Solidarity as a Common Notion

Abstract

The long-lasting crisis caused by neoliberal austerity measures, rampant privatization and destruction of the welfare state in Southern Europe has given rise since 2011 to new forms of collectivity that could best be characterized as transindividual social platforms of diverse constituencies driven by solidarity. With the concept of ‘transindividual’, I seek out a notion of collectivity arising from an open-ended process of individuation where a relational ‘we’ is differentiated and reconstituted every time again on the basis of common capacities put into action rather than being enclosed by a given ideological unity. My argument expands on Étienne Balibar’s theory of the transindividual from which solidarity emerges like a ‘common notion’ in the Spinozist sense, through encounters and actions of individuals gathered by social imagination and practice of a political vision in the public sphere (Balibar 1997). Solidarity structures in Attica (Greece), ‘municipalismos’ in Spain and Catalonia and the ‘Zagreb is Ours’ citizen platform in Croatia are prime examples of social movements promulgated by solidarity that demonstrates a path and logic of transindividuation. What we can learn from them is that affectivity is not sufficient in this process. Social affects, such as indignation, dissipate if they are not transformed into ‘common notions’, in a Spinozist way of a transition from social imagination to political action. The result is another organization of the body politic that could be regarded as transindividuation – a new social fabric of relations around the common and public good. The article elaborates on the social dramaturgy of transindividual solidarity, which entails a performative emergence of a collective subject.

Notes

1 This text is an adaptation of a chapter from the book I co-wrote with Ana Vujanovic, Toward a Transindividual Self: A study in social dramaturgy (Oslo-Brussels-Zagreb: Oslo Academy of the Arts, SARMA, Multimedijalni institut, 2022), pp. 204-27.

2 All quotes from Spinoza are indicated by reference to the part and the proposition from Ethics according to the convention of citing classical philosophical sources.

3 Valeria Graziano’s statement at the Spring Meeting, 18 April, at Performing Arts Forum, Saint-Erme, France. On the criminalization of solidarity see Syllabus (2019).