Is Philosophizing a Part of the Rights of Man?
François Laruelle
In Pourquoi pas la philosophie 4 (October 1984), p.50-66.
The Majority Principle
We can conclude on this affirmation: because the People or the Peoples (of) the One are the depository of the essence of thought, they are no longer defined by the right to think. However, this is so in the sense alone where they no longer need this right and the law such that it is ordinarily conceived to really think, which is another interpretation that would emerge from hypocrisy.
Is there a specific right that belongs to Minorities? Does minoritarian man or man grasped in their essence have rights like the man such that unitary thought aims for has rights without succeeding in determining them? We must first pose these problems to be able to respond to the last question that preoccupies us: is philosophizing a part of the rights of man? We know what philosophy is in question, and of what man is as well, but we do not know what rights can here be questioned, nor if philosophy is one of these rights.
The minority and minorities are themselves a “minoritarian” concept in the philosophical tradition. On the one hand, minority and minorities are still dissociated and not rejoined. On the other hand, the first, the minority, has no explicit status in philosophy that can grant a place to it, and hardly an implicit status in the 18th century where the minority is marginally invoked. And on the other hand still, the minority is nearly never thought for itself, in its specific positivity, but always in opposition to the “majority” and thought as a lack, a privation, an expectation of the majority: either as an imperfection or, in a complementary way, as an inevitable natural necessity. Finally, the minority only intervenes on the juridico-rational mode, a mixed mode that proves that the minority is a concept foreign to the essence of reason that can only denounce it as its Other. For a long time, the minority will remain marked by this quadruple philosophical insufficiency, and confounded with the margins, the peripheral differences that the State or Reason must reduce – in conformity to the unitary exigency.
That it is a matter of the minority or minorities, their criterion has always been posed within and through the majority – outside of them. It is the majority – in all senses of the word – that has always unitarily decided for the minority, and of what they should be. The criterion of major and/or majoritarian thought has been elucidated and definitively posed by Kant and Fichte: think for yourself by putting yourself in the other’s shoes [penser par soi-même en se mettant à la place des autres].
Let’s call this: the Majority Principle.
This formula of human dignity is par excellence what signals the radical philosophical forgetting of Multitudes, the rational denegation of the People. We will return to this. It is enough to imagine the philosophical systems implicated in one such axiom that was elevated to the state of the categorical imperative of the Philosophical Decision, to comprehend that one and several minorities no longer have any other solutions than to rejoin the gyron of Unity. We know the methods, which are as much the methods of pedagogies: the subordination of the accident or the mode to the statist and rational substance; the subsumption under the unitary rules of rational thought and rational sociability; the sublation and interiorization to the Concept; the margin or the periphery, sometimes “difference” and all the modes of alterity attenuated and reduced in the contemporary fashion. These are the forms of serfdom programmed by Reason and above all programmed by the unitary paradigm, a serfdom that makes up a system with the carving out of minorities to which Reason delivers…unto itself. This auto-objectivation is the unitary ideal under the form of these minorities pre-programmed and already animated by the telos of Unity, which allows us to understand that the juridico-political and juridico-pedagogical restriction of the concept of minority was inevitable.
The contemporaries have rediscovered minorities, but as if they have rediscovered the real: under the form of the Other. The confusion of Minorities with the modes of alterity accompanies the confusion of the essence of the real with the Other or transcendence in that which has the most radical or ekstatic: the “as such.” Hence, a reversal of perspective – which is precisely but one reversal – a reversibility of the classical prejudices and the unitary triumph under the mask of reversibility. While the signs of positivity were readable for Kant and Fichte on the side of the majority, common conscience, judgment of the public, open and precisely “public” rationality, and “thinking-in-common” (in Gemeinschaft denken), they have henceforth passed on the side of the margins, modes, accidents, differences and différance, waste and debris. The result? A certainly more positive concept of minorities, a discovery of “difference” equal in theoretical importance to that of “negative magnitudes” and “real opposition” by Kant, a theoretical and perhaps practical softening. However, there was an insertion of a rigor without precedence of Minorities within unitary games.
