On the Age of the Poets: Towards a Different Relation with the Sacred. By Jaime Rodríguez Matos

MLA: 7 January 2021

Today we live on that extreme fringe of metaphysics where it returns—as nihilism—to its own negative foundation (to its Ab-grund, its own ungroundedness). If casting the foundation into the abyss does not … reveal … the proper dwelling of humanity, but is limited to demonstrating the abyss of Sigé [silence], then metaphysics has not been surpassed, but reigns in its most absolute form …. (Agamben)

I want to start with an epigraph from Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, one of Giorgio Agamben’s early books (1982). But I want to preface it by revealing that I was reminded of this passage recently in reading an article by Matteo Mandarini, which I came across while working on a paper on Alberto Moreiras’ recent publications. In both Moreiras’ work and in Mandarini’s article the central problem is the way in which twentieth century Italian thought, in trying to grapple with the destruction of metaphysics yields to different active ways of persisting on the marginalization of the ontological difference, and the peculiarly difficult negative and positive status of being in its relational difference with beings. That is, there is a double movement which, on the one hand, entails the good faith traversal of Heideggerian and Nietzschean insights (sometimes even under the aegis of a more Heideggerian than Heidegger himself kind of militancy) which ends up producing, on the other hand, the paradoxical result of a more consummate forgetting of Being—to use Heidegger’s jargon. The issue is not limited to Italian thought by any means. Post-foundationalisms of all sorts drown in these waters. Agamben’s text reads:

Today we live on that extreme fringe of metaphysics where it returns—as nihilism—to its own negative foundation (to its Ab-grund, its own ungroundedness). If casting the foundation into the abyss does not … reveal … the proper dwelling of humanity, but is limited to demonstrating the abyss of Sigé [silence], then metaphysics has not been surpassed, but reigns in its most absolute form …. (Agamben 53; Mandarini 43)

(I leave aside the issue of nihilism for the moment.) Revealing the proper dwelling of humanity I understand, in Moreiras’ terms, as revealing a “life … without being, life without bios, which is only accessible in the abyssal relation which is itself the necessary consequence of the affirmation of the death of God,” and which would be the “the possibility and therefore the necessity of the experience of … a resacralization of life, and its remembrance” (Moreiras Infrapolítica. Instrucciones de uso 36). Here “resacralization” can mean anything but orthodox religiosity—in fact, it is a marker of the death of God. And this is very far from the passive, apolitical, silent apathy that is often ascribed to thought tracking the outside of metaphysics, but which, within Agamben’s text, can be recast as the “absolute form” of metaphysics. Elsewhere, Moreiras describes it as “the practical compromise in each case with an existential decision that would rescue our time and would prepare, in the long run, a new administration of the time that we have in common, which would merit the name of a new politics” (Sosiego siniestro 126). And I think this is not incompatible with what Badiou proposes when he writes in “Poetry and Communism” that poetic communism is “to sing the certainty that humanity is right to create a world in which the treasure of simple life will be preserved peacefully” (The Age of Poets 103). Perhaps this compatibility explains why, despite all the obvious differences, Moreiras closes a recent set of meditations undertaken during the first months of the pandemic by using Badiou’s work, and the notion of the age of the poets in particular, to argue that the post-foundational politics of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony ultimately produce a disaster as it seeks the to fill the void of the social, thus providing a ground for the groundless that would then be the sacred incarnation of the Name (124-125). Such would be the result of attempting to surpass the age of the poets via the age of politics, an age that Laclau declares explicitly in On Populist Reason (Laclau 222).

Badiou’s framing of antiphilosophy and the age of the poets remains one of the most powerful ways of broaching the issue of post-foundationalism and foundations in our time.  The idea of an oriented representation of disorientation (exactly what the poets of the age of the poets sought to undermine) remains at the heart of much of what goes by the name not only of philosophy but of theory as a whole—and the theory of hegemony is a good case in point. In fact, the return of philosophy, which has not happened in a convincing way, has only given way to the return of the political suture of philosophy under the guise of a heightened consciousness of historicity, but of a historicity that is only the prerogative to foundational claims, even if those claims have to traverse the abyss revealed by the ontological difference. Philosophy itself should have been able to “conceptualize disorientation” (Manifesto… 74). And the issues of this conditioning of philosophy by the poem will be the central concern in what followis. Without a doubt, Heidegger is one of the crucial philosophical opponents for Badiou in such a conceptualization; but it is also clear that the reach of Heidegger’s philosophical power remains palpable (for some even threatening, as we will see) within it, particularly in the work of the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Badiou’s philosophy proposes, in a way that is not simply dialectical, to swallow Heidegger and move beyond him while acknowledging his “success in philosophically touching an unnoticed point of thought detained in poetic language” during the age of the poets (Badiou Conditions 36). It should not be a surprise that, particularly when it comes to the relation between philosophy and poetry, Badiou seems very near to Heidegger. In an important sense, the end of the age of poets means not that we no longer take the poem seriously, but that it is not the only condition for philosophy.

Yet, we indeed inhabit that extreme fringe of metaphysics where it returns—as nihilism—to its own negative foundation (to its Ab-grund, its own ungroundedness). And Badiou’s thought is not only at its most Heideggerian when it comes to the poem, but also, and here the nearness is also the greatest distance (and not in a good way), at its most denegationist regarding his own de-suturing aims.  The aim, for me, is not to unveil this or that incoherence in Badiou’s edifice. In fact, for all of the inconsistencies I rely on work that has been well-known and well-received already (Riera, Lecercle, Macherey, Rancière, Bosteels). I will limit my offering today to sketching, barely, what remains a working hypothesis regarding the need to reconsider how we mobilize our (a-theist) militancy in the face of the death of a God that we never see in our own work but always in that of others.  By this I do not intend anything close to a return of god or making a place for theology. I simply mean to begin the exploration of a stumbling block that is everywhere in twentieth century thought. It is, for instance, registered in Mandarini’s article mentioned above as the struggle with the mystical in Italian negative thought (e.g., Cacciari).

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The age of the poets, as a philosophical category, comes into play within a wider argument that seeks to declare that—despite the significance of the deconstruction of metaphysics, the end of philosophy and the dismantling of the grand narratives of Modernity—the category of the subject, however reconfigured, must be maintained. Philosophy, given over to its own defeat, had not been “in level terms with Capital, since it has left the field open, to it most intimate point, to vain nostalgia for the sacred” (Manifesto… 58). Philosophy has fallen prey to sutures. And vain nostalgia for the sacred is the most dangerous effect of the poetic suture.

At this point, it would be unnecessary to remind anyone of Badiou’s moves in orchestrating the (re)turn of philosophy itself, so I will not attempt even a cursory summary of the architecture of his doctrine. I offer instead a text that cuts to the heart of the issue with post-Heideggerian thought.  It is a passage from a text in which Badiou, in the most loving way possible praises Jean-Luc Nancy, a text in which Badiou claims that given how loved by all Nancy is within the philosophical community, he is tempted to simply be something of an evildoer. It is important to stress this respect and admiration as the context of the passage regarding their philosophical differences.

“… above all, Jean-Luc Nancy more so than many others, more so than myself, is in a refined sense the last communist. It is he and nobody else who writes, not in 1960 or 1 970 but in 1991 that “Communism, without doubt, is the archaic name of a thinking which is still entirely to come.”  Oh, how I fraternally salute this statement! I nonetheless try one last time to be an evildoer. “A thinking which is still entirely to come”! How irritating this post-Heideggerian style of the perpetual announcement, this interminable to-come, this kind of laicized propheticism which does not cease declaring that we are not yet in a position to think what there is to think, this pathos of the having-to-respond for being, this God who is lacking, this waiting in front of the abyss, this posing of the gaze that looks deep into the fog and says that the indistinct can be seen coming! How I feel like saying: ‘Listen, if this thinking is still entirely to come, come back to see us when one piece of it at least will have arrived!'” (Badiou The Adventure of French Philosophy 70).

The age of poets is the sublimated, philosophically correct, way of addressing the issue here broached in good humor but in the guise of the evildoer. The poetic suture is nothing if it isn’t also this irritating post-Heideggerian style. That we are not yet in a position to think what there is to think should be re-stated in the following terms: the age of poets is posited by Badiou in order to avoid thinking what there is to be thought: that the God of philosophy refuses to die; that the abyss is not in front of us but right under our feet …. But also, that perhaps in the militancy against any form of what the tradition has left us under the names of the mystical or the sacred can also be one of the shadows that will remain with us for millennia and that Nietzsche decried in The Gay Science when he first spoke of the death of god (Bk. III, 108). Moreover, can we really argue about communism taking on the “to come” versus the future anterior of the Idea? I simply note the displacement: not the ontological difference, but the relationship between poetry and philosophy is what is at issue with Heidegger in Badiou’s thought, and this troping of the ontological difference will have a price. “What will become of the poem after Heidegger, after the age of poets?,” Badiou asks; the answer: “The poets will tell us, and they actually already have, since to de-suture philosophy and poetry, to leave Heidegger behind without returning to aesthetics, is also to think otherwise that from which the poem proceeds, to think it in its operative distance, and not in its myth” (Conditions 40).

They will tell us or we will tell them that they have already told us, but always only what we are able to hear and that only, particularly when they have already done some of the philosophical legwork for us. One can opt for calling Heidegger’s thought poetic just as Heidegger himself opted for naming  the “poetic” Antigone’s manner of “becoming homely within being” (Heidegger Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” 117). More so if we take into account that it is precisely the ontological difference and the re-casting of the relation being/thought that is at issue in that 1942 reading (see Moreiras Infrapolítica. Instrucciones de uso 68-69). But whatever one decides in that regard, it remains that Badiou’s the age of the poets is here to put an end to it. And that this task is perhaps more arduous than we thought. That there is something off in the way Badiou seems to relate condition and conditioned has been noted forcefully already by among others Gabriel Reira and Bruno Bosteels. Bosteels most radically: “the intraphilosophical apparatus seems to lead to a hypostasis of the pure event or commencement as such, thanks to the philosopheme of selftheorization—with poetry providing the theory of its own eventality” (218). Bosteels further notes that Badiou self-diagnoses dogmatism in this “rather large amount of philosophical appropriation of the condition” (218). One will get to de-stuture, but at the risk of dogmatism: one possible term Badiou will use for describing not what happens when a condition takes over the whole of thought, but for the consequences of the radical appropriation of the condition by philosophy.

