In phonetics to ‘articulate’ means to speak, to use the mouth, tongue and jaws to utter meaningful sounds. But ‘articulation’ also refers to the act or process of jointing, the state of being jointed, a mode of jointing or junction. In thus venturing to speak about two philosophers that have profoundly shaped some of the basic concepts of philosophy, this book takes up the project of charting the diverse ways in which nature and politics come together, buckle on to each other, or get jointed, and by the same token, disjointed as well. But why this particular choice at this particular moment in time? What does it mean, today, to bring ‘nature’ and ‘politics’ together, in so intimate a proximity? It no longer seems feasible to distinguish neatly between politics and nature as belonging to discrete chains of signification that include human, artifice, culture, on the one hand, animal, plant, elemental force, on the other. Instead of remaining apart, intact, these two chains appear, like a DNA helix, to entwine inexorably, their trajectories bound together more than at any other point in history. But equally, the basic categories of conceptually organising the world no longer seem self-evidently ‘natural’. At a juncture when our cultural horizon is narrowing in on the post-human, the blurring of the distinctions between ‘man’ and ‘machine’, ‘natural’ and ‘prosthetic’, ‘creativity and ‘technique’ seems to be calling for abandoning the age-old schemas that have defined Western philosophy. Nature itself is in the process of dying, or, if not that, then certainly of morphing into something beyond recognition. The centuries-old alliance between nature and politics, an alliance premised on the belief that the basic political categories were, in some important sense, natural categories, is receding fast.

And yet, at a very fundamental level, and despite the helicoid transformation of nature to include aspects of the categories it was seen until very recently as being in opposition to, nature continues to haunt our political discourses in multiple ways. First of all, it has now become imperative to have a politics for nature. If policies that contain climate change and global warming are to be enunciated, then environmental issues and concerns must come to the forefront of political decision-making. But already, we see in this type of discourse, necessary and urgent as it is, a re-emergence of age-old categories that we thought we had left behind. Concerns about human genome editing, for example, often derive from a reluctance to alter what is ‘natural’ as natural things are generally thought to be healthier and better than artificial things.¹ Such debates indicate a real split at the heart of contemporary thinking about nature, between on the one hand, the eclipse of a ‘pure’ concept of nature, which precedes and circumscribes its derivatives (e.g. technology, history, culture), and on the other, the persistent re-appearance of ‘nature’, not, perhaps, as a master-narrative that provides meaning to political practices and institutions, but through its effects on discourses and modes of political engagement.

So we are still entitled and indeed have a responsibility to ask: what do we mean by ‘nature’ today? How is ‘nature’ constructed as a concept, and why does it make a re-appearance at critical junctures of our political discourse? A consistent attempt to answer these questions shows, I believe, that ‘nature’ was never an incontestable concept, whose meaning was clear and secure, and whose boundaries with other concepts were safely drawn. To put it simply, the question of nature was never settled once and for all. Like those terms in the Platonic dialogues desperately in need of explication, of a common denominator that will draw together their diverse meanings into a single regimen of signification (e.g. virtue, courage, piety), but which no interlocutor is ever able to define, ‘nature’ has always been an elusive term—a concept that was necessitated by others (e.g. technē, technology), but incapable of being defined independently of those others. Even the most cursory glance at a dictionary definition of ‘nature’ will flag up the essential negativity of the word: ‘nature’ refers to the physical world and the processes and laws by which this world is governed, as opposed to humans and human creations, or independently of them. But this decisive addition, ‘independently’, in fact conceals a crucial dependency: it suggests that ‘nature’ is understood through its network of relations to other concepts, for example the ‘human’ (or ‘human creations’), to which it is bound even as it is supposed to exclude them. And at the same time, of course, it is questionable whether nature truly excludes the human. Aren’t human beings also ‘natural’ beings?

If we go back to the history of philosophy—and it is one of the contentions of this book that a return to the history of philosophy is necessary—we will find that the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘politics’ have been closely intertwined from the start. In fact, politics per se has been claimed to be the corollary of the distinctive nature of humans that come to the world needy and vulnerable in a double sense: on the one hand, like all natural beings, humans are not self-sufficient but need many things, according to the celebrated formulation of the Republic. On the other hand, however, unlike other natural beings, humans come to the world naked and unequipped to ward off the elements, fight off their enemies and secure their preservation. According to the myth of Epimetheus, which Protagoras narrates in Plato’s dialogue of the same name, powers and abilities were distributed among animals until they were all used up, and there was nothing left to give to the human race, which thus had to go ‘naked, unshod, unbedded and unarmed’ (321c). Two gods took pity on this race, first Prometheus (who, as we know, incurred the wrath of Zeus and paid a high prize for the compassion he showed humans), and subsequently Zeus himself, who commissioned Hermes to bring ‘justice and a sense of shame to humans so that there would be order within cities and bonds of friendship to unite them’. To Hermes’ question whether he should distribute these attributes selectively or to all without exception, Zeus replied: ‘To all’. ‘For cities would never come to be if only a few possessed these’ (322c–d).