We perhaps reckon that the axiom of “public” and “open” rationality, the axiom of public judgment as the factum of “common conscience” – think for yourself by putting yourself in the other’s shoes – has become, had to become in Nietzsche, such a terrifying force of unitary levelling that it had to acquire with the contemporaries. Thinking for oneself represents the thought of the other for themselves: the thought of the Other represents a thinking for oneself for the Other. Instead of the simply analytic or synthetic, above all synthetic, interpretation of the relations of the Self and the Other (no I without You, no You without I – Fichte), the interpretation is reflected in-itself, crossing itself, and is both analytic and synthetic, interiorized and intensified. Because it was but one relation, the relation of the I and the You imploded the rationalist and public Cogitamus and has become the radically plural Cogitamus, cogitative multiplicities have replaced the foolish games of the I and the You and filled their gap with an intersubjective continuum that Nietzsche calls an “ego ipsissimum.” The unitary structure of self-consciousness proceeding through auto-objectivation has metamorphosized into “difference” but without losing anything of its unitary rage to the contrary. The You stopped being another I to become the Other as such, and the I and the You mutually assume each other, reciprocally support each other, and affirm each other in a reversible way. The I stopped enclosing the encounter with the You in the straitjacket of the synthesis of the transcendental imagination to deliver the I and the You to the power of reversibility, and this is superior still to that of reciprocal determination: it is the power of the and that is superior to the terms. An I represents a You is the immediate sign of a You for an I: this is what the juridico-rational imperative of the majority has become.
As we see clearly here, there is no majority without a process of identification even if it were towards the Other, towards the pure power of the Other person, rather than the Other I having become too identified with itself and global. That identification becomes partial and stops being global or specific distinguishes these modern “minorities” from the ancient majority, but this distinction is only made to better assure the triumph of the majoritarian spirit. The minorities are the new majority that are hardly displaced and above all generalized, making up the “majority,” and form a chain of regularity and the law. The I is the I of the You, and the You is the you of the I: the You is therefore no longer undoubtedly the simple effect of the auto-objectivation of an I, but the de-multiplication and crossed conjugation of “terms,” their simultaneous/alternating entanglement fundamentally changes nothing to the unitary Ideal. The I-of-the-you-of-I, the collective cogitamus is content with relaying the traditional, more-than-classical prejudices. For one last time perhaps – but we are not even sure – it makes them implode, forming a brilliant constellation, the milky way of universal subjectivity, the white trail of a subject who is also object, the trail of a production who is also a You.
Thinking-in-community (In Gemeinschaft denken) was inevitable as this imperative sublime of rational publicity that one imposes upon the Cogito extracted from its solitude, its secret and madness, that gives rise to an unchaining without precedent from the majoritarian solution towards the minoritarian problem and projects Minorities onto the scene. Henceforth, Multitudes who are the essence of humanity, Multitudes that we must call solitudes – nothing but human Solitudes – are delivered without restraint unto communication, unto the phenomenological and communicational constraints. Minorities are summoned to manifest and communicate themselves, “to surface” and extract themselves from the secret that was their whole life – and what remains of it perhaps. This enraged struggle of the contemporaries against the rationalist hinter-worlds where they blind themselves, definitively hiding another essence from them, the specific essence of the Peoples (of) the One, and dissimulates their uselessness from an access, a passage, a paideia, and transference “towards” the One.
The Minority Principle
The unitary Ideal, in philosophy, the law, and ethics – and the philosophers know this, even when “division” becomes utterly positive – has been: divide and rule. There is no reign without division, no unity without transcendence. This is why Minorities or Multitudes who draw their essence from their indivision – but really or transcendentally experienced, as the content of their immediate givenness (to) themselves – could not be perceived in the unitary horizon that thinks the terms in and from their “totality” or, at least, in their relation, which anticipates them in any case, that does not follow them without also preceding them. But what if the Terms a priori precede, by getting rid of any chance of recurrence, the Rapports or Relations? What if radically finite Individuals preceded Intersubjectivity (rational or not, public or not, “relational” or not) always posed somewhat in the element of transcendence? And what if there was a multiplicity in = as real immanence itself? What if there was a monadic multiplicity that absolutely preceded the monadology that the contemporaries apparently have not freed themselves?
