Le commun
At Dardot and Laval’s, *the common* refers neither to a thing, nor a resource, nor a shared heritage: it is the political principle of an activity through which people engaged in the same task bind themselves to one another. A river, a piece of software, a forest are not *common* by nature; they become so only when a practice establishes them as such and collectively governs their use. *The common*, then, is a *doing*, not a *having*—and what it establishes is, by principle, withdrawn from appropriation.
Le commun est à penser comme co-activité, et non comme coappartenance, co-propriété ou co-possession.
Here’s the translation, preserving all Markdown, links, italics, and symbols while aiming for idiomatic English:
Dardot and Laval’s move is to wrest the word from the thing. Ordinary thought imagines “commons”—water, air, seeds—resources that must be shielded from the market because their very nature would destine them to be shared. The authors reject this slippage. Nothing is common in itself—not even humanity, nor a kind of judgment, nor a quality of soul. “Only the practical activity of people can make things common.” The common isn’t found in the object; it emerges from the co-activity that institutes it and commits to keeping it beyond appropriation.
Hence the reversal the book highlights: for so long, the common was the great threat to property; today, property reveals itself as “the primary threat to the very possibility of life.” Instituting a common isn’t about placing a resource under glass in the name of its fragility—that would still turn it into a patrimony without a subject. It’s the exact opposite of rekindling hearths in Morizot’s sense: not to sanctify, but to reopen a shared responsibility, a co-obligation for all those engaged in the same activity. The gesture aligns with Illich’s conviviality in its refusal to entrust to a body of specialists what belongs to acting together.
Dardot and Laval’s common ≠ the economists’ “commons”: the latter locate sharing in the property of a thing, while the former locates it in an instituting practice. And the common ≠ co-ownership: where co-ownership divides an asset among rightsholders, the common founds an obligation among those who act.