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The consequence of this all-too Heideggerian echo is a restriction concerning the unnamable. Bosteels: “Why should we “stand up to the test of an unnamable point to begin with? Why should thinking … recognize its impotence before this empty symbol of the pure real …?” (194). Bosteels recognizes that within Badiou’s doctrine this point is a safeguard against the deformation of fidelity to the event, or against the possibility of pseudo-events that devolve into terror and disaster. (And this is precisely the point that Moreiras was leaning on in movilizing Badiou against Laclau.) The reaction here is not strictly philosophical or theoretical. It hinges, rather, on a specific reading of the historical situation which marks how other might mis-read Badiou and prompts the following warning from Bosteels against two possible risks:

“the notion of a necessary impasse risks falling short of [Badiou’s] own thinking all the while aligning [him] with … radical thought that takes its inspiration from Heidegger and Lacan …. A second risk is that the unnameable operates only as a kind of point in reserve, from which perspective any subjective procedure of truth could be read as always already involving a disaster. … [… T]he postulate of the unnameable can always lead back to the transcendent presentation of a measure beyond measure, or of a ground without any bottom. Indeed, does assuming the unnameable in order to stop evil not mean proposing an insuperable limit to aIl generic thinking of truth? … In other words, we should look to it to make sure that the notion of the unnameable does not become the supporting base for a new nihilist definition of ethics, that is to say, a definition that would start from the avoidance of disaster as the sole reference point of truth.” (195)

This resistance to the unnamable is registered once more in the presentation to “the age of the poets” that Bosteels coauthored with Emily Apter, in which the conclusion makes the poem say what the unnamable limits: “ultimately, poetry and prose after the age of the poets testify to the possibility and even the necessity that we do not remain silent about that of which we cannot speak” (Apter and Bosteels xxxv). The reference here is obviously to the mystical in Wittgenstein’s sense. The least possible charitable way of reading this overstepping of the limit would be to decry it as a militant affirmation of the mystical experience, even if in a denegated form. The aim of the text seems to be rather to reject as nihilism any directive that may stand in the way of a world-changing fidelity by placing too much emphasis on the limits of the sayable. From the point of view of that denunciation of nihilism, the highest being annihilated is the possible new politics of communism. And it would be tempting to see in this only a political theology. But what if the issue is rather with a misdiagnosed or misunderstood notion of sacralization? And what if clearing that up moves the conversation in a different direction entirely?

Consider Heidegger at his most vulnerable when it comes to the accusation of sacralization. In Identity and Difference, in the context of re-imagining what the principle of identity might mean were we to see the ontological difference as difference, Heidegger explains that the deity enters philosophy when the difference between being and being is taken as the ground plan in the structure of metaphysics; Being then is generative ground. This ground then needs to be accounted for by that for which it accounts, which is by the causation through the supremely original matter—the cause as causa sui. “This is the right name for the god of philosophy;” and we cannot pray to or dace before this god (Identity … 72). And here it is here that Heidegger declares that: “The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy … is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit” (72).

The ontological difference is a difficult notion to pin down. It is beyond me to even begin to outline it now. But we can say, provisionally, that the co-belonging of Being and beings of god-less thinking is not a promise or yet to come, it is not a mystical experience any more than we could claim that it is mysticism to say, with Badiou that “there exists a proof of communism by way of the poem” (108). Nothing here will save us from the serious and real difficulties that ensue in thinking our radical ungroundedness, but perhaps a site is thus cleared for a different kind of listening.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. 1982. Trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Apter, Emily, and Bruno Bosteels. “Introduction.” In Alain Badiou. The Age of Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose. Ed. Bruno Besteels. New York; London: Verso, 2014. vii-xxxv.

Badiou, Alain. The Adventure of French Philosophy. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. London; New York: Verso, 2012.

___. Conditions. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London; New York: Continuum, 2008.

___. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Bosteels, Bruno. Badiou and Politics. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2011.

Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.

___. Identity and Difference. 1957. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London; New York: Verso, 2005.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

Macherey, Pierre. “The Mallarmé of Alain Badiou.” Alain Badiou: Philosopohy and Its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 109-116.

Mandarini, Matteo. “Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggarianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s.” Cosmos and History: Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5.1 (2009): 37-56. Print.

Moreiras, Alberto. Infrapolítica. Instrucciones de uso. Madrid: La Oficina, 2020.

___. Sosiego siniestro. Madrid: Guillermo Escolar Editor, 2020.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. 1882. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Ed. Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. “Unbreakable B’s: From Beckett and Badiou to the Bitter End of Affirmative Ethics.” Alain Badiou: Philosopohy and Its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 87-108.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Literature. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Polity, 2011.

Riera, Gabriel. “For an “Ethics of Mystery”: Philosophy and the Poem.” Alain Badiou: Philosopohy and Its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 61-86.

Dino-Gramsci 2020… No Thanks! (by Jaime Rodríguez Matos)

We live in regressive times.  Everywhere we are assailed and cut down so that the worst among us may have a chance to assert their weakness as a strength.  This is not a question only of the right.  Parts of our so-called left are equally invested in this scene.  Now, the “left” is that part of the political spectrum that is supposed to hold back the most egregious onslaughts of an increasingly irrational and suicidal capitalism hell-bent on the annihilation of everything.  Yet, a more cynical view might venture that, today, the real function of the “left” (that is, not the movements and manifestations of multitudes of people that exceed the framework of clear political positions, but the politicians that appear the day after so as to give some coherence and institutional gravitas to things) is simply there in order to neutralize all that is actually happening in the political arena across the globe.

Take Gramscianism, as it has emerged academically, via a renewal of philology of all things!, in the last several years.  One is always put on guard as to all the revelations that go beyond the 1985 classic Hegemony and Social Strategy by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Cultural Studies, Latinamericanism in its subalternist and post-subalternist modalities, radical Lacanians on the left—they all got it wrong!  There is a more intricate and complex concept of hegemony which not only goes to show that people have not done their homework (for these schoolmasters, it is very important to point out that some people have not done their homework), but also that bourgeois conceptions of things have dominated over the last several decades (and by  bourgeois conceptions we are supposed to project all-things-post-structuralist—bad because those Pos-Mo theorists are not political enough).  No, hegemony is none of that!  What, you might ask, is true Gramscian hegemony?  Peter Thomas has done us the favor of boiling it down for us in a recent article: “After (Post) Hegemony,” in Contemporary Political Theory (2020).

Thomas establishes that the concept of hegemony was central to political developments prior to the publication of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in the early post-war years.  But it is only the motley and divergent accounts of hegemony that emerge, especially in the 1970s, that begin to coalesce around a concept of hegemony that can provide a realistic analysis of modern political orders and their contemporary transformations.  The relevance of this paradigm has been challenged.  And Thomas’ article seeks to give an account of the major objections so as to expose to what extent the proposal to go beyond hegemony effectively results in the rediscovery of precisely those political problems to which the emergence of hegemony, in the Marxist tradition, was designed to be a strategic response.  Thomas is not only intent on offering a proper account of the text of the Prison Notebooks, he also wants to insist on the relevance of hegemonic politics today.

Thomas has three major interlocutors.  Those who see hegemony as a historical fact that has come and gone (this is the temporal concept of hegemony). Those who work out a fundamental critique of hegemony as the concept (Latinamericanists like Alberto Moreiras, Gareth Williams, and Jon Beasley Murray, who dispute hegemony in general).  And those who seek to expand the theory of hegemony via the insights of post-hegemony (the ideas cited in this regard are those of Benjamín Arditi and Yannis Stavrakakis).  In their representativeness, these three variants encapsulate, for Thomas, the prevalent presuppositions of posthegemonic thought, and thus of a distorted Gramsci: first, the “pre-Gramscian conception of hegemony; second, their acceptance of the hegemony of Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of hegemony; and third, their understanding of hegemony as a universalizing system of power and domination.”

Thomas follows these critical remarks with two sections that propose a new image of Gramscian hegemony.  The first is titled “Hegemony after Gramsci” and the second “Hegemony after Passive Revolution.”  Here it is a question of calling out the lack of engagement with Gramsci’s writings, which lead to an undue emphasis on consent.  And one of the central questions is centered on the fact that affect was not something ignored by Gramsci. The second order of objections concerns the way in which Laclau and Mouffe’s work can or cannot be taken as a paradigm that could “exhaust hegemony in all of its variants.”  The short version is that it cannot.  It only accounts for the reality of bourgeois revolutions.  Or, in a different register, their intervention, according to Thomas, can only be understood under the aegis of passive revolution, which is to say the manner in which the bourgeois revolution came to orient the work and action of subaltern sectors.  And it is this form of hegemony which Thomas claims became dominant in intellectual circles.  This is the key to Thomas’ argument: When posthegemonic theorists propose to go beyond the understanding of hegemony made influential … by Laclau and Mouffe, it can therefore be argued that they are in fact proposing to go beyond hegemony conceived in terms of the passive revolutionary processes of bourgeois hegemony, rather than beyond hegemony as such.”

But hegemony is none of that.  What is it?  “The problem of hegemony as leadership functioned as a strategic perspective that guided and structured [Gramscis’s] approach to the concrete task of political organization.” Hegemony is “a method of political work, or of political leadership understood as pedagogical practice.”  How?