What we call the Minority Principle – to be quick, for it is not strictly speaking a principle, it is not a fundamental law of Reason – is the recognition of having posed Individuals from the start of any thought. This is otherwise less an exigency (ethical, legal, philosophical, that is, rational) than the recognition of an immediate given. Individuals can only be immediate givens if they are the real itself, the absolutre phenomenality before any ethical, juridical, rational determination, etc. … so that the Minority Principle is the recognition of the radical finitude of Individuals – and to this extent where the People are the content of phenomenal experience of Individuals – a finitude that is identically their absolute autonomy. The real minority, the real concept of minorities, is therefore not – as we know now – the return or reversal of the majoritarian and rational concept of the minority. The real minority is the essence of the “individual” and no longer “individuel” essence of man. Finitude itself stops being comprised as the Other of Reason to become a specific region of experience, and even an absolute sphere of existence, because real finitude is an irreversible absolute precession in relation to majoritarian Reason. The consequence is that positive minoritarian finitude stops being a margin, a periphery, a sub-system of Reason – that is, it stops being a beyond of Reason. The Principle of Reason or the Majority Principle is beyond the Minority Principle, in the sense where this beyond is now determined by the “determination in the last instance” or as the finite topography of Reason.
When they are thought in their essence, torn from the horizon of the State or the Polis, Minorities stop being what the contemporaries would like them to be: a spare motor of history, a new piece destined to replace the old somewhat breathless “Class Struggle” and whose failures, sensed by our mechanics, let the vehicle of history get bogged down in its own debris. Minorities, the peoples (of) the One are not a new revolutionary “base.” They are rather the real “terrain” of history and the State, but only as their Determination in the last instance. But this, the Determination in the last instance, no longer at all has the form of a contradiction or a difference – the form of a struggle in general: it is a finite topography for Majorities or “Authorities.”
The finite essence of man and the minority
The task of a minoritarian thought is quite distinct from the contradictory, absurd project of a “philosophy of the minority” or “philosophy of minorities.” The task is to determine these concepts in a new way on these four points: to make the minority and minorities join one another; to give them a decisive place, making them the “keystone” of another way of thinking; assigning them a positivity of essence, an autonomy acquired a priori prior to any confrontation with the “majority”; and finally to liberate them from the juridico-political and more broadly rational context that inhibits or limits their philosophical flourishing by giving/refusing them the universality of categories.
Yet the point is certainly not to transfer these “unitary” functions without decisive modifications to them. The concept of the positive and sufficient “minority” can only be conquered by the destruction of its juridico-rational concept and the juridico-rational concept of the “majority” as the foundation of the Rights of Man. The law thus requires a more radical experience of its essence and reason cannot claim to exhaust it. However, we now know that the destruction of the juridico-rational foundation of the Rights of Man is not the sufficient condition of an “access” to Minorities, or that it is precisely but one “access” – that is, a supplementary falsification. The minority is positive and given as first in a specific, transcendental and not empirical, experience. This experience is what there is of the most intimate and most irremediable in Man, and “decides” the fate of the law as the fate of philosophy.
To characterize humanity in its minoritarian essence, we can say it schematically as follows: we stop making humanity an ideal predicate (psychological, historical, biological, etc. … ontological in general) and make man an essence before humanity, but an essence-subject, a concrete or real essence because this essence is defined as the One itself. Man is the essence who has never been a predicate. Man is the subject who has never been humanity. What is the point? The point is to “reconcile” – but this term no longer suits us here – the subject and the essence. On the one hand, we do not “reconcile” opposites, we grasp them in their unity as immediate givens before their metaphysical distinction and their dialectical unity. On the other hand, it is not the subject and the substance that are thus given before their separation, but the subject as the real and determinant essence (in the last instance alone). Transcendental Multitudes or Minorities are the a-philosophical concept of the People, and the People thus experienced as an immediate given are nothing of a substance, a totality, an Idea, a Spirit, etc. … and nothing moreover of the margins, the fringes or interstices of a totality.
