necessarily side by side with the abolition of a psychic economy based on the
affirmation of personality as a category of identity. We can even say that proletariat is
the political name of the social force for identitarian indifferentiation, whose recognition
can completely disarticulate societies organized from the hypostasis of general relations
of property. Marx was very successful in relating this concept to the juxtaposition of the

political logic with sociological description, associating in a deep way real existing
workers (who constituted an important majority of the society) with the concept of
proletariat. However, to sustain such relation is not the necessary condition for
demonstrate the effectiveness of the Marxist concept of proletariat. In the present
historical situation of reconfigured society of work, we should rethink such relation, so
that we can discover other places proper to the manifestation of claims based on an
ontology of subject as presupposed by Marxist construction.

Beyond the principle of cultural difference.

If we accept such hypothesis and post-identitarian horizon, we must consider

some recent alternatives to think a possible theory of recognizing not restricted to a

compensatory politics. In the debate with Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser tries to solve
such question arguing for a certain dualism in which problems of redistribution and
recognizing, although overlap one another, could take in consideration the impossibility
to reduce cultural spheres to economic one. Taking it in consideration, we can interpret
such following affirmation: justice ask us to conceive cultural recognition and social
equality in such way that both of them can reinforce themselves in spite of obstacle one
another. Especially because economic and cultural injustices overlaps usually
themselves in such way that both are dialectically reinforced.
In this sense, according to Fraser, an important challenge in theories of
recognition would be produced if we articulate economic and cultural injustices. From
this perspective, Nancy Fraser presents a distinction between two models of political
action. There would be compensatory politics related to dynamics of recognition and
redistribution. For example, politics concerned with the perpetuation of the Liberal
Welfare as well as something that Fraser calls official multiculturalism.
Moreover, we can add a consideration to Frazers interpretation making explicit
that the articulation between economic Liberalism and multiculturalism uses the
affirmation of cultural difference as a compensatory way to paralyzed politics against
social effects proper to Liberal economic policies. In order to compensate such political

paralyzes, society figures itself as an atomized network of strict identitarian groups

dealing constantly their own recognition in a fragile dynamic of tolerance.
We must say fragile dynamic of tolerance because cultural identities are, at
least in this context, defensive constructions in that they are defined upon relations of
opposition and exclusion. Cultural identities (such as these one related to the affirmation
of the particularity proper to ways of life structured by ethnical groups, nationalities,
religions, modes of sexuality, or even traditional systems of habits) would define
themselves under tension between identities and differences, if we dont want to accept
the typically Liberal illusion of a pluralism without antagonism. An illusion based on
forgetting that political and psychological identities are constructed within asymmetrical
relations of power, making them expressions of strategies of defense or domination.
The sensibility to such antagonism would become less intense only by the consolidation
of a strongly equalitarian space beyond cultural differences rather than by an extreme
politicization of the cultural field.
We can find some convergences between such demand and Frazers belief on the
existence of radical policies which articulates socialist practices of redistribution with
practices of deconstruction of cultural differences. Such deconstruction appears as a
necessity because we can create new forms of solidarity and equality resulting from the
conception of subjects as supports of deconstructive practices able to modify
structurally the system of social representation, constituting multiple differences in
constant movement. The failure to establish myself within a rigid identity, but to
recognize the need to deal with something I do not completely understand in terms of
identity, would take me to greater solidarity with what , on the other , I am unable to
integrate. If such new forms of solidarity would work, then they could eliminate the
merely compensatory character proper to politics of cultural recognition, because those
new forms of relationship wouldnt allow that the regressive dynamic of the identitarian
conflicts hides the political impossibility to change the economical reality. According to
Fraser, this new solidarity could eliminate the regressive dynamic of such cultural
conflicts, opening space to a substantial sharing of subjective discomforts derived from
static identities. That is, instead of simply removing the cultural clashes of discussions
related to politics , we see a tendency that seeks to prevent that the debate about culture
does not enter into a regression dominated by issues relating to the recognition of the
production of identities.