Here it is: “hegemony in these texts and interventions signified the capacity to propose potential solutions to the social and political crises afflicting Italian society, with the aim of mobilizing the active engagement of popular social strata in a project of social transformation, in opposition to the passive assent to existing hierarchies secured by Fascist dictatorship. This conception of hegemony as a strategic perspective and practice remains central to Gramsci’s carceral writings. It is the basis for his argument that in 1930 the condition of subalternity can be defined in terms of the incapacity of subaltern classes and social groups consciously to assume the tasks of self­direction, since they are subjected to the organizational and institutional forms of the existing dominant classes (Q 3, §14, pp. 299–300). Hegemony in this sense is also central to Gramsci’s argument in 1931 that ‘the most realistic and concrete’ meaning of ‘democracy’ involves conceiving it in terms of a hegemonic relation in which there is a ‘becoming directive’ [dirigente] of popular social strata…”

And this is the thing about philological schoolmasters: they confuse the truth of their textual proof for relevance.  They assume the authority of their text so blindly that it does not ever occur to them to ask if that truth is worth salvaging given their historical moment.  They cannot ask this question because doing so would put in danger the investment of so many years burning the midnight oil, straining their eyesight.  I find it absolutely ridiculous.

Is not the idea that political work, or political leadership, can be reduced to a pedagogical practice the most regressive and appalling way of understanding all of our recent history?  Is that not a slap in the face of just about everyone who has walked out to protest all over the world in the last twenty years?  Were not the “leaders” that so pedagogically set out to take over things in the last twenty years the ones that truly needed to shut up and take some notes?  Have we not had enough of these pedagogues that always manage to reduce mass insurrections, like we have never seen before, to petty narcissistic party fratricide?

Would that Gramsci, the neo-Hegelian productivist in contempt of the masses that (he thinks) do not know what is best for them, were more like Laclau and Mouffe.  Please!  I would gladly take that over the Gramsci that the new philology parrots only to convince itself that there is something political to its not even disavowed elitism.

Materialism Without Matter: Gramsci Notes. 15 May 2020. By Jaime Rodríguez Matos.

 

 

 

Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891.  He died in 1937—at the age of 46.  I am two years younger than that today as I write these notes on the first section of the Cambridge University Press edition of his Pre-Prison Writings.  That is to say, I will make comments on texts dating from 1914 to 1918, most of them newspaper notes, written when he was between the ages of 23 and 27.  (I finished my dissertation at the age of 29, disowned it, and worked for ten more years on the manuscript which became my first book, hoping no one ever deems it necessary to go back to anything I wrote before then.  So I do not wish to do to a young Gramsci anything I wouldn’t want visited upon myself.)  I want to note some issues or problems that I found worthy of further thought and investigation.  That is, even as I find myself in agreement with many of the criticism raised in the previous blog entries here, what I want to set down, at the moment, are the ways in which I would image a possible, though difficult, tarrying with Gramsci.

 

I want to suggest a different way of looking at Gramsci’s unabashed endorsement of Idealism in these pages.  In fact, I want to suggest that this is the closest Gramsci got to the existential analytic of dasein—from which he distanced himself, at least according to the general undersatanding of Gramsci today, but which might yet make way for an infrapolitical Gramsci.

 

Going back to Marx, this would be “to understand that adopting the standpoint of the proletarians in a state of ‘permanent’ insurrection resulted not so much in putting an end to idealism, but in installing the materialism/idealism dilemma—the perennial

question of their difference—at the very heart of the theory of the proletariat and its privileged historical role” (Balibar 27).  I don’t wish to insist on any subject’s privileged role, though.  Only on the idea that in terms of the existential analytic of dasein Idealism has at least one priority: “If what the term idealism amounts to an understanding of the fact that being is never be explicable by beings, but is always already the ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then the sole correct possibility of a philosophical problematic lies in idealism” (Heidegger 200).  In Gramsci this played out in a very specific way. Allow me a digression before I turn to a comment on something that informs my way of looking at the present situation.

 

In “Socialism and Culture” (1916), Novalis appears as a way to clarify the “supreme problem of culture:” “that of taking charge of one’s transcendental self, of being at the same time oneself and the self of oneself” (8).  In order to know others, we must first be capable of understanding ourselves perfectly, claims Novalis/Gramsci.  Giambattista Vico is adduced to give this notion, to know thyself, a political slant in a gloss on Solon’s maxim: “Vico maintains that, with this phrase, Solon intended to provoke the plebeians, who  believed themselves to be bestial in origin, while the nobles were of divine origin, to reflect on themselves and recognize themselves as  being of the same human nature as the nobles, and therefore to claim  to be made equal with them in civil rights.  And he then identifies this … as the basis and the historical reason for the rise of democracies in antiquity” (8-9; italics in original).  At issue here is “the scope and the principles of a true understanding of the conception of culture, and of culture in its relation to socialism” (9).  Culture is not encyclopedic knowledge—which Gramsci saw as harmful.  We are back to Spirit/History: “Culture is … the organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’s personality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we can come to understand our value and place within history…” (9-10).  All of this spiritual striving, however, is not anything “spontaneous” or “beyond the control of our wills” (10).  That would be nature, unchangeable, within the realm of “ineluctable laws” (10). But we are, on the contrary, creatures “of spirit”—which, in this context, means “a creation of history, rather than nature” (10).  Yet what can we make of all of this if there is no perfectibility, if there is no “sense” and order leading toward the final raid/revolution?  Let us take a step back.  The supreme problem of culture is for all of us to be able to discern that there is no difference between those who have a putative divine line of descent and those who are mere animals.  Rather than put the emphasis on the distinction human/animal, or gods/animals, I want to underscore the way in which the human-animal is here also the knot between a materiality of the spirit and an eventual void piercing through the available knowledge.  We are spiritual-historical creatures to the extent that we can inhabit that void in knowledge that is our ongoing transformation as spirit-history.  Critique is another name for this ability to inhabit that hole in knowledge.  For Gramsci, however, all of this is still moored to the political hopes of a more coherent, logical, ordered and perfect world: “To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to assert one’s own identity, to emerge from chaos and become an agent of order, but of one’s own order, one’s own disciplined dedication to an ideal” (11).  One must know the misery that others have created for us, in order to be able to replace it with a civilization of our own (11).  If for Gramsci history-spirit is a chain of events leading to our liberation of prejudice and idolatry (12), then “civilization” itself must not become either a prejudice or a form of idolatry.  What is the chain of historical-spiritual events if it is not a drive toward the ideal, toward a telos, toward a more perfect order?  I put forward the following: it is the presentation of an abyssal experience that we have systematically refused to face, in which the systematicity in question has been the various ways we have projected a desired order of things.  Words like destiny, order, god, life, and so many others, have organized our collective ways of projecting that there is something covering over the that void.

 

Gramsci’s sense of that abyssal experience is also palpable.  In “History” (1916) we find both the abyssal experience and the way that “life” is called upon to lessen the anxiety that experience produces.  “Give up to life your every action, your every ounce of faith,” writes Gramsci (13).  But even that can leave you with the sense that “something is missing”: “You are in the world, but you do not know why you are here. You act, but you do not know why. You are conscious of voids in your life; you desire some justification of your being, of your actions; and it seems to you that human reasons alone do not suffice” (13).  “You are,” he adds: “like a man looking at the sky, who, as he moves further and further back through the space which science has mapped out for us, finds ever greater difficulties in his fantastic wanderings in the infinite until, arriving at the void, and incapable of conceiving of this absolute void, he unconsciously populates it with  divine beings, with supernatural entities, to co-ordinate the vertiginous, and yet logical movement of the universe” (13-14).  According to Gramsci, these are inferior manifestations of the self, “purely instinctive, mere uncontrolled impulses,” and religion is the way that most seek to deal with them (14).  In stark contrast stands “the force of life itself” (14).  One must historicize and draw out the unfolding of religious impulses, for once one can trace a phenomenon back to its origin it will have been overcome: “To make them an object of history is to recognize their emptiness” (14).  But note the key operation in this passage: the void in question has shifted place from the sensation of arriving at a place where the ground is lacking (over which a religious answer is projected as a way to cover it) toward the emptiness of the religious answer itself.  It is history-spirit that will offer “the explanation to our existence” (14).  History-spirit cannot be supernatural.  However, this materialist understanding yields all too quickly to a different kind of faith: “revelation. If something still remains inexplicable, that is due only to our cognitive deficiencies, to the still imperfect grasp of our intellect” (14).  The whole is knowable, even if do not yet know all of it.  The past will be with us no longer as our shadow, but illuminating the way to a better future.  Gramsci is not shy about this secularization of religious categories: “Our religion becomes … history.  Our faith becomes … man, and man’s will and his capacity for action” (14).

 

What emerges is a fight against two different kinds of knowledge.  On the one hand the encyclopedia of all the fact that contribute to the permanence of the ruling class power; and, on the other, the knowledge that emerges once proper cognition of the historical process is gained.  One jumps over the abyss that opens in the dissolution of the first—which includes not just the narratives that legitimize a certain ruling structure, but also all of the metaphysical certainties that were the diving dictate from on high—to land on the certainties of a capacity for constructing the better world.  Between the first and the second form of history-spirit lies the recuperation of all that had been occluded in the past.  All is now light: “a past which illuminates” (14).  It is important to add that this kind of history is “the richer history which is not written in the history books” (30).  This illuminating past is “the bond of solidarity,” “the bond of shared humanity”—“the light which millions of Italians see by, … which illuminates the world for them…” (30).