The unreflected transcendental experience of the One allows us to think this “unity” – a unary rather than unitary unity – of the subject (and) the human essence before their disjunction. The human essence of man stops being this universal predicate with a thousand faces who unitary philosophers indulge, who always have an experience of truncated man even when they claim to liberate man from anthropology and humanism. Man is a radically singular, living or concrete essence, a lived experience, and as such man precedes all philosophical essences of singularity. Man makes these philosophical essences the simple mode of a universal, indeed a genus. The People can only be outside-of-philosophy and precede philosophy if their essence is the real itself such that the People do not need any philosophical predicate to be defined and constituted. The People are unengendered because they absolutely precede – not relatively precede – the political, cultural, biological, economic, historical attributes, etc. …, with which one claims to reconstitute the People and what they attempt in vain to make singular, that is, absolutely determined, the infinite intersection or convergence. Man is not this “animal who is not yet fixed,” according to a Nietzschean formula that condenses all of Greco-contemporary rubbish. Man does not have to be fixed because man is not an animal (rational, historical, political, ontological, etc. …). Man is absolutrely and immediately “fixed,” or, rather, determined from and through their very essence. It is Nietzsche – not as a man but as a philosopher – who is a philosophizing animal not yet fixed in his becoming-animal.
It is with the same method that we will stop making the minority a predicate, a necessarily universal one (and even a transcendental predicate), overlapping with other predicates that would overdetermine it (economic, political, lingual, sexual, etc. …). Here again, the point is not simply that of a reconciliation of humanity and minority, an operation that makes up a part of the day-to-day [ordinaires] miracles of the unitary style, analytico-synthetico-dialectico-differential miracles, etc. … When at least they are experienced under their absolute or unreflected form, humanity, subjectivity, minority, reality, etc. … are concrete essences immediately given (to) themselves on a non-thetic or non-positional mode of oneself. The unreflected transcendental experience is the pre-philosophical criterion of any possible thought or any “anthropo(logical)” use of a nondescript category or statement. This implies the non-pertinence of traditional inclusions (analytic, synthetic, differential, etc….) of these real, non-thetic essences such as subjectivity, humanity, and minority. Therefore – and we finally have the right to understand it in a finite or irreversible meaning – they are “ante-predicative” experiences. It is impossible to subsume the Minorities as Peoples (of) the One under attributes or universals, and furthermore it is impossible to reduce them to these attributes or universals. To take only one of these ante-predicative experiences, “minority” is a transcendental, that is, real essence, and “minority” is an immanent rather than transcendent essence, an “experience” rather than an Idea. Furthermore, and complementarily, “minority” is not a fact – a social fact, a lingual fact, a cultural fact, a sexual fact, an economic fact, etc. …
Think for yourself by putting yourself in another’s shoes?
The recourse to the Other is the type of solution that prolongs a badly posed question. In reality, all questions are by definition badly posed because they deny as such, as questions, the immediate givens of what is positively deprived of question and non-being: the People. There is no People Question or Minority Question as there is, perhaps, a “Jewish Question,” or as there is very certainly a “question of Being.” When will thought stop viciously redoubling the Other, inscribing Transcendence in Transcendence, thus confounding the Other in its real essence with alterity? It is not so much the real Other as it is ideal alterity that the contemporary systems draw their resource and errancy. One will be content with making the Other a predicate, no doubt a special one, a predicate that carries in some way all others, but remains of the nature of an attribute, that “veers” towards the state of universal alterity.
In fact, the Other is immediately and directly experienced “in” subjectivity itself as a structure of the non-thetic givenness (to) oneself of the One, consequently without passing through its own mediation, without being idealised like the Other-of-the-Other, without giving rise to a universal attribute and an unlimited transcendence. The You that I am in my essence or rather as my essence – and to assume that this problematic of the Other person (the problematic of solipsism) still makes sense here – has never first been a transcendent You, a more or less interiorized Other person ensuing within the immanence – the ideal immanence – of an I. The man that I am in a radically immanent way is anterior to the disjunction of the I and the You. The man that I am is in a sense, if you will, already an Other person, but an Other person who has not previously been a face-to-face [vis-à-vis], who is not separated from myself…through oneself, who does not repose “in-itself” to come to affect me by its alterity…from this very alterity.
Unitary philosophy can do nothing against the People if it does not surreptitiously redouble the Other, if it does not begin by wanting to deracinate the Other from its immediate, non-thetic, inherence (to) “myself.” What the Minorities do not know, at least from their essence – they nevertheless have the multitude for their concrete essence – is rather this transcendence of the Other person, above all when it is used towards becoming the power nude or voided of “ontological” alterity. Minorities are multiple without having to identify themselves with an Other, that they are already in a non-positional way. This identification is only necessary outside of them, when the Other itself has attempted to render itself autonomous in relation to the experience of its essence and reflects itself in itself. In the absolute sphere of Minorities, one can undoubtedly say that the I is also a You, but – under all reservations – is a You who does not want this I at all to have the structure of a conscience, self-objectivation, and a mixture of identity and alterity as two separated principles. The Other is given as Other in an unreflected way as immediately as the One (to) oneself and, consequently, the Other is neither an avatar of the I nor a principle exterior to the I. The Other is probably a necessary dimension for any kind of multiplicity, but transcendence or alterity are not. The Other-without-alterity is not a predicate. The Other-without-alterity is an immediate given.