This egalitarian vision of politics is part of a broader argument put forward by Protagoras that civic virtue can be taught and learnt, but there is no denying the intimate link it establishes between nature and politics. According to the myth, humans are political beings by virtue of the gift Zeus gave them, but also by virtue of their common heritage from a race (to anthrōpōn genos) that was denied armoury and protection, and had to make up for it by living communally and founding poleis. Two elements jointed together therefore: an essential and insurmountable vulnerability inherent in the human condition, and a divine gift which defines from that moment onwards what it is to be a zoon politikon.

With the advent of modernity, the link between nature and politics will be further complicated. With Thomas Hobbes we have the first attempt to think through the notion of a ‘natural right’ (as different from the Thomistic lex naturalis) in the shape of a fundamental entitlement, encroachment upon which is unjustifiable under all but the most extreme circumstances. At the same time, however, the double significance of nature is sharpened: while it may be the case that rights are conferred to humans ‘by nature’, natural—i.e. non-civic or non-political—forms of association are deemed incapable of securing the most fundamental natural right, the right to life, hence Hobbes’s entreaty to exit the state of nature so that the rule of law can apply and civic relations be established. In this latter sense, nature figures as a negative condition for politics; the state of nature stands at the opposite pole of the civic state, and politics stands to nature as to its negation, even though—and here’s the greatest paradox—it is by reference to nature itself (‘natural rights’) that politics justifies itself.

Notwithstanding the emphasis placed on rights, subjective freedom and individuality by the moderns, there are important continuities between the ancient and the modern tradition of thinking about the political. For both traditions, I argue, nature is an inescapable horizon that frames and conditions politics. On the one hand, nature figures as a negative condition for politics; it is because humans are naturally needy and vulnerable that they get together and form political communities. In other words, ‘nature’ signifies a lack in the human condition for which politics is meant to compensate. Politics in this sense is at the service of life and self-preservation, and channels the energies of the community towards the satisfaction of needs. On the other hand, however, politics also has another sense which lends it a ‘higher’ ethical significance; this sense comes to the fore when the link that connects politics to self-interest, the immediate satisfaction of needs, and the continuation of life gets loosened up, and politics is done sovereignly, in ways that go beyond or may even be at odds with the perceived individual or collective interest. This notion of politics will be fleshed out in the course of the book; for the moment let us underscore the fact that in the tradition from Thucydides to Hegel it has been associated with war and death, with disregard for life and material possessions, but also with generosity and the gift. Though in many ways antagonistic to the concern for self-preservation, this kind of politics is no less a natural offspring, inasmuch as it is the very nature of the zoon politikon, to use Aristotle’s term, that makes it possible.²

Thus, politics emerges before us as a highly contradictory thing: it is intimately connected to the management of need, which in turn gives rise to an economy of exchange and to forms of association that serve primarily the function of securing life. Life, the sheer preservation of life, is affirmed as the reason for founding communities by philosophers as disparate chronologically as Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes. At the same time, however, politics cannot be reduced to a cool-headed calculation of the potential gains and losses as prescribed by economic logic; the decision to enter into and affirm the common bond (and even more, to die for it) requires a ‘leap of faith’, a moment of uncalculated irrationality, because there is no guarantee that what one gives to the community will be remunerated or redeemed at a later stage. This ‘leap of faith’, this act of giving without a predetermined payback date is, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, the ‘excess of the specific nature of the zoon politikon, its excess with respect to the social organisation of relations that benefit the partners’.³ In other words, politics proper turns out to be what transcends the more primitive community of need and calculation of benefits, and inaugurates a higher ethical order in which people, instead of expecting to receive and giving only grudgingly, are ready to give freely. Two politics then: a politics of need and self-interest, of calculation, of expected reciprocity, a politics intimately connected to human beings as ‘natural’ beings with needs and vulnerabilities; and then another politics, a politics of excess, of the incalc...