 

On a different front, I would like to not that today it is impossible to read these texts without feeling their historical distance.  They are intimately involved in the context of WWI and the Russian Revolution, and they orient themselves therein in a way that is difficult to abide with today.  Gramsci makes clear some of the things that would be unconscionable for us to assume today.  Consider the tangled web of consequences derived from the class struggle.  For us, it has become ever clearer that “the class in power” will never “assume its responsibilities,” will never “carry its premises through to their logical conclusions,” will never “submit to an examination of the way in which it has been preparing for the … present miserable state” (5).  But for Gramsci, such a reckoning was also the only way to restore “the dualism of the classes” (5).  That is, only in the recognition of this failure would the dualism of the classes become clear.  No one today would even imagine to make such a demand of the ruling class in earnest.  The ruling class today simply ploughs through with the construction of its narrative.  It accepts responsibility for naught.  Thus, today, we believe neither in destiny nor in dualisms.  Given Gramsci’s presuppositions, this would make it difficult to sustain a belief in “the passage of civilization from an imperfect form to a more perfect one” (5).  This is also our inability to believe in progress.  But I leave it at that.

 

 

 

 

Balibar, Étienne. The Philosophy of Marx. Trans. Chris Turner. London; New York: Verso, 2007.

Gramsci, Antonio. Pre-Prison Writings. Trans. Virginia Cox. Ed. Richard Bellamy. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York, 2010.

1988: This is not a Review, it is a Call to All to Read “The Heidelberg Conference.”

Jaime Rodríguez Matos

[I do not post this as the general view of anyone doing work on infrpolitics, but as a personal engagement with perhaps the most intimate tradition linked to the emergence of infrapolitics.  It remains for those engaged in this work to point out to what extent infrapolitics is not simply a restatement of the French reading of Heidegger.  For my part, only after there is a concept of post-hegemonic infrapolitics can one begin to think through the political determination of the groundless calling, just as it is only after there is a concept of infrapolitical post-hegemony that it becomes possible to think thought the responsibility of deconstruction without ceding an inch on the philosophical insights that deconstruction has bequeathed us.  In the final analysis, however, the issue here is not whether infrapolitics is a novel endeavor regarding deconstruction (I believe it is simply a more radical continuation, even if this has to be done in tandem with deconstrunists such as they exist today and are academically sanctioned as such), but whether we are or are not better equipped to deal with the possible fascism that Trump and others incarnate today.]

1. Are we more prepared today than we were in 1988 to deal with the possible resurgence of fascism? Almost thirty years on, there are some significant differences.  On the Left: it is no longer the case that Marxism is in retreat.  The word Socialism has gotten a new wind, even in the USA.  Elsewhere, leftist populisms have appeared (and perhaps also disappeared).  And in academia, a new breed of political theorists, wearing their radicalism on their sleeves, has found support from prestigious research institutions.  On the Center: it is no longer the case that the discourse of the rights of man and multicultural political correctness holds unquestioned power.  It is also no longer the case that the neoliberal agenda that underwrote much of what passed for such things goes without saying.  Hillary Clintons’ failure to secure the presidential seat gives one pause when considering the fate of neoliberalism, even as it is absolutely not a rupture with its most basic structures that we are attending to.  On the Right: a resurgence of a vitriol and violence imagined to be things of the past has left many in a state of deep shock.  The Right defined by a sort of cultural conservatism has given way to a Right of coded and not so coded racism, sexism, homophobia, and all around hate for all things not low or middle brow.  The attack on intellectual life, and education in general, has had profound effects on all facets of higher education, to the point where it is no longer even possible to discern the logic behind decisions made under the false pretense of efficiency and excellence.
2. In 1988 Alain Badiou published Being and Event. He was, then, a virtually unknown professor (at least on a world-wide scale) with links to a Maoist French militancy.  Today he is undoubtedly one of the central master thinkers of our time.  In that book, and in its more accessible follow-up, Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou made the case that it was in part due to the influence of Heidegger-inflected thought that the world had lost its way, or more precisely, that the left had lost its way, or, even more to the point, that philosophy had gone awry in so far as it was linked to politics.  The diagnosis had its appeal.  (Slavoj Zizek made a good part of his career on this one claim.)  It is perhaps hard to remember the complete rejection that first greeted this stance.  It was, then, almost a provocation to speak in the name of universality.  At least, one had to assume that doing it would lead directly, and very fast, to accusations of Eurocentrism.  Conjuncturally, however, it was a very astute way of framing things.  The naïve all over the world soon found themselves saying: “finally!, someone is here to legitimize my inability to actually delve seriously into deconstruction, poststructuralism, Being and Time, Spivak’s footnotes, the whole issue of the undecidability of the to-come that nevertheless is a step that has to be taken so that there can be something like my responsibility,” and so on and so forth.  Badiou’s Being and Event went on to go largely unread, or even dismissed as his own fall into the complacency of the Heideggerian deconstruction of metaphysics.  His “philosophy for militants” turned out to be the real draw.  Be that as it may, one thing is absolutely clear today: to claim that the world (any world, even Putin’s under the influence of Dugin) is somehow dominated by Heidegger-inflected thought is a claim that only the question-begging, straw-man-building, preachers-to-the-choir can entertain seriously.  In any case, even if we go back to the situation such as it was in 1988, it turns out that things were more complicated than they seemed from the point of view of (former) Maoists doing academic high theory in order to re-commence Marxism.
3. In France (and one could say in Europe in general, even if most of the information was already known to anyone who cared enough), the publication of Victor Farias’ book on Heidegger’s ties to Nazism dominated 1988 from the start. And Heidegger inflected-thought, or more generally, the “thought of 1968” in France, was under attack from the simplifying world of media culture for allegedly not having denounced forcefully, or clearly, or loudly enough, Heidegger’s disgraceful involvement with the Nazi party.  The recent publication of the Heidelberg conference, which saw Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, together with Hans-George Gadamer, in a visit to Germany, gives us a clear glimpse of the complexity of the issue at hand.  For, in a world that was supposedly at the beck-and-call of deconstruction what emerges is the picture of an establishment that was only too glad to breath in relief at the opportunity of finally dispensing with the difficulty of Heidegger’s questions, and of the reading that some of his most committed French readers had endeavored to put forth since the 1960’s.  It became clear in 1988 that, because of the apparent novelty of Farias’ findings and the mediatic reaction to it, the surprise in question what not simply the result of an uninformed layman who happened to be a journalist, but that the journalists were following in the footsteps of an academic and supposedly informed audience who had taken it upon themselves to simply ignore the work that had been done regarding Heidegger and his ties to Nazism—a work that not only readily accepted the difficulty of assuming his political error, but which also brought to light an even more radical difficulty regarding the possibility of thinking Nazism precisely by reading Heidegger against the grain of this error.  In 1988 Derrida concluded that the Farias’ affair ultimately exposed not anything related to a novel and deal-breaking link between Heidegger and Nazism, for all of it was already known, but the complicity between a hegemonic neoliberal media apparatus and a university which ignored the same information only because the way it was framed, up until Farias’ book, was not only more difficult, but also put in question some of the most cherished assumptions that underwrote the social contract that it sought to uphold.  Derrida: “there is a certain field where one finds united the hegemony of the university, the powers at work in the university, and a structural hegemony of intellectual power that finds expression in the press.  An analysis, and not only a sociological analysis, should be applied to the articulation of these two domains.  It is there that the responsibilities of everyone are called” (77, emphasis in original).
4. Once again I ask, how are we better prepared today to deal with a possible reincarnation fascism?
5. In 1988 what was clear was that the political ideology that was supposed to have made fascism impossible was itself very weak. (And no one would seriously question this claim today: for what is at issue is not a strong political stance but the discourse of human rights, the ethics of respect for the other, and the weak claim that capitalist-democracy is the only way to safeguard freedom.)  This weakness was due to the fact that it relied on some of the very same concept that fascism took as essential to its discourse.  Now, it is true that the phrase “the political ideology that was supposed to have made fascism impossible” is still a very vague formulation.  Yet, it remains, for some, a fact that we do have certain positions that, if it were the case that fascism triumphed, would have to assume responsibility regarding the failure to have stopped it.  It is in this regard that Zizek states (citing Benjamin) that every fascism is a failed revolution (152).  [Zizek’s own endorsement of Trump complicates matters somewhat, as it entails that, for him, Trumpism is not yet, or not quite, a fascism, but an acceleration of world history so that contradictions fall into a place where it becomes visible (quicker) what needs to be done (in all its Leninists overtones).  The very idea of a possible acceleration of history should be critiqued, as it entails a very questionable teleological matrix.]
6. Derrida, 1988, once more: “a certain disquiet, at this point even a certain fear, on the side of the tradition of this discourse—a fear regarding its own fragility and regarding a potential for questioning that is stronger in Heidegger’s work than in many others …” (21).
7. And further: “… the discourse that dominates European institutions is no longer capable of holding up, and those who put forth this discourse know this in an obscure way. You know that one of the violences to which the people who pose this kind of question are exposed … is that when one says that ethics, that the way that we define ethics today is shaking on its lack of foundation, or when we say that we no longer know very well what it means to be responsible, the violence to which we are exposed is that one says to us: so you are putting forth a discourse that is immoral, an irresponsible discourse!  I maintain, on the contrary, that deconstruction today [early 1988] … is of course not an abdication of responsibility; it is … the most difficult responsibility that I can take.  And to trust in traditional categories of responsibility seems to me today to be, precisely, irresponsible” (24).
8. And yet, the definition of responsibility cannot be a theoretical act (49). The issue here is not a theoretical voluntarism or decisionism.  Oddly enough, the Marxist and the deconstructionist find common ground on this front.
9. Deconstruction, in 1988, and in spite of the university ignoring its work almost entirely, had spent a long while looking closely at those concepts that were supposed to have prevented the holocaust. And it had come across the evidence that subjectivity, intention, good will, etc., were not only not sufficient when it came to putting a stop to what from our present point of view is an absolute horror, but that these concepts were also, as it turns out, in complicity with that which they were supposed to have prevented.  Derrida, 1988: “… it is not because deconstruction deconstructs a received concept of responsibility that it is irresponsible.  On the contrary: I believe it is an exercise of responsibility to remain vigilant before the inherited concepts of responsibility.  And it is a fact that the … metaphysical concept of responsibility, such as it was formed throughout the history of philosophy, notably in its Kantian moment, as it was inscribed in the rights of man, in the democratic axiomatic, in Western morality and politics, that these concepts, European concepts, did not prevent Nazism.  And even that, very often, Nazism, Nazi discourse, used the very axiomatic that one opposes to it….  There was, in discourses, in people’s heads, something for which the theoretical concept and the form of injunction of that responsibility were not sufficient. …  [W]hat gives us all a bad conscience today … is that this concept of responsibility is not sufficient.  That all the categories it implies, that of the subject, of intention, of good will, are not sufficient” (50-51).
10. In contrast to an explanation of Nazism that would place the blame on a “natural” inclination toward conformism—thus exculpating and inscribing Nazism as the natural unfolding of the human thing (see Gadamer’s comments in the appendix, pp.79-80)—Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe attempt a more Heideggerian response to the issue of responsibility and of a responsibility to Nazism. This is the singular contribution of the French, and their reading of Heidegger in so far as it assumes that there was a Nazi commitment on the part of the great thinker.  In what follows I do not intend to give a learned account of it, or to even pay tribute to those who have already understood this.  I simply take the opportunity to alert the reader to the opportunity presented by the transcription of the Heidelberg conference to get a glimpse of the far-reaching consequences that reading Heidegger against the grain can have for us today, thirty years on.  (Though it also goes without saying that taking heed of the work of those who have been careful not to ignore all of this must become part of what we acknowledge as our responsibility.)
11. Derrida sketches what is at stake by way of the issue of the “question of the question.” As he explains it, for some time Heidegger thought the question as piety (Frömmigkeit)—as beyond science and philosophy.  This piety beyond metaphysics went together with the motif of the quest, of a search for principles or an investigation into first causes of foundations (66).  This piety is later (in Unterwegs sur Sprache) linked, in reference to the Greeks, to the fact of being “already docile; docile means he who listens, who is obedient. … questioning is already a listening—a listening to but also of or from the other.  I do not have the initiative, even of the question, even in this piety of thought that is the question” (67).  Before the question, logically and chronologically, before it, there is an acquiescence (Zusage): “this consent to die Sprache without which there would not even be a question” (67).  The issue becomes how to deal with die Sprache: “this attunement to die Sprache—which one cannot translate … neither by ‘language [langue]’, nor by ‘speech [parole]’” (67).
12. It would be a question of moving too fast if one were to say that die Sprache was language as the house of being. One has said yes even before questioning—but to what?  To whom? This question mark undermines the authority of the question itself.  And this opens another path to access responsibility.
13. This is the decisive step. Derrida, 1988: “Heidegger spoke all the time about responsibility, responding to the call of being: there would be no responsibility if there were not, already, the call of being that is not the call of someone, of a god ….  I am, even before responding in terms of moral conscience, I am accountable, responsible for a call that comes to me, I know not from where.  It is not God; it is not another consciousness or conscience.  I am imputable.  Dasein is a responsible being, that is, a being that must respond to a call that already constitutes it.  But from that moment, which is the moment of Sein und Zeit and of the years that followed it, under the authority of the question, at the moment of the Zusage, there is already a displacement of the motif of responsibility. …  I am responsible before even knowing for what, or before whom.  It remains for me to know to what, to whom the Zusage will be determined.  It is there that the political risk of the Zusage is very serious.  …  [I]t is one thing, then, to recognize in this yes an absolutely originary responsibility, which I cannot escape, and it is another thing then to determine to what and to whom I say yes when … I accept being responsible for this or that, before this or that instance of authority.  It is there that the matter is determined politically: between the Zusage in general and then the acquiescence to this or that juridico-political instance for this or that act….  There is a step, and this step is the step of what we call ‘juridico-political,’ which is at once ineluctable and undecidable: because it is necessary to traverse the moment of undecidability.  …  There is no possible responsibility that does not undergo the ordeal of this undecidability, and of this impossibility.  I believe that an action, a discourse, a behavior that does not traverse this ordeal of the undecidable, with all the double binds, all the conflicts …, is simply the tranquil unfolding of a program….  The program can be Nazi, democratic, or something else … but if one does not traverse this terrifying ordeal of undecidability, there is no responsibility” (67-69).
14. Aware of the complexity of the point, Lacoue-Labarthe explains: “[Heidegger] was conscious of the leap he was making between, let’s say, something like the call of being and the leap it was necessary to take in order to become committed” (69).
15. The example of Heidegger is an extreme one. His work opens the way to think the ungrounding of his own political error; but this is only possible by reading him in a certain way (which is the singular achievement of, principally, Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe).  Heidegger opens the way toward thinking the originary call (of politics), which is not yet political.   When his commitment to the Nazi party is used as a name for the political as radical evil, it is adduced in order to side step or leave unthought the secondary status of the political determination of the call.  The yes is not originarily a yes to God or to a necessary authority.  It is a yes to we-do-not-know-what.  And this not-knowing is nothing less than the ungrounding of the political determination that follows.  This ungrounding is the very possibility of responsibility, for responsibility is only possible if we are able to step back in order to assume that there is no absolute authority that demands obedience in order to assign the call (of politics) to the juridico-political instance of this or that apparatus, whether it is the Nazi apparatus or any other political formation.  Heidegger’s yes is only secondarily a yes to Hitler, and this is not to say that there could have been a primary or primordial yes to a “right” form of politics, but to illuminate that every political determination is always secondary, and can therefore never be absolute.  That is, the militant, or the philosophy for militants, whether it is Heidegger or Badiou’s, can never know if its political determination of the calling, in this or that instance of authority, is the right one.  Responsibility, means, then, not justifying why one is right, but assuming, not that one could be wrong, but that no absolute necessity has ordained that any one particular determination is right.
16. Are we more prepared today than we were in 1988 to deal with the possible resurgence of fascism? Not at all.  If anything, we are in a more precarious position.  Today what we are witness to, as a possible stop gap to fascism, is the reemergence of a radical militancy that wants nothing more than to declare and “demonstrate” its political determination as the right one.  To the extent that this oppositional force is the only stop gap we have at our disposal against the forces available to figures like Trump, it seems unlikely that we will be able to witness a revolution capable of preventing a new form of fascism.  It remains to us, up to all of us, to interrupt the irresponsibility that enables the efficacy of all the forms of fascist discourse.  This includes our own fascist will to political correctness.
17. Now, what this entire exposition also exposes is that there has been a recent massive response to a political call, which only by means of an irresponsible denegation of the unnecessary assignation to the juridico-political conservative, and even reactionary, determination, is able to image that what is at issue at the present time has something to do with the plight of the white and rural working class. The populist, or the hegemonic, way to master this circumstance has been traditionally assigned to the role of managing equivalential chains of signification.  Yet, what the gap between call and determination points to is that this choice could have more to do with unacknowledged and ignored ways of being in the world than with the effects of neoliberalism on middle class America.  This does not only point toward unacknowledged visceral racism, it also entails thinking through the rejection of politics that typically lies at the heart of conservative populist movements.  (The recent desire to extricate Trumpism from populism is a wild herring effect of our current nihilist era.)  The rejection of politics should not be met with more politics, even less with morally upright politics.  The people, even according to the old Marxist axiom, have reason.  Even if for the wrong reason.  They have reason in intuiting, in heeding the call of being, which claims abeyance regarding politics as the totalizing discourse of our era.

