Infrapolitics is a situated exercise in the time-space of our now. It is terrestrial thought. It lives in the nothing below politics, the latter understood as the everyday trafficking of conflicting desire. It is a praxis of need, hence a preparation for every possible future politics. As an anxious praxis of the nothing, it labors to transfigure everyday existence into an insistence that shelters what remains and therefore necessarily projects. It aims to unsettle desire into need, and to transform need into inceptive ground. It rescues the moment as well as its site—any moment, any site—by moving into a counter-fallenness. It is no metontology—it has no particular interest in producing prescriptions or establishing norms for concrete behavior. Or an alternative formulation: infrapolitics is a metontology if we consider the latter the trace of a return to a now expropriated cave. It is a savage moralism. It questions comportment in the light of its underlying obscurity. Hence it moves toward concealment and guards it as such. It has and seeks no illusions. It is a disillusioned praxis of movement. It moves toward a freedom that stays in place and recognizes no outside. It dwells in a world that has lost its haleness for the sake of a new dispensation. It is worldly thought. It is an exercise that questions and avoids the priority of politics in our present by stepping back into its conditions. It was formulated as a path of thinking in the wake of the perceived intellectual and existential collapse of the theoretico-political projects of the 2000s in the US academy and beyond: it was and remains an emergency. It thinks of itself as belligerent against university discourse in the humanities. It thinks of itself as a revolutionary abandonment of tradition. It thinks of itself as post-metaphysical and on the way to an other projection of thought. It recognizes no difference between theory and practice to the extent it understands theory as a form of practice and practice as a form of theory. It is anticapitalist because it demands an end of primitive accumulation at every level of manifestation. It is an-archic as it accepts no principle of command and no origin of truth. It is also anonymous and secret. It is a practice of counter-ruinance in the ruins of the present. It is the nothing of politics.
Infrapolitics: An Entry. (Draft)
Published
