Think about Nazi Germany, the purported defender of the West, allying itself with Japan and signing a nonaggression pact with Bolshevik Russia. It is an example. Another one: Think about the Trump administration, professing an end to war adventurism and engaging itself in the administration of Venezuelan Chavism or threatening to take over Greenland by whatever means necessary. The truth of the political is not political; politics lies, and there is no properly political truth. Whatever politics brings out of concealment remains mired in a superordinate concealment that can only by handled by doxa, always political. To that extent, we should always think of politics by positing a metapolitics and an infrapolitics that constantly go along with it in a rather uncanny way, unpredictable and yet always present. Both of them, metapolitics and infrapolitics, are permanent guests and witnesses to the political game but never more than secondary players, adventitious participants in it at most. Sometimes they are implicit and sometimes they become explicit. Perhaps it is only when they are made explicit that politics finds its (improper) truth. Metapolitics and infrapolitics, in different ways, unconceal the impossible truth of politics. The truth of politics is therefore always metapolitical or infrapolitical.
We are about to start the semester at my academic institution. We must do so under an injunction that has metapolitical force: we are to abstain, in our teaching, from “racial ideology,” from “gender ideology,” and from “sexual ideology.” It is an administrative injunction, and if we ignore it we will lose our jobs. The prohibition has more weight than its content: what is in fact, racial, gender, or sexual ideology? Nobody knows for sure. It is to be determined politically, from student denunciations, which are being encouraged, or by administrative opinion. But it is a prohibition that affects the witnessing that all teaching carries within it. One can be a witness to the prohibition, we must be, it has been made clear enough, and others must witness its potential transgression. But the question for me is: if my teaching is to be decided by the prohibition, which is to say tainted by it, if the prohibition stands metapolitically over every word I say, every witnessing of the teaching material I profess, can I still teach without lying? Can I offer any truth that is not always already preempted by the metapolitical injunction to abstain from any nearness to racial, gender, or sexual ideology? Yes, I can be silent on race, and gender, and sex, I normally am anyway—but will that now obligatory silence carry through into whatever I may wish, nay, have to say on, say, the medieval history of Spain? Will the metapolitical injunction bring my teaching to ruin? In the name of opposing indoctrination, they turn teaching into mere indoctrination. Metapolitics is indoctrination, at any rate its desire. But teaching is not indoctrination, whatever else it may be.
Can I oppose infrapolitical strategies to the metapolitical injunction? May I hope to reveal the improper truth of the political otherwise? That is, not by submitting to the metapolitical injunction, not by transgressing it so that I become a potential victim of denunciations and penalties, simply by retaining the thought that teaching is always a form of witnessing or it is nothing, comes to nothing. It is not easy to do. One has to think of ways. And the first question would then be: should I share this very text with my students? Should I have them witness it?
Infraphilosophy 