It is very difficult to summarize what Felipe Martínez Marzoa tells us–his writing is very involved, complex, and premised on everything else he ever wrote, making reading him something like a cult activity: difficult to just take a part and try to make sense of it.  Having said that, perhaps the essay “The State and the Polis,” from 1999, is the clearest summation of what he meant to convey on the subject, but take “clearest” with a grain of salt. 

His overall project has to do with taking the equation of modernity and nihilism (“nihility,” he says) seriously.  And with it the notion that modern civil society and the modern State are already accomplishments of nihilism.  Keep in mind he was a Marxist for many years and that one of his most important books is A Reading of Das Kapital.  But he did take Nietzsche, and then Heidegger, seriously.

Metaphysics is for him the establishment of an “unlimited continuum,” Being as “unlimited continuum,” where every cut and every distance, every distribution and qualification, are merely contingent and arbitrary.  This of course culminates on universal equivalence, universal exchange value as only value.  Within the unlimited continuum, within universal time-space, exchange value reigns supreme, and civil society and the State, and the entire system of rights, are simply ways of codifying that state of affairs.  Needless to say, universal equivalence is the underlying principle of technology and the condition of possibility for the total objectification of the world as standing reserve.  Climate change and planetary destruction are mere consequences.

So, he says, how can we determine that?  What is the point of comparison that may give us the minimum distance to understand the state of affairs as the state of affairs, to thematize it and bring it out of self-concealment? 

Well, archaic Greece, of which we only know by inference for the most part.  We mostly know what is knowable by projecting backwards from a few extraordinary decades that were at the same time the culmination and the implosion of the Greek polis. 

Take what Herodotus says Cyrus said:  “I have no fear of men whose character is defined by the fact that the center of their cities is an empty space in which they gather to deceive each other under oath.”  Martínez Marzoa thinks Herodotus is unconcealing what the Barbarians understood of the Greek community: a strange community that already regulated exchange internally in the agora.   At the time, presumably, the exchange was yet an exchange of things, not of commodities.  Community was still central.  But the agora, by signifying a particular modulation of community, and a successful one, based not on demokratía (a later concept) but on isonomía, and by leading men to reflect on it, through thematizing it, through making it explicit, at the very same time it constitutes the polis as such, also explodes it. 

The empty space, the hole at the center, destroys the opacity of community.  If the community is totally opaque to itself, then it could be said there isn´t one.  So it is only when the community unconceals itself as community that communitarian links become relevant.  This becoming relevant of communitarian links is the polis as such.  It is also the end of the polis.  The gathering place, the agora, is also the place of separation.  When the game one plays becomes explicit as a game, when the game moves towards its own self-understanding as a game, the game breaks down.  It stops as game.  We can only understand community through the implosion of community. 

Communitarian links decay and vanish.  If the “empty space at the center” was the very opposite of the unlimited continuum, its very success moves it towards becoming the unlimited and uniform space of the continuum.  In a sense isonomía becomes demokratía, the Socratic disaster happens, and the polis implodes as such.  It is the beginning of politics. 

There are of course centuries of decline, mediated partly by an idea of faith, towards the construction of a new legitimacy, which ends up being the bogus, nihilistic legitimacy of the modern State where equality, as Hobbes put it, only means that everyone has the power to kill the other, etc.  The only legitimacy has to do with the fact that there is no legitimacy. 

The polis, in the inceptual Greek moment, is a vanishing act, like being itself.  When it finally appears, when it shows itself, that is the very moment of its disappearance. 

A corollary: if politics becomes or is a consequence of the very thematizing of communitarian links, in other words, if politics is the attempt to distribute what is undistributable, then politics is the catastrophe, it happens as catastrophe.  The demos has always already been the very condition of politics but it is a poisoned condition, because when the condition is unconcealed as such, then community vanishes.  At that point the demos needs to be imperialized, hegemonized.  Politics becomes the exercise of command in precisely the way Heidegger’s 1942 Parmenides lectures describe as a Roman practice, always already a translation of Greek practices (although he never put it in those terms, those lectures indicate a theory of hegemony as political command.  But–is hegemony something other than political command?).   The imperium marks the politics of the West to the point that Heidegger could still say in 1942 that we only understand politics “imperially, like the Romans.” 

