Life is never enough to ground politics. We don’t want life, but good life, just life. We forget very often Aristotle’s view on politics and logos. For him logos allows humans to discern good from evil. Life is a presupposition for politics, but it can never count as bare life. Here we must contradict Dussel. Living labor is not the source of value. It is its presupposition. Labor is always in Marx a social activity. We may speak of modes or ways of living collectively, but this is not immediate corporal life. There is no secret of capital, no exteriority constituting its truth. Marx finds the limits of capital in its contradictions. To proceed otherwise would have meant reintroducing a form of transcendence, something outside the world.
Vitalism was ruinous for politics, especially after Nietzsche. For him culture was necessarily linked with self-deceit. Morals, the crown of culture, were but a hidden form of domination. There is only life. And life only wants something: to live more. Or, to put it in Spinozist terms, life only wants to persevere in its being. Now, life can be healthy or not. Life wants to live healthy and powerful. There is no other goal for life than increasing its powers. Now, once my powers are not limited from within, they must now vanquish limitations coming from outside. The others are my enemies, a risk for my life. Collective life must be a constant struggle for domination. But since culture is always based on some form of community, it is ipso facto a form of lie that decreases the powers of life. And since social powers are objective, grounded in institutions and practices, nobody can really escape. The individual is powerless… unless he manages to rule from above the world, as an existential prince. This is the Übermensch, the existential hero. He lives in society, he obeys the law, but deep inside he knows everything is a lie. He knows everything, because he knows there is nothing to know. Every night he goes to bed knowing he is the only aristocrat of spirit, capable of enduring the lack of meaning of life. He destroys the world in his head, allowing it to exist deprived of legitimacy and truth. This is breve individual affirming his or her life in isolation.
The magnificent Deleuzian-Guattarian conceptual forest inherits Nietzsche’s life heroism. The follow his genealogy of morals and create their own version of the timeless hero called Übermensch. Unlike Aristotle and his politics, Nietzsche and his heirs claim to be beyond good and evil. How can politics be grounded without this elementary ethical stance? More or less power for life is not a question of politics. Unless we destroy the egalitarian aim of politics and reduce it to the sheer exercise of power and domination.