Nevertheless, I would like to evaluate the possibility to arguing for a relative

different tendency. Maybe the problem do not consist only to dissociate culture to
identity, but go further and insists on the necessity of a theory of recognition able to
dissociate politics to culture. The debate about the relation between redistribution and
recognition reduces social relations to two fields: culture and economics. However, it is
necessary to add politics as an autonomous field, because maybe is impossible to
separate culture from the production of defensive identities, but we must evaluate the
possibility to affirm politics rising from something that we can call potency of
depersonalization.

Politics of indifference

I would like to defend that the political field must to be differentiated from
cultural and economical fields. A possible consequence from such consideration states
that identities can and should find their own space for development but without
politicize this place. Actually, politics des-identifies subjects from their cultural
differences, des-places them from their nationalities or geographical identities, and even
des-individualize them from their psychological attributes. Above all, politics is a force
of des-differentiation able to open a productive field of social indetermination. Political
subjects do not support individual representative claims of certain particular groups or
classes. Under such conditions, claims that appears in the political field are only the
emulation of singularities trying to inscribe themselves into a simple game of forces
rather than a very political confrontation with a concrete force for change. Actually,
politics ignores individuals and perhaps this is one of the most contemporary Marx
teaching.
A political point of view we should say that the space of cultural differences
must be a space of absolute indifference. However, what really means the proposition
that states cultural differences as objects of political indifference? At first, we should
remember what it doesnt mean. We cant ignore that particular programs for affirmative
action plays a strategic role, nor that laws in defense of historically more vulnerable
social groups (such as women, immigrants, homosexuals, transvestites, etc.) must
strategically state cultural differences in order to strengthen the social sensibility to the

particular vulnerability of such groups. Nevertheless, in these cases we are talking about
the plasticity that political action has to impose real conditions which ensure the
assertion of egalitarianism , and one of these conditions is the construction of awareness
of the vulnerability of groups historically dispossessed. In such cases, we can talk about
a strategically provisory use of the notion of identity.
Moreover, affirming cultural differences as objects of political indifference
means to argue for the autonomy of politics in relation to culture as well as to economy.
Such autonomy derives from the belief in the fact that only the political field can affirm
itself as a radical equality field in the extent that the cultural and economic fields will
always characterize themselves by the inequalities able to be attenuated, although never
eliminated at all. If it is true that there is a social dynamic of culture characterized by the
affirmation of the multiplicity of constantly changing differences, then we can conclude
too that there is a potency of fragmentation and differentiation haunting the economic
field. From Hegels Outlines of Philosophy of Right, we can admit that the circulation of
wealth and properties in the sphere of the civil society among individuals will always
produce inequalities, even that the function of State would be attenuate or control them.
Actually, we can find alternative ways beyond the free market economy; we can open
social spaces where common good can circulate in a more effective way and where is
possible to consider the common ownership. However, the principle of accumulation is
inherent to the economic activity because of the equation between capital and
performance, which probably will never be (nor should be) eliminated at all, except in
the case of the conclusion for the necessity to a horizon of complete statization of the
ways of production.
In contrast to it, we shall try to determine better what could be an autonomous
political sphere in front of culture and economy. Therefore, should we be obligated to
defend the strictly political claims, which does not express themselves neither as
economic justice nor as claims for recognizing cultural particularities? In this case, our
interpretation would be certainly in vain because we will probably not find claims like
these. Politics does not have a place of its own. However, arguing for autonomy of
politics allows us to understand why there are social struggles, which are not restricted
to the inner logic of economic advantages or the defenses for cultural particularities.
The experience of politics is not far from that one proper to economy and culture.
Actually, it serves to both of them in the extent that it aims to impel economic and

cultural claims toward a certain affirmation of a radical egalitarianism able to expose