If you harass a fellow worker, is that politics? If you publish intimate pictures of your sexual partner, or of your former sexual partner, is that politics? I suppose one could argue that you only harass, you only give yourself over to harassment, for political gain. One could even argue that all political gain is the result of harassment. But that is a slippery slope from which one can only take some distance by claiming what seems to so many a dubious distinction: there is politics, whatever measure of dignity you may want to accord to it, and then there is infrapolitics. Infrapolitics precedes and determines politics in every case. Any form of political gain that comes from your harassing practices is probably despicable as a matter of taste, and yet it is the most common one in everyday places such as your workplace; or the US Senate. And harassing practices come in many forms, they are pollakhos, like being itself. But if we accept some forms of harassment and not others we are simply hypocrites. Do not worry: you would not be the only hypocrite, they–you–are legion. Infrapolitics–the very thought–enables the distinction, makes it possible for anyone to say that your political gain out of bad infrapolitics is disgusting and should be taken away from you. In a democratic society if there were any. This is not a call for some buenismo but the very opposite: it is a denunciation of the fact that political moralism in the Kantian sense has today taken over politics totally and absolutely and that a militant return to a moral politics–politics based on the rule of democratic law–is essential, even a reason for war.

Granted that you only harass someone when you think you can get away with it, when you think you will pay no price: that is, when you occupy, or at least think you occupy, some miserable space of your own within hegemony. Or within so-called counterhegemony when it is legitimized as such (having become therefore a part of the hegemonic apparatus). But what if someone were to tell you that there is an alternative, and that alternative is definitely a threat to you.

The Spanish tv series Intimidad, Intimacy, in Netflix, is a curious mixture of thriller and militant position-taking. Yes, I think it is true that only recent changes in hegemony as it is normally understood make it possible: the relative naturalization of feminist discourse, for instance. So one could consider Intimidad feminist militancy. But I think that is a limiting perspective. I prefer to see it as posthegemonic militancy against masculinist and patriarchal aggression. I prefer to see it as an awakening to infrapolitics.

You should see it, it is easy enough. It features the double case of a politician and a factory worker in the city of Bilbao. The point the series makes is that harassment occupies a social space that antecedes the political space and conditions it drastically. Such a simple lesson no one wants to assume. Why?

The crucial issue of presenting harassment–acoso laboral, acoso sexual, acoso intelectual, acoso pure and simple–as social murder is significant. The series includes mention of the English term “mobbing,” mispronounced as “moo-bing.” Infrapolitical jurisprudence is moving in that direction, but certainly not yet in the United States. Mobbing = mortification = consignment to (social) death = social murder. Which sometimes becomes murder pure and simple.

In the 1956 text “Was ist das–die Philosophie?”  Heidegger uses the German word Abbauen, which literally rendered might be “deconstruction,” to talk about the “destruction” of the history of philosophy he had already recommended in Being and Time.  The paragraph says in the available English translation: 

This path to the answer to our question is not a break with history, no repudiation of history, but is an adoption and transformation of what has been handed down to us.  Such an adoption of history is what is meant by the word “destruction.”  . . .  Destruction does not mean destroying but dismantling [Abbauen], liquidating, putting to one side the merely historical [that is, historiographical] assertions about the history of philosophy.  Destruction means–to open our ears, to make ourselves free for what speaks to us in tradition as the Being of being.  By listening to this interpellation we attain the correspondence [to that towards which philosophy is on the way, necessary for an adequate answer to the question What is philosophy?] (What is Philosophy?, Rowan & Littlefield, 2003, 71-73)