 

 

Books cited

Badiou, Alain. L’Être et l’événement. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Print.

____. Manifeste pour la philosophie. L’Ordre philosophique. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Print.

Derrida, Jacques, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference. Trans. Fort, Jeff. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Print.

Farias, Victor. Heidegger and Nazism. Trans. Burrell, Paul. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Print.

____. Heidegger et le nazisme. Paris: Verdier, 1988. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York; London: Verso, 2011. Print.

Politics, Trace, Ethics: Disciplinary Delirium—On Trump and Consequences

“Politics, Trace, Ethics: Disciplinary  Delirium—On Trump and Consequences”

Jaime Rodríguez Matos

CSU, Fresno

(Paper read at the conference “Latin America in Theory/Theory in Latin America” held at USC, Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 11 & 12)

 

The first part of my title is meant as a reference to the kind of thought that maintains that it is not possible to neatly separate politics from ethics.  The trace of the ethical in the political and the trace of the political in any radical ethics…. This is a difficult proposition, which I would like to frame today, at least on a first approach, by way of the recent election result that has given us Donald Trump as president-elect of the United States.  I currently teach at an institution where Mexican and Mexican-American students represent a large sector of the student population.  When we went back to our various classrooms on November 9^th, there was a palpable sense of dread and mourning.  At least for myself, that day represents the most vivid experience of something like an exposure unto death, an exposure to nakedness, destitution, passivity, and pure vulnerability—to the face of the other as the very mortality of the other, of the absolutely other, piercing, as Levinas put it, “what merely shows itself,” piercing through “what remains the ‘individual genus’” (174 & 167).[1]  When Levinas writes of this kind of exposure in his late work the limits of language are tested at every turn.  For what is at issue here is the singular beyond equivalency, the singular before and beyond the synthetic function of consciousness and re-presentation, the singular before or beyond or not yet under the unity of transcendental apperception—a noema without noesis, an exposure to time as “the deformation of the most formal form there is—the unity of the I think” (176).  This breach of intentionality—in which there is a relationship to the other not of the sort that reduces the other to the thought of the identical as one’s own, thus reducing one’s other to the same—is ethical to the extent that it must remain prior to knowledge.  Which means that as soon as I transform this exposure into a datum that means something within the architecture of a political “what is to be done?” I am no longer dealing with a formless time, still completely historical, but before or beyond intentionality.  I would then be dealing with the presence of the present as the temporality of the graspable and its promise of something solid, material.  Now, this materiality is the only thing that seems to be of value to many of our fellow radical thinkers, who are, quite correctly, concerned with the very political question of what to do now that the entire world of many of my students at Fresno State seems to be on the border of a catastrophe wrought in the name of “making America great again.”  This political, too political, first response would forget all too quickly the fundamental experience of singularity without equivalence, which is ultimately, as Levinas, himself puts it, an experience of love, by running away with its bit of knowledge, its bit of ground on which to found its: “what needs to be done is ….!”  If I could put it in these terms, at the risk of simplifying and doing some concretizing of my own, the less political edge of the ethics of singularity without equivalence would present us with a radical complication in our current climate.  For when I walk out of the classroom where I was in the company of my frightened students I immediately come across a young man wearing cowboy boots, Wrangler jeans, and a red baseball cap which orders everyone who reads the white letters on its front to Make America Great Again.  And there it was again, piercing through what shows itself, the face of the other, an alterity without noesis, the vulnerability and nakedness of the other.

