The Concepts of Life and the Living in Societies of Control

Lazzarato’s key intervention in this chapter is the development of an ontology for his philosophy of the event which he does through a rehabilitation of the work of the nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Lazzarato uses Tarde to outline what he calls a “neomondology,” an updating of Deleuze’s use of Leibniz but for a capitalism defined not just by the disciplining of bodies and control of populations, but by a limiting of the possible, in a moment wherein capital works on the virtual, not just actual. Lazzarato argues that Tarde used his theory of monadology to undermine the “massive unities” of capital, labor, and value. Tarde discovers in the monad the idea of a multiplicity of relations that do not depend on the subject nor object, but rather produce them.