Heidegger presents his notion of destruction as part of a Stimmung, an attunement, a specific mode of pathos that our historical epoch prompts in us and that grounds the possible correspondence.  Thaumadsein is the classical name for that attunement.  Heidegger claims that thaumadsein was not left behind, which for us, after Cartesian doubt, includes anew a step back and a restraint: “Im Erstaunen halten wir an uns . . . Wir treten gleichsam zurück vor dem Seiendem” (84).  And yet, Heidegger says, our “fundamental tuning” “is still hidden from us” (89): “What we come across is only this–various tunings of thinking.  Doubt and despair, on the one hand, blind obsession by untested principles, on the other, conflict with one another.  Fear and anxiety are mixed with hope and confidence” (91).  It is here, following those considerations, to which Heidegger offers no particular answer, that Heidegger makes the claim that such an attunement might best be explored through poetic language: “our discussion, which follows philosophy’s thinking, necessarily leads to a discussion of the relationship between thinking and poetic creation.  Between these two there exists a secret kinship because in the service of language both intercede on behalf of language and give lavishly of themselves.  Between both there is, however, at the same time an abyss for they ‘dwell on the most widely separated mountains'” (95).  To my knowledge, Alain Badiou, the great critic of the “suture” of philosophy to poetry in Heidegger, never referenced the fact that Heidegger places the closest proximity between the two at the level of a fundamental attunement–away from any psychology and certainly away from the identification of philosophy with poetry, but certainly on the way to the possible naming of an epochal pathos that could restitute an orientation on the path of thinking.  At stake is the correspondence with the epochal logos, which remains hidden from us. 

In the first part of the essay, which is really a lecture explicitly framed as an introduction to a conversation with his listeners, Heidegger had introduced André Gide’s dictum, in his book on Dostoyevski, that “with fine sentiments bad literature is made” (23).  In retrospect we read that the search not for fine but for the proper “sentiment” is crucial for a good answer to the question of philosophy. And yet the answer as to the sentiment is not given–hence there is no corresponding answer as to the question of philosophy.  Only the two questions subsist.  Heidegger has indeed risked that the question of philosophy has to do with establishing a correspondence with the sending of Being and also that the possibility of attaining it would include not just thaumadsein but also restraint and a step-back from an exclusive concern with das Seiende or present presence.  But that is all he risks.  Except that he does tell us that the notion of philosophy is historically situated as well: 

for Heraclitus philosophia did not yet exist.  An aner philosophos is not a “philosophical” man.  The Greek adjective philosophos expresses something completely different from the adjective philosophical.  An aner philosophos is hos philei to sophon, he who loves the sophon.  . . . What this word means for Heraclitus is hard to translate.  But we can explain it according to Heraclitus’ own interpretation.  According to this the sophon means, Hen Panta, One (is) All.  All means here, all things that exist, the whole, the totality of being.  Hen, one, means, the one, the unique, the all-uniting.  But all being is united in Being.  The sophon says–all being is in Being [Alles Seiende ist im Sein].  To put it more pointedly–being is Being . . . Being is the gathering together [Das Sein ist die Versammlung]–Logos. (47-49)

The Sophists attacked this conception, Heidegger says, and they caused the birth of philosophy by doing so.  The sophos–Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus–lost his harmony, his homologein, the Sophists made sure of it.  From then on, only a striving was possible.  “Because the loving is no longer an original harmony with the sophon but is a particular striving towards the sophon, the loving of the sophon become philosophia” (51).  “The step into philosophy, prepared for by Sophism, was first accomplished by Socrates and Plato” (53). 