As James Hatley has observed (35-36),[2] in Otherwise Than Being (101) Levinas elaborates on a scene of persecution in which he must fear not only for the possibility of a violent act of his own against the other, but also fear for the other’s plans for violence against him.  This fear is not simply a fear for oneself.  Rather: “My very persecution by the other is revealed to be my call to responsibility for the other.  The mere fact … that I have become a victim does not save me from responsibility.”  It is here that Levinas writes of an ethical delirium:

In ethical delirium … No matter how great the other’s assault against me might be …  Not the other’s assault upon me but my vulnerability to him or her is the issue.  My ethical delirium for the other does not cancel out my attentiveness to him or her … but intensifies it beyond any possible recall. (36)

Delirium is, one again, an attempt to explode or exceed the reduction of the other to the same in conscious representation.  What would the politics of this exposure be?  I would propose that whatever politics can be derived from this experience of singularity without equivalence would only be a deformed politics, and I don’t mean that as a bad thing but in the same sense that Levinas writes of a deformed time that is no longer the vision of the presence of the present in knowledge.

Now I believe that this is not simply something that we can learn from Levinas and apply as a ready-made solution to our problems.  For Levinas, this deformed time is also the address of a commandment or an order that is the voice of god, it is the fall of god into meaning.  Again, the thrust of this formulation is to move beyond the idea of meaning as presence or its reducibility to presence.  And Levinas emphasizes this double edge when he insists that this formless temporality is, and has always been, time as the good-bye of theology, while at the same time being the to-God of theology (à-Dieu).  I find this appearance of god consistent with everything Levinas sets out.  I think this is the inescapable conclusion if we follow the path of ethics.  But this is also why I find ethics problematic.  I fear that in this god, even if it is a deformed god, remains the all-too-palpable possibility of a political translation of theology: it is the most minimal, and perhaps for this reason the most effective, safeguarding of the becoming necessary of contingent authority, and authority figures.

The problem opens a different question.  For it would be possible to claim that if we do away with this figure, then we are immediately in the realm of a politicity that remains ensnared in the all-too-political framework of tragedy, where cutting the head of the leader is the central future of that form.  The most vivid theoretical work in this regard, to my mind, is Roberto Esposito’s conclusion to Categories of the Impolitical.[3]  There, in relation to Bataille’s acephalism and the image of Numancia, he points out to what extent Bataille’s writing elides the political and the impolitical:

the impolitical, pushed to its extreme, where what is in evidence is its own acephalism, the cutting of its own head, finds once again a political configuration, it recognizes (or it imagines) a point that is originarily prior to the ‘rupture’ with politics.  This point remains rigorously unrepresentable, but that unrepresentability can itself be represented, in its radical absence from the modalities of presence, but nevertheless represented. (308)

Which results in the perhaps contradictory fact that the impolitical becomes political at the exact moment in which one recognizes that there is something that remains before or outside of the political.

Though it is not the path I want to follow as I conclude, it would be possible to track in some of the literature of the 20^th century attempts to think through this problem which eschew both the tragic as horizon for politics and the absolute commandment of ethics while insisting on the singular without equivalent that Levinas has done so much to make thinkable in our time.  Celan, Lezama Lima, Alejandra Pizarnik, among others, would be important reference points.  In that configuration, the issue concerns the relationship between the words of the poem and the deformation of the Muses, who ultimately are interrupted just as intentionality is interrupted in Levinas texts, without the loss of the singularly inequivalent.  But that is not the path that interests me today, as we are gathered here in Los Angeles at a time when people are out on the streets and the sound of police helicopters hovers over our heads.

I would like to return to the situation at hand now that Trump is the president elect.  And to the question of what kind of politicity, if that is the appropriate word here, would obtain if we allow the deformed time of singularity without equivalence to be heard as we think together in this difficult time.  Furthermore, I want to ask you to allow me to shift from the praxis of the militant to our own praxis as people who think and write about what is happening in our contemporary historical situation.  A praxis that is on the same plane as the actions of any militant, for our work can no longer simply be imagined to stand somewhere outside of time.

My feeling is that some of the difficulties that arise today do not only affect and compromise words like ethics, politics, subjectivity, and so forth, but that they also unground the frameworks in which we attempt to make them intelligible.  Latin Americanism is just one of those frameworks.  And whatever politicity can emerge from these ruins must begin by reimagining not only what we understand by politics, but also the function of knowledge when it is exposed to (the) singularity without equivalence (of the other).  It will not come as a surprise for most of you here today, that it is my opinion that the kind of thought that takes it upon itself to work through these problems goes by the name of infrapolitics.  But rather than say anything more about infrapolitics per se, I want to close by turning to the notion of psychoanalytic delirium and point out to what extent the style of that thought can be illuminating in what seems like a very dark post-Trump night.  That is, its style or its way of falling into meaning might be of help not because of any doctrine of the subject or of subjectivity, which might seem to be antithetical to what I have been outlining so far by way of Levinas, but because of what it can teach us, perhaps, as academics struggling with the relationship of knowledge and the exposure to the singular without equivalence.

For Jacques-Alain Miller, whom I cite here without the slightest need to presuppose his dominion over the exegesis of psychonalaisis, the formation of the unconscious is “the signifying alienation ([in which] the signifier represents the subject for another signifier) and sometimes, when a signifier calls upon another, it is produced for the subject as a lapse, through which it appears that he himself has produced it” (12).[4]  The difficult question, or the matter for psychoanalytic debate, is how to take this point of departure into account when differentiating between the formation of the unconscious (in neurosis) and the claim regarding elementary phenomena (in psychosis), while maintaining that these elementary phenomena are not simply a form of organisism.  How to reconcile something like an elementary phenomenon while rejecting organisism?  Miller proposes that there is an elementary phenomenon, but it is not quite certain what it is, much less that it is the address of god to us.  The elementary phenomenon represents a “we don’t know what” for someone else.  Elementary phenomenon, S1, represents an unknown X for someone, for the subject.  “In the formation of the unconscious, signifier links with signifier and the subject emerges as the effect of this link.  … the subject is not aware of this procedure: the signifiers link up among themselves and the subject is a little relegated to the background, as we see in the [case of a] lapse” (12).  And delirium is nothing but the address of this elementary phenomenon or sign, which represents an X for the subject.  Something comes to be taken as addressed to me, this tells me something, it speaks to me (19).  Thus the mysterious perplexity that the intuitive phenomenon produces—an intuitive phenomenon to which we add the delirious intuition implied.  There is here a supplement: the production of meaning.

For the analyst, “it” speaks to him.  The first evidence, the elementary phenomenon, the signifier alone, no one knows what it signifies.  It is only when another signifier appears (S2) that the signification of S1 emerges (22).  My students crying on November 9^th, or the Trump supporter walking around campus with his celebratory gear, remain a “sinthomic” or formless thing that is yet outside of the symbolic fabric until I begin to assign them places like oppressor and victim, and the like.  Yet, they are not only both equally deserving of our responsibility to them, but are also responsible one for the other. Only when we instrumentalize in each case their singularity, reducing them to the sameness of our representations, bringing them into the light of conscious attention, do these individuals become the elementary phenomenon that authorize us to say: see, that is the thing that allows me to claim that politics speaks through my academic mouth, that is the ground on which I find the authority to say what needs to be done.  Yet what is happening here is the mistaking of “reality” for the constitution of delirium.  What if meaning comes from delirium in every case?  Delirium as equivalent to S2.  Which is to say that delirium would have an inextricable relation to knowledge.  Knowledge as delirium (22).

I do not mean to be simplistic or dogmatic one way or the other.  Nothing against knowledge, just as there is a new valuation of delirium.  Nothing against the delirium that makes knowledge possible, even as there is no rehabilitation of knowledge as a form of certainty.  For knowledge as delirium is exactly what undoes the certainty of the political or ethical materialist, he or she who thinks that somehow everything has been made clear and neatly tied to Reality.  We are reminded by the most devoted of Lacan’s students that

Lacan invites us to be a little psychotic, a little more perplexed.  He invites us to read things without understanding them and he helps us with his style that produces perplexity.  He teaches us not to efface the moment of perplexity, not to run away with our S2, our knowledge, supported by our phantasm, in order to decipher and affirm that we have no difficulty and that we understand what is happening.  To try not to understand what is happening is a discipline. (24)

Can this be the beginning of a deformed politics, a politics that is no longer the creation of hegemony, of the all too-quick answer regarding “what is to be done”?  To reject the pose of he or she who understands without perplexity?  The risk of running away too quickly with our bit of knowledge, with our S2, with the little plot of ground on which to stand and grandstand, is that we simply could mistake our phantasm for Reality.  Let us not demand of ourselves, or of others, or of the other in us—let us not demand write and think so that I can understand without perplexity!

[1]           E. Levinas. Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 174, 167.

[2]           James Hatley. “Beyond Outrage: The Delirium of Responsibility in Levinas Scene of Persecution.” In Addressing Levinas. Eds. Eric Sean Nelson, Antje Kapust, Kent Still.  Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2005, pp. 34-51.