the universal function of particular struggles when they are invested with a symbolic
meaning which transcends their own particularity.2
If it is the case, however, it is not so clear why we should presuppose the autonomy of
politics as condition to arguing for existence of something like an anti-predicative
recognition. As it may seem that we are just on the understanding of the political field
as forming universality of rights. An understanding that would lead us to the idea that
social demands become political only when private interests appear as an expression of
universal rights that has not yet applied to vulnerable groups. Then, we have subjects
predicated through the judicial announcement of positive rights previously denied to
them rather than subjects considered in an anti-predicative way. The expression antipredicative recognition makes sense only if we affirm that something proper to a
subject constitutes him or her as a potency of undeterminacy. A consideration that let us
with a fundamental question, to know: how do we recognize politically such potency
that does not predicate itself?
In order to consider the possible conditions of such recovering, we must think
about what really means to affirm the necessary existence of an anti-predicative
dimension of recognizing. In our case, it means an attempt to develop strategies of
recognition that can avoid mechanisms of institutionalization. Such strategies will
propose a radical deinstitutionalization in which we will atrophy the law, rather than
extend its influence on social experience. This topos of a life beyond the sphere of rights
so present in Giorgio Agambens reflection on a possible form of a destituent power
could be absorbed in a theory of recognizing able to open fundamental space to
irreducible experiences of subjective indetermination and their political consequences.
In fact, when somebody expresses such ideas, some people consider it as an
insidious form of Liberalism, as if we would repeat the sound of the old mantra: less
state intervention. Consequently, deinstitutionalizing would means let society free to
create ways of life, closing the eyes for experiences of oppression and economic
vulnerability. However, we can think in another way. We can say that
deinstitutionalizing means to create something like zones of cultural indifference",
that is, zones in which society exercises its indifference to cultural differences and their
2 LACLAU, On Populist Reason, p. 246

anthropological determinations. This may pass, for example, by the withdrawal of

legislation on customs, family and self-determination, while we seek to strengthen the
legal sensitivity to processes of economic spoliation. To recognize problems of
redistribution as problems that require being addressed in their specificity serves here
not to defend modes that they should be subjected to the same logic that the very
cultural difference issues. Which brings us to the phrase : strong regulation of economic
relations and weak regulation of social relations . We could even say that the problems
of redistribution should be profoundly regulated within the legal system , to ensure that
the recognition process can develop into a zone of indifference in which law becomes
inoperative.

The idea of processes of deinstitutionalization able to create zones of

indifference surges from an admittedly heterodox appropriation of Marx consideration
on class-struggle and the proletariat. These concepts allow to open the space for forces
of dedifferentiation in the political scene. This force is fundamental to the production of
political subjects and appears in its productive potency only through the retracting of the
sphere of rights. Actually, it is the retracting that allows the indifferent production of
singular ways of life.
At this point, a paradigmatic example is elucidative. It refers to the
deinstitutionalization of marriage. Fair questions related to the expansion of rights to
homosexual marriage permeates our contemporary societies, in order to protest for
equalitarian juridical dispositions in respect of the existent civil rights for marriage.
However, a more consistent approach really should radicalize such demand stating that
the state simply fail to legislate on the form of marriage , keeping up to legislate
exclusively on the economic relations between couples or other forms of " affective
groups " . It would be a radical mode to conceive the principle of opening the marriage
to other social patterns distincts from the disciplinary structure of the heterosexual
bourgeoisie family and its biopolitical mode to govern life. In spite of State extends law
to other cases that it do not deal with (as the homosexual ones), we should just eliminate
the law creating a zone of deinstitutionalized indifference.
The classical counterargument consists to say that State would abandon the more
vulnerable people (as women presented in the example), if this institution do not

legislate no more on marriage. However, there is a major problem. In spite to legislate

its own questions (such as economic relations of the family, or the legal separation of
estate, the pension bill, etc.), State legislates on questions out of its competence (the
form of the affective choice of the subjects, that is, the particular flexibility proper to
ways of life in constant mutation and production). Actually, the juridical dispositive of
the State shall legislate on questions of economic order in spite of questions of the
affective field. However, marriage is not simply an economic contract. It is, or should be
at least, the recognition of affective binds produced as particular expression of the
affective circuits proper to emancipate subjects. In this sense, State can legislate on
restricted economic question on marriage or other forms of stable relationship, keeping
silence on what form these relationships should have (if between man and women, two
women, or two women and one man, etc.). That is, in reference to affective forms,
juridical dispositive are not able to predicate the multiple forms of possibility, but it
absorbs the multiple effectiveness of the possibilities. According to the juridical
perspective, such multiplicity shall be undistinguishable.