If so, it is legitimate to ask whether thaumadsein was already a derived and secondary attunement–in fact, the attunement proper to metaphysics, which Heidegger also calls, although not in this text, ontotheology.  The sophoi would have corresponded through a different attunement.  What was it?  And: was Sophism a historical disruption also in the sense of bringing forth a different attunement?  Was that precisely its fateful accomplishment?  Can we take Sophism to be an actualization or institutionalization of the Parmenidean third way?  Let me put it this way:  Sophism interrupted the sophon, the hen panta, the immersion of Seiende im Sein which was still the thought-character of Anaximander, Parmenides, Heraclitus, presumably Pindar and Aeschylus and even Sophocles.  Sophism was powerful enough to displace the aner philosophos toward a miswandering into a common sense no longer attuned to logos: attuned to doxa, to the marketplace of ideas, to the back and forth of the polis (which brought the polis to its doom at the same time it made it flourish).  That would be the claim.  It is fateful because the reaction to it–Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the ti question–forced the move into metaphysics and the forgetting of the ontological difference and it opened Western history as such. 

When Heidegger says in “On the Essence of Truth” that Kant opens up the last stage of metaphysics he must be talking about the stage where another disruption happened, this time the one that brings metaphysics to its culmination and its end: the stage of the death of God, announced by Kant and expressly formulated by Hegel and then taken up by Nietzsche and reformulated by Heidegger as the stage of the flight of the gods and the wait for the “last god.”  It is dubious that the reaction to such a stage could lead in the direction of a reestablishment, a restoration of the Hen Panta.  That is perhaps what the Heideggerian “other beginning” says: that the other beginning would be different from the “first beginning.”  But will there be an “other beginnning”?  If so, it could only be through some confidence in the possibility that somehow that “other beginning” will start to take place as a new fateful instantiation of Western (perhaps by now already global) history.   I lack that confidence myself, which may make me a pessimist.  We do not have a name, or any awareness, of the fundamental attunement of the last stage of metaphysics opened by Kant–no longer Aristotelian thaumadsein, not really, no longer Cartesian doubt.  Could it be Nietzsche’s probity?  Perhaps.  But restraint, or restraint in probity, still tells us nothing about the fundamental attunement needed to move to a different epoch of thought. 

Unless it is the terror that Rilke mentioned in his Duino Elegies, which crosses in many ways the essential poetry of the century, from Mandelstam and Pessoa to Celan and Claudio Rodríguez and José Angel Valente.  A thinking attuned by terror to the terror of planetary disruption through climate change, a new if long announced word of Being–hardly enough to accomplish a new beginning. 

            (El trato es hablar solo entre 10 y 15 minutos, lo cual implica tener que dejar de lado tantas observaciones sobre este intenso y por muchas razones perturbador libro de Miguel Morey.  Al menos hasta la conversación que siga a nuestros comentarios preliminares.  Me limito entonces a mencionar algunas cuestiones que me motivan particularmente.)

            Me pregunto en qué registro discursivo colocaría Jacques Lacan la obra de María Zambrano, ella misma relativa enemiga de la razón discursiva.  El pensamiento de Zambrano no sigue ni responde al discurso del amo, ni al discurso universitario, ni al discurso histérico, ni al discurso del analista.  Tampoco al discurso capitalista.   Es quizá discurso del saber, o del sentir, pero de la misma manera que podría decirse, sostenidas todas las diferencias, del discurso de Friedrich Nietzsche o del discurso de Georges Bataille o incluso de gran parte del discurso de Martin Heidegger.  En Zambrano todavía está más acentuada que en los pensadores mencionados la diferencia con el discurso universitario–para no hablar de los restantes. Morey, en su libro, habla con cierta insistencia de la dificultad extrema no ya de entender propiamente a Zambrano sino sobre todo de escribir o de establecer una relación crítica con su texto–el texto zambraniano desborda y delira el discurso universitario también en ese sentido, más marcadamente que tantos otros discursos de pensamiento en el siglo xx.  Es interesante esa renuencia y creo que no es posible atribuirla sin más al tipo particular de idiotez que el discurso universitario ha ido labrando para sí mismo de manera creciente y ya abrumadora.  En cualquier caso desde sus primeras páginas Morey renuncia a hablar sobre María Zambrano y opta por hablar desde ella o en relación con ella. 