[3]           Roberto Esposito. Categorías de lo impolítico. Trans. Roberto Raschella.  Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2006

[4]           J-A Miller. “The Invention of Delirium.” Lacanian Ink 34 (Fall 2009): pp. 6-27.

“O friends …”

“O Friends…” (by Jaime Rodríguez Matos)

A friend (someone who is by no means simply trying to dismiss our work by misrepresenting it in order to declare its insufficiency, someone who is aware of the work that happens explicitly under the term infrapolitics) objects that every time the word infrapolitics is used we might as well substitute it for deconstruction. There is the perception that the insistence on the word infrapolitics is problematic, that something has gone wrong. The wrong turn concerns politics. The objection: once we have deconstructed subjectivity, collectivity, history, and so on, we are no longer dealing with a traditional notion of politics and therefore it might be more of a provocation to call the result “politics.” “Politics,” then, understood as the task of deconstruction (assumed to be the proper but denegated name of infrapolitics), is “the work toward and from the other without ground.” So far the objection.

I find this reaction needs to be made explicit and taken into account if one is interested in considering the existence of the Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective. It illuminates, inadvertently, to what extent infrapolitics is no longer a continuation of previous theoretical work. It also highlights to what extent the project makes even those in close proximity a little uncomfortable. My aim with these remarks, then, is not necessarily to say anything new, but to make explicit a facet of our project that has been underthematized. Our friends’ objections shed light on some of the more general protestations (sometimes but not always hostile) being made against infrapolitics at the moment. For it is the very refusal to look politics head-on that is at issue. The accusation of a-politicity is made exactly when politics is being questioned most radically. This is important to note if only as a heads-up against any possible question-begging reclamations. The demand for the useful and effective politicity of infrapolitics is possible only by begging infrapolitics to accept presuppositions that are not its own, by begging infrapolitics to destroy itself. That this can happen both in the name of academic discourse and also in the name of political Causes is testament to the non-place that infrapolitics “occupies” at the moment.

Remarks:

• Steve Buttes recent comments on infrapolitics highlight the extent to which the project can be mistaken as the latest incarnation of a decades long attempt to do theoretical work within Latinamericanism. Following the gesture of John Beverley in Latinamericanism After 9/11, Buttes treats the entirety of Alberto Moreiras’ work, as well as that of scholars associated with him (Patrick Dove, Kate Jenckes, Marco Dorfman), as different instances of a master project geared toward making certain phenomena visible for the fields of Latinamericanism or Political Theory. Everything “theoretical,” regardless of specific circumstance, becomes the work of “the infrapolitical thinker.” This is problematic on more than one front. For one, it fails to see the specific circumstances that led to the emergence of the term. One of the issues at stake, however, concerns the very image of the moment that animates the work on infrapolitics.[1] To put it bluntly: infrapolitics becomes necessary as a project when the theoretical apparatus that informed much of the work that was done in the 1990s and 2000s seems insufficient, or, more radically, when it begins to serve, in many instances, as alibi in maintaining the staus quo regarding the life of an academic discipline like Latinamericanism. It is certainly possible to quote Lacan or Lacanians in order to show how the subject is constitutively divided from itself, but if this is done in the name of producing more readings or contributions to the study of Latin America, then the radical unworking of subjectivity simply serves to prolong the appearance that everything is just fine so far as area studies is concerned. At the same time, this kind of theoretical resourcefulness hides the fact that it is now necessary for “theory” to begin to do theoretical work of its own beyond the masterful reproduction of what is elaborated elsewhere. And this is not simply a question of arrogantly asserting superiority over any archive, but rather of a recognition that, whatever the limitations of our work, it has to begin to push the boundaries imposed by all images of the present that are handed to us regardless of theoretical provenance. (So we are faced with a group of scholars from disparate backgrounds—cultural and literary critics, philosophers, political theorists, etc.—all of whom are faced with the fact that, whatever their credentials, it seems unavoidable to cross into “foreign” disciplinary territory: we lack the paper work that would make us “proper subjects” in those other territories. One way of putting it would be to consider the existence of a trained Hispanist intent on thinking through contemporary global politics by way of a post-deconstructionist notion of the ontological difference.) In a word: it involves acknowledging, and accepting the consequences on our part, that no one is ever recognized as prophet in his own home—which is fine by us, as we deny the possibility of prophesy in the first place, above all when it comes to knowledge of history and politics. For these reasons, the work of the group does not find a ready-made mode of inscription in stable academic frameworks. That resistance to infrapolitics is felt from within (what the “outside” world considers to be just the usual suspects of poststructuralist theory) as well as from without is indication that the claim that infrapolitics simply continues decades long work by a recognizable sector of any field is not quite accurate. One would first need to account for the fact that thinkers who see themselves as deconstructionists (of whatever ilk) find it necessary to situate themselves at a distance (however proximate) from the project as such. This is simply a fact of our situation, not something that has been posited by us. This distance also marks a certain contour of our current situation, and it is not a minor one in my estimation.
• It would be impossible to do justice to the diversity of approaches that make up the group by pointing to labels such as deconstruction, theory, hermeneutics, posmodernity, subaltern studies, Marxism, pasychoanalysis, political philosophy, and so forth. The line that cuts across all of those terms has a theoretical bent, but it is far from homogeneous and recognizable from the point of view of the current “tool box” approach to academic positionality. But also, and perhaps more important, what is crucial in each one of those cases is that all of those terms are being constantly divided from within: we are heretical in all our theoretical preoccupations. In my own specific case, I have found it perplexing that some label me as a Heideggerian, a Badouian, a Lacanian, and even an old-fashioned literary critic. At the same time historians claim that history is lacking, while literary critics quip that there is too much history keeping me away from the texts. While I can see why that happens, it always results in a reduction that does little justice to what is actually at hand. And more often than not, these acts of labeling go hand in hand with fundamental objections based on the idea that if I am taking Heidegger, or Lacan, or Badiou seriously enough then I should not be doing what I do. These are not simply personal anecdotes regarding my history in the academy: they indicate a fundamental uneasiness when it comes to a certain kind of work that is being done today (not just by me) that refuses the full capture of academic discourse.
• Why demand a clear demarcation between deconstruction and infrapolitics? It might be counterproductive to take the path of delineating to what extent infrapolitics is not deconstruction. Derrida, Heidegger, Nancy, and others, are fundamental references for many of us. Thus, it is not out of a need for demarcation but out of a need for a more amalgamated existential specificity (an infrathin [inframince] relation to use Duchamp’s term recently invoked by Nancy, 14) that it has become necessary to insist on infrapolitical and poshegemonic reflexion. For Moreiras, the posthegemonic supplement of infrapolitics “es rehusarse al poder del conflicto central a favor de las múltiples intensidades existenciales de una vida, la común y corriente, la nuestra en cada caso, y de hacerlo además en nombre de la resistencia a toda captura” (Moreiras “Comments to Sergio Villalobos Ruminott’s “Literatura y lucha de classes””). It is not simply that the great categories of politics have to be deconstructed, it is also that the shift toward politics (however “deconstructed”) is a shift toward the obliteration of everyday ordinary life to the extent that it does not show itself useful for the politics of the deconstructed community, or subject. To this Moreiras counters: “La pregunta que siempre se plantea en relación con la infrapolítica, es decir, para qué sirve eso, de dónde la necesidad del prefijo, podría invertirse: la política es en cada caso la captura capitalizante de la vida infrapolítica. Y esa es la definición de política que decide también por qué esa palabra debe caer bajo sospecha, y no sólo en general, sino siempre en cada caso, a cada uso” (Moreiras “Comments to Sergio Villalobos Ruminott’s “Literatura y lucha de classes””). Every time the suffering of the world is invoked as the authorizing instance of academic research, as Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott points out, what is at work in fact is the deactivation, not to say the censorship or annihilation, of this existential or lived infrapolitical dimension. He is referring to the objection voiced in the name of “communism,” but we could substitute the specific terms for politics to the same effect: “la tarea distintiva de la infrapolítica pasa por suspender esos automatismos y poner en suspenso las homologaciones empáticas. Advertida ya de la condición contraproducente de la empatía, la infrapolítica no sabe, pero sospecha de las grandes declaraciones y de las formas monolíticas e identitarias del discurso. Y por eso, más que la restitución de la [política] como motor de la historia, la pregunta infrapolítica sospecha de la [política] como forma histórica de la tesis del conflicto central, misma que estructura el horizonte onto-teológico occidental. Desde esta inquietud, la lucha de clases en sus formulaciones más militantes y sentidas no repara suficientemente en su función catecóntica, función que le permite amortiguar, neutralizando, la intensidad discontinua de las múltiples luchas sociales.” Which is to say that the problem of infrapolitics is not simply to offer a resignification of politics, a better sense of the political, but to show how the invocation of politics is always the erasure of the infrathin existence that does not allow itself to be captured by the political in any form.

References

Buttes, Steve. “More Thoughts on Infrapolitics”. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/more-thoughts-on-infrapolitics-steve-buttes/, 2016. 3 May 2016.

____. “Some Questions for Infrapolitics”. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/some-questions-for-infrapolitics-by-stephen-buttes/, 2016. 3 May 2016.

Moreiras, Alberto. “Comments on Regional Critical Work”. Infrapolitical Deconstruction: Discussion Group, 2016. Facebook. 29 April 2016. <https://www.facebook.com/groups/446019398878033/permalink/875947335885235/&gt;.

____. “Comments to Sergio Villalobos Ruminott’s “Literatura y lucha de classes””. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/literatura-y-lucha-de-clases-comunismo-del-hombre-solo-de-fedor-galende-vina-del-mar-catalogo-2016/ – comments, 2016. 2 May 2016.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Intoxication. Trans. Phillip Armstrong. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Print.

Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio. “Literatura y lucha de clases. Comunismo del hombre solo de Fedor Galende (Viña del Mar: Catálogo, 2016)”. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/literatura-y-lucha-de-clases-comunismo-del-hombre-solo-de-fedor-galende-vina-del-mar-catalogo-2016/ – comments, 2016. 3 May 2016.

