What does it mean to be anti-social? Potentiality and political ontology in The Buribunks

Abstract

ABSTRACT Carl Schmitt's ‘The Buribunks’ describes a posthuman future where the very human being of the Buribunks is ontologically entangled with the production and dissemination of their diaries. These written records serve as the medium by which Buribunks exist in a socially proper way – that form of life Aristotle, Agamben, Arendt and others refer to as bios. The individual Buribunk may exist as an organism by eating, breathing, etc., but it is only by writing that the Buribunk may live as Buribunk. To exist without writing is, for the Buribunks, not to live – radically reversing the metaphysical stakes of life established through Aristotle's argument on potentiality and Agamben's commentary thereupon concerning (im)potentiality. Drawing on the metaphysics of (im)potentiality in relation to Buribunkian diary-writing, I argue that the injustice of Buribunkdom is the foreclosure of impotentiality. That is to say, through the ‘elimination’ of the ‘anti-social’ individuals who elect not to participate in diary-writing, the Buribunks lack true freedom because their potentiality is only relevant when actualised. Schmitt's story offers a dystopian and cautionary tale about the danger posed by embracing a political ontology that necessarily limits the metaphysical freedom of the individual.