            En el capítulo 10, un capítulo relativamente tardío en el libro de Morey, nueve lo preceden, nueve de once, al margen de los Apartes, Morey repite que “los alcances precisos” del pensamiento de Zambrano “se nos escapan” (223).  Y continúa:

Hace ya mucho tiempo que nos movemos en su atmósfera, pero estamos lejos de haber podido tomar realmente tierra.  Y tal vez siga siendo así aún durante un tiempo.  Sin duda llegará la hora en la que su propuesta de una razón poética podrá comenzar a ser aquilatada en toda su complejidad, y cuando así se haga es seguro que no dejará de constatarse su asombrosa proximidad con muchas de las más nobles, por culturalmente nutricias, experiencias de pensamiento que por los mismos años se estaban llevando adelante en las cuatro esquinas del mundo occidental.  (223)

            Morey dice que el denominador común a esas experiencias de pensamiento es la “crítica de la razón discursiva” (224).  Algo hay en el siglo xx, como período de la historia del ser, que lleva al pensamiento a intentar formularse como crítica de la razón discursiva en algunas de sus obras esenciales.  Morey menciona a Heidegger y a Bataille, pero también a Maurice Blanchot, a Emile Cioran, a René Char, que son más o menos coetáneos de Zambrano.  La pregunta de Morey en ese capítulo, para la que él esboza una respuesta preliminar y tentativa respecto de Blanchot, es, no si hay influencias o si puede establecerse una relación directa entre los textos, al modo universitario habitual, sino si hay paralelismos y concordancias que convendría establecer incluso a pesar del desconocimiento mutuo.  Es por lo tanto una pregunta que atañe a cierto secreto del pensamiento, y que tiene que ver no tanto con el “espíritu de época” sino más bien con esas “hegemonías rotas” de la historia del ser de las que hablaba Reiner Schürmann.  Si en la historia del ser hay principios epocales que acaban por sintonizar pensamientos de época incluso desde sus diferencias mismas, precisamente porque se postula que esos principios configuran una hegemonía histórica que condiciona, el siglo xx sería el comienzo de una época aprincipial, una época posthegemónica o an-árquica donde el pensamiento prescinde de toda sumisión epocal.  Es algo paradójica la noción: habría pensadores, Zambrano entre ellos, también Morey, cuya pertenencia epocal puede medirse en relación con su capacidad de ruptura de toda pertenencia epocal–su capacidad posthegemónica en relación con una razón discursiva general que marcaría o seguiría marcando una tendencia dominante o abrumadoramente dominante.  Pero hay algunos y algunas que no están en ello, siempre, dice Morey, “en soledad” (223). 

            La pregunta para nosotros, en la precisa medida en que ha dejado de interesarnos el discurso universitario o discurso dominante del saber, en la precisa medida en que nuestra curiosidad o nuestra querencia atiende genealógicamente a esos pensadores oscuros, relativamente impresentables, tan despreciados por la academia elegante, tan fuera de moda, tan incapaces de responder a esa noción caída de sentido común o de sentido común político que arrasa el campo contemporáneo de la producción académica, no es sin embargo si debe haber o no una “constatación,” como dice Morey, de sus paralelismos o concordancias diferenciales.  Esa sería en cierta medida una mirada todavía filológica, todavía pendiente de recursos archiacadémicos tales como el de reducir el pensamiento a su historia.  Yo pienso que nuestra pregunta es en qué medida esos pensadores an-árquicos o posthegemónicos del siglo xx pueden ser semilla o condición de pensamiento real en el presente y en el futuro.  Está claro que esa pregunta no busca acumulación de saber y mucho menos bajo la fórmula marxiana de “acumulación primitiva,” que para Marx era el “pecado original” del capitalismo.  No interesa encontrar una constelación de pensamientos que acabe por configurar, a fin de cuentas, una constelación de pensamiento en cuanto tal susceptible de configurar una nueva hegemonía–sería no solo un pecado sino también un error y una inconsistencia.  Interesa más bien encontrar en esos textos de un pasado tanto más acuciante cuanto que es relativamente reciente acicate y modelo para seguir la obra o la desobra que empieza a ser ya condición literal de respiración en nuestro tiempo. 