This is why we oppose the formula of rational majority that wants for one to think by themselves (durch sich selbst) by putting themselves in the shoes of the Other with several arguments. On the one hand, the People exist before consciousness, they are non-thetic or non-positional (of) themselves, and if they “think” it is uniquely under an unreflected form (there is “only” immediate givens). The People exclude from their ipseity, from their singularity, rather, any mediation through an act of thinking or through a “distant” or reflective thought – a faith. On the other hand, the People are the Other from the outset, given (to) themselves as Other – the Other-without-alterity – and therefore do not have to be identified with the Other: at least in the essence of the Individual, if not beyond it, there is no place of the Other, the Other scene of the I.
There is no I without You, no You without I…: how do we not approve these very beautiful formulae that make intersubjectivity a categorical imperative? How can we denounce the habitual unitary hypocrisy present there? What innocence and insolence must we dare to consign it the whole will to domination that is expressed in the ideal of the “majority,” with its simple “reversal” no doubt, but also its “differe(a)nce”?
The concept of “(in) the place of the Other” is one of these “interesting” fetishes to which contemporary unitary thought (and psychoanalysis, of course) gets along with, but it leaves it unthought because the concept allows it to think, and from which it cannot perceive the vicious character of redoubling or repetition from its own forces. The supreme form of the transcendental illusion (what Kant, Fichte, Heidegger, etc. … began to denounce without giving themselves the means to carry this enterprise to term) is certainly not in the refusal of the reciprocal determination of the I and the You, in the solipsism that forgets or negates the synthesis of opposites through the Transcendental Imagination; or even in metaphysics that forgets difference, the différance as such of being and the Other. Rather, it is in the refusal, the forgetting – do these terms still suit for what now matters? – of the “individual” essence of the I (and) the You such that it is experienced even before their “philosophical” disjunction and synthesis.
The need that the I has of the You and reciprocally signals enough the willed state of unendingness to which unitary philosophy agrees to leave the I and the You to couple them between themselves and with History, the State, Language, etc. … It can only lack man because it can only miss man – this is the logic of domination, proper to this way of thinking. The “by yourself” that defines the autonomy of juridico-rational majority reposes on an abyss of non-thought that unitary thought…believes to be bearing through the interminable process and through the process of the interminable, while it is manoeuvred throughout by this insufficient determination of the essence of the I or the People.
The minoritarian essence of the law
We can now respond to the question: is philosophizing a part of the rights of man? On the one hand, we have subtracted man, the radical anthropic essence, from their juridico-rational definition. The problem is no longer posed in the same way of knowing if man has rights. Rights in general no longer serve to define the essence-of-the-multitude of man, determining the essence-of-the-multitude of man as a juridico-philosophical mixture, and even we will no longer let ourselves be seduced and benumbed by the statist concept of the “rights of minorities.” On the other hand, what is then the “minoritarian” status of the law and rights, if Minorities are no longer defined and legally “protected”?
Here, it is hardly possible to give a detailed analysis of this problem, but the principle of the solution is the following. Grasped in its minoritarian essence or its finite phenomenal content, the law is the ensemble of operations that limits – but a priori, even before State intervention – the unitary grip (majoritarian, rational, public, etc. …) of the State over Minorities or the People – in which they are not a consequence of. The law – no longer having its foundation within the rational essence of man but serving, to the contrary, to limit the unitary grip in general and under all its forms (even the most “differentiated” or the most “différantiated” – changes not only its essence or foundation, but its nature or intimate constitution and consequently its relation to the State. Even its “limitational” and “protective” function is no longer at all of the same type (intra-rational, or the mode of the unitary, etc. …) as that of rational law. In particular, the paradox of a minoritarian experience of the law, when it has eliminated the circle of a legal conception of minorities, is to make the law an “a priori defense,” a resistance that even precedes what it resists. Man or the People are never a piece of the public machine that they determine without recurrence. Law is therefore, like philosophy re-thought in a minoritarian mode, in the place of what Issue III (Theory of the Philosophical Decision) called the Other or Non-Thetic Transcendence and which was presented as the real or transcendental A priori – respectively: the “empirical” or juridically auto-interpreted law. The essence of this minoritarian-thought law is not at all juridical in turn. One would doubt that this paradox would be insoluble for “majoritarian” or unitary thought – but this is the whole interest of this notion.