 

 

[1]           For Moreiras, the continuity with the work on Latinamericanism, which was always a problematic relation to begin with, is now untenable. Recently he has offered the following exposition of the problem: “there is a void at the place where critical regionalism used to exist as Latinamericanism. Today the position is empty, and our mission … is to work back from that empty critical position into a proper genealogy of historical life: in other words, history is all we have, or history + the void. For me also, this has been developing essentially since the end of the Cold War, but more markedly and more catastrophically since 9/11, 2001—an event that marked the end of postcolonial thought as a genuinely productive possibility. We can note that, today, even people that are enthusiastic about the Latin American progressive politics cycle do not talk about it in terms of any kind of critical regionalism, rather in terms of whether or not the left can become hegemonic, and what mistakes are being made strictly following a political and economic logic given actual conditions, where ‘culture’ is very often simply another fact of political economy. Simply put, from my perspective, geopolitics has shifted to such an extent Latinamericanism, and any kind of great-spaces area studies, have lost their function today. This is a crisis in university discourse because the disciplinary constitution of the university has no replacement for that function but also or primarily because the disciplinary constitution of the university also has no interest in developing it. So we do a genealogy of historical life–perhaps looking for some kind of impersonal democratization as critical horizon, and perhaps looking for singularities of the time of life, what we used to call a ‘metahistory of material practices of power.’ Such is what remains of a Latinamericanism that can no longer sustain an intellectual endeavor in my opinion. My point, once again, is not to be pessimistic, but precisely to avoid all pessimism through an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the state of things as they are. Only a clear understanding of the epochal situation can help orient our own careers, what is a dead end, what is not, what the function of intellectuality connected to languages and historical traditions could be today. My opinion: we owe tradition nothing, but we may want to establish a relationship to it, that is all. How we do it will define our role for the foreseeable future. Finally, I defined myself as a Latinamericanist only to the extent I have an ongoing conversation with Latin American intellectuals, and in no other sense. Same as regards Hispanism” (Moreiras “Comments of Regional Critical Work”).

Preguntas sobre infrapolítica/impolítica

Preguntas sobre infrapolítica/impolítica

Jaime Rodríguez Matos

¿Cómo entender las últimas páginas de Categorías de lo impolítico de Roberto Esposito? ¿Podríamos partir de ahí para empezar a pensar una posible distinción entre impolítica e infrapolítica?

Se trata de la imagen de Numancia y de los numantinos que antes de rendirse ante Escipión se dan recíprocamente muerte. En el texto de Goerges Bataille que comenta Esposito, “La représentacion de ‘Numance,’” lo “irrepresentable de la representación es … la decisión de una muerte en común, la comunidad decidida en la muerte” (Esposito 318; Bataille 486-489). Esto resulta opaco desde el punto de vista de la política romana: la pérdida de todo ese mundo es la negatividad sin residuo de lo impolítico (319). Pero más allá de la muerte, lo que se hace imposible representar en este caso es lo común –que no son individuos los que mueren, sino todo un pueblo: “El carácter más irrepresentable de la representación de Numancia consiste en el aspecto común, y por ello, en un sentido sustraído a toda evidencia, político, de su impolítico” (319). Lo político, de su impolítico: lo que se puede representar de lo irrepresentable. Bataille, que tiene como telón de fondo la lucha anti-fascista cuando escribe sobre la representación de Numancia, concluye, no su texto, pero sí el de Esposito con las siguientes palabras:

No hay más que ilusión y facilidad en el hecho de amar a Numancia porque allí se ve la expresión de la lucha actual. Pero la tragedia introduce en el mundo de la política una evidencia: la lucha emprendida no asumirá sentido y no se volverá eficaz sino en la medida en que la miseria fascista encuentre frente a ella algo distinto que una negación agitada: la comunidad del corazón de la que Numancia es la imagen. (en Esposito 320)¹

Una negación agitada es lo que sabemos hacer casi de forma automática. Dadas las condiciones de miseria necesarias siempre llega el momento del grito, del “ya basta!” Y no es la imagen de Numancia porque siempre se apoya sobre el presupuesto de una comunidad plena, que no es y nunca ha sido. Y asumirla como el suelo sobre el que nos rebelamos al decir ya basta es haber perdido la batalla antes de comenzar. Entonces: para no quedarnos en la negación agitada es necesario, ante todo, afirmar la irrepresentabilidad irremediable de la de la comunidad y lo común. En este sentido lo común es aquello que no entra nunca en la política. Lo común sería, por ejemplo, la realidad de la catástrofe del esclavo y la esclavitud, que mientras lo tratemos de entender como un problema político solamente no quedará resuelto más que como radicalización de la instrumentalización de la vida. Es decir, mientras el problema de la esclavitud sea sometido a respuestas políticas, éstas solo serán desplazamientos del problema hacia otras zonas. Mientras no nos hagamos cargo de esta imposibilidad, de esa negatividad sin residuo, de lo impolítico, del hecho que en este caso estamos ante aquello que queda totalmente por fuera de la política, nada cambiará –aunque cambien las formas en las que se presente. Esposito, en voz de Bataille, se pregunta: “¿Cómo ‘escuchar’ políticamente lo que está fuera de la oposición política (de lo político), fuera del choque entre partes contrapuestas?” (320).

La cercanía entre Esposito y Bataille es extrema en estas últimas páginas. Esposito recurre al texto de Bataille diciendo que éste provee la conclusión de su libro. Resulta interesante por esta razón prestar atención al hecho de que la conclusión de Esposito/Bataille no es la conclusión de Bataille. En el breve texto de 1937, la conclusión añade una distinción de la que Esposito no se hace responsable más que de forma implícita:

El principio de esa inversión es simple. A LA UNIDAD CESARIANA QUE FUNDA UN JEFE, SE OPONE LA COMUNIDAD SIN JEFE REUNIDA POR LA IMAGEN OBSESIVA DE UNA TRAGEDIA. La vida exige hombres reunidos, y los hombres sólo se unen por un jefe o por una tragedia. Buscar la comunidad humana SIN CABEZA es buscar la tragedia: matar al jefe es en sí tragedia; sigue siendo una exigencia de la tragedia. Una verdad que cambiará el aspecto de las cosas humanas comienza aquí: EL ELEMENTO EMOCIONAL QUE DA VALOR OBSESIVO A LA EXISTENCIA COMÚN ES LA MUERTE. (488-489)²

El recorrido de la escritura impolítica que hace Esposito en su análisis de figuras como Canetti, Weil, Broch, representa una diferencia significativa de cara a lo que se expone sobre Bataille hacia el final del libro. Para Esposito, ésta es una escritura y un pensamiento en el que es observable una elisión que no es visible en ninguno de los otros. En Bataille, el “confín entre político e impolítico, que puede definirse diciendo que lo impolítico, empujado hacia los confines extremos –el corte de su propia cabeza, la acefalia– reencuentra una configuración política, reconoce (imagina) un punto originariamente anterior a la ‘ruptura’ con lo político. Este punto sigue siendo rigurosamente irrepresentable. Pero esa irrepresentabilidad puede ser ella misma representada, en su radical ausencia de las modalidades de la presencia y, sin embargo, representada” (308). La tragedia, lo impolítico sin cabeza y su escenificación, se hace político justo en el momento en el que se reconoce que hay algo que queda antes o fuera de lo político.

¿Podríamos decir que en tanto que trágica esta imagen de lo impolítico se mantiene plegada de forma demasiado comprometida con la política –y más aún, que insiste de forma contradictoria en la negación agitada precisamente porque asume demasiado pronto la necesidad de reinscripción de lo impolítico en la política? ¿Podríamos decir que la impolítica al limitarse a la no-relación con lo político, es decir, al no tener disponible un concepto como el de poshegemonía se ve obligada a habitar un espacio trágico que aun bajo el signo de la muerte del jefe sigue siendo demasiado político? O en otras palabra, ¿sería posible decir que sin un concepto de poshegemonía lo impolítico solo puede pensar su politicidad de forma trágica?

Notas

[1] “Il n’y a qu’illusion et facilité dans le fait d’aimer Numance parce qu’on y voit l’expression de la lute actuelle. Mais la tragédie introduit dans le monde de la politique une évidence : que le combat engagé ne prendra un sens et ne deviendra efficace que dans la mesure où la misère fasciste rencontrera en face d’elle autre chose qu’une négation agitée : la communauté de coeur dont Numance est l’image” (Bataille 488).

[2] “Le principe de ce renversement s’exprime en termes simples À L’UNITÉ CÉSARIENNE QUE FONDE UN CHEF, S’OPPOSE LA COMMUNAUTÉ SANS CHEF LIÉE PAR L’IMAGE OBSÉDANTE D’UNE TRAGÉDIE. La vie exige des hommes assemblés, et les hommes ne sont assemblés que par un chef ou par une tragédie. Chercher la communauté humaine SANS TÊTE est chercher la tragédie : la mise à mort du chef elle même est tragédie; elle demeure exigence de tragédie. Une vérité qui changera l’aspect des choses humaines commence ici : L’ÉLÉMENT ÉMOTIONNEL QUI DONNE UNE VALEUR OBSÉDANTE À L’EXISTENCE COMMUNE EST LA MORT” (488-489).

Bibliografía

Bataille, Georges. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Print.

Esposito, Roberto. Categorías de lo impolítico. 1988. Trans. Roberto Raschella. Madrid: Katz Editores, 2012. Print.

First collective publication dedicated to infrapolitics: Transmodernity. Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015

Although the work is ongoing, the texts in this issue of Transmodernity reflect some of the questions and problems that the Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective has engaged with in its first year of activity as a collective.

See link for access to essays by Alberto Moreiras, Maddalena Cerrato, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís and Jaime Rodríguez Matos.

https://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=ssha_transmodernity;volume=5;issue=1