Abstract:
Most analyses of the individual’s role in politics are either framed around individualist
ideologies, addressed to the problem of freedom, or directed within an ethical and
moral framework to the choices and responsibilities of individual subjects. Against the
idea of the individual as an ontologically given form, this thesis takes up the question
of the subject and its relation to politics by placing it within the production of
abstraction internal to the practical metaphysics of the capital-relation. Set around
two overlapping objectives, the thesis seeks to first demonstrate how the figure of the
individual subject is overdetermined by intersecting forms of real abstraction, and
second to theorise the prospects for politics after the individual. Situating abstraction
first in layers of computational capital, it then demonstrates how the individual is
made real via modalities of abstraction that reach from value, through property and
law, and into forms of financialisation. By analysing the multiple determinations of
the abstract individual in this way, the thesis identifies an impasse of politics
encrypted within the capital-relation by the dual form-determinations of value and
the individual. The second objective is to consider an orientation to forms of thought
and politics that interrupt, break down and exceed this limit. I move through this
prescriptive frame by first offering an account of transindividuality as a strategy of
critique for breaking with the false dichotomy of the individual and collective.
Although the transindividual provides an essential analytic frame, it nonetheless
leaves open the question of politics. Finally, by turning to the question of politics
directly, I offer a theory of a political form that maps subjectivation and difference to
the idea of communism.