Finally, philosophy is a part of this law that no longer defines man, but what man defines. That philosophizing is a part of the “rights of man” in the dominant and classical sense of this word is a question that even in this framework has hardly been posed: one would be content with ordinarily with the “liberty of thinking” or “opinion” disguised as philosophy, which otherwise sufficiently marks the rationalist and post-rationalist flattening of philosophizing into thinking-by-opinion. Regardless, the “liberty of philosophizing” would be an exigency as aleatory and unstable, as hypocritical as the “liberty of thinking.” Is it aleatory as a fact, required as a right? Precisely, the problem is no longer now to be content with its hypocritical and unitary mixtures, where the liberty of philosophizing has for its real necessary condition the refusal to philosophizing and makes a system with it. This system is not only a state of fact from which the philosopher sheds tears – for the philosopher is the most shameful of crocodiles. Even in the theory and foundation of the law, there must be a refusal of philosophizing that one can combine with the possibility of philosophizing. To be more clear: this refusal to philosophize is not at all the minoritarian outside-of-philosophy, the sufficiency of Multitudes (of) the One who do not need philosophy to exist. Contrarily, it is the violent and ambivalent refusal to the People the “right” and not only the fact of philosophizing, all by partially and otherwise recognizing this right to them. The unitary law is always a forfeiture [dé-dit], a de-legalizing [de-droit], the cunning operation of giving-refusing and granting-removing. And if we cannot grant without removing, indeed, Minorities spontaneously estimate that they have nothing to be granted and nothing to be granted from no one, and the ethical distinctions of the right and the fact, law or rights as exigencies or as “to conquer,” Minorities are indifferent, for they know from the outset that the vice is in the law itself such that it is thought and not only practiced, that this law is immediately a non-law – an insult.
Philosophizing, or even establishing the law, is therefore for Minorities an activity that they determine a priori, and in a radical way, before the institutions and the State do so by “recognizing” the “law” and “give them the means.” It is possible that the State intervenes still within this activity between the philosopher and the lawyer, the legislator of mores and the legislator of reason. But if there is one “law” acquired a priori and as the “real limitation” of the grip of statist-unitary philosophy and the law, it can no longer maintain the same relations with the philosophical or juridical project of the State, and the State can no longer claim to determine it either. The truth is that the People, thought in their essence, determines in the last instance and in a finite way the existing or empirical law, and the law, among other things, is determined by this minoritarian law in which we have said that it is an a priori defense against the State and its law.
To extend the effects of this “change of terrain,” through which we stop subordinating the People, that is, man, to the law and philosophy, to order the law and philosophy to man, we will add this. The question, do we still have the right to the philosopher?, is also a bad question, that is – as we know – still a question. The “right to…the right of…,” to have rights and, among other things, a right to philosophize – which one could, for example, demand and argue against the restrictions that the State puts at the dispensation of philosophy – can no longer itself be of the nature of the law. The right to the law [Le droit au droit] is only the vicious or unitary foundation that is the most constant presupposed of legal philosophy. The essence of the law is not more legal than the essence of philosophy is philosophical, and yet, despite this “negation,” these essences are positive: the law has its finite and real essence in Individuals. Individuals are what give the law its phenomenality or reality. The law, not more than philosophy, is not first given in a tradition: it must be integrally produced and give rise to an activity of “juridical fiction” or juridical possibles, of jurisfiction [jurifiction], as philosophy gives rise to an activity of philo-fiction when it is deployed in its element of non-thetic transcendence. However, this “activity” is immediately, through its essence, also an immediate given of the “individual” experience that finite subjects lead by themselves. Said otherwise: the minoritarian or finite essence of the law has as its effect, not as its condition, the exclusion of the fetishistic “right of minorities.” Of course, nothing is more real, nothing is more “effective” at least, than this law…
en-demic 