            Hacia el final de Le coupable Bataille dice: “Tu asunto en este mundo no es ni asegurar la salud de un alma sedienta de paz ni procurar para tu cuerpo las ventajas del dinero.  Tu asunto es la búsqueda de un destino inconocible” (416).  Perseverar en esa búsqueda es una posibilidad para cualquiera pero no para todos.   Sus resultados son en todo caso impredecibles y pueden resultar duros: “No te equivoques: esta moral que escuchas, que yo enseño, es la más difícil, no deja esperar sueño ni satisfacción.  Te demando la pureza del infierno–o, si prefieres, de un niño: no habrá promesa alguna a cambio y no quedarás ligado a ninguna obligación.  Oirás–viniendo de ti mismo–una voz que lleva a tu destino: la voz del deseo y no la voz de seres deseables” (416).  Creo que no sería falso decir que Morey escribe su libro desde Zambrano de forma claramente comprometida con ese mandato batailleano, a su vez plenamente compartido por Zambrano misma. 

            Empieza a hacerlo desde la referencia a un “tercer camino” que buscaría eludir la muy antigua división del campo de pensamiento entre poesía y filosofía.  El tercer camino zambraniano, meditativo antes que discursivo o contemplativo, trataría de eludir la doble trampa de la técnica y del misterio, es un camino más allá de la técnica pero también ajeno al misterio.  Vocación y destino, dice Morey, añadiendo una serie de precisiones sobre la recuperación o el recuerdo de un “sentir originario” del que dependería la posibilidad misma–yo la llamaría antifilosófica–del aprendizaje del secum morari senequiano.  Morey dice de ella, con Zambrano, que es un pensamiento del fondo oscuro, un pensamiento infernal o pensamiento de catacumbas que deriva o delira en “otra especie de verdad” respecto de las verdades que la filosofía o la poesía pueden producir. 

            Me atengo, pues, a eso en mi comentario.  Quiero pensar ese tercer camino al morar consigo, camino del morar consigo, que promete, en la recuperación del sentir originario, una aventura de pensamiento destinal en la experiencia de “otra especie de verdad:” verdad poética, o racional-poética, diría Zambrano, o demónica, preferiría decir yo si se me permite.  En todo caso, verdad todavía radicalmente intempestiva e inaceptable para tantos catedráticos del pensamiento contemporáneo y para sus numerosos acólitos.  Pero de la que depende, no solo una respiración posible, sino la existencia misma de un futuro. 

Muchas gracias por la invitación a participar en esta conversación.  Es un honor.  Cuando me contactó Benjamín Mayer al respecto yo pensé que mi única función en ella sería precisamente la de ser un conversante más, no tenía idea de que se esperaría de mí esta pequeña intervención especial, para la que no me encuentro especialmente preparado.  Así que, con mis disculpas, y sin más pretensiones que la de ayudar en la conversación, voy a centrar mis comentarios en el capítulo 5 sobre “la criminalización del pecado” y en su contrapartida en la segunda parte de Los ríos al norte del futuro, que es el capítulo 16, la conversación sobre “conciencia.” 

El contexto es por supuesto la gran temática de cristianismo y secularización que cruza todo el volumen.  Para Ivan Illich, como sabemos, la secularización es consecuencia de la “corrupción” del cristianismo, ella misma consecuencia quizá inevitable de la formación original de un “cristianismo histórico” en la creación de la Iglesia como poder secular.  La cuestión fundamental atraviesa por lo tanto la misión o la función de Pablo e indirectamente de Agustín de Hipona.  Dado que hablamos de corrupción, es lógico suponer que habría en Illich un gesto o una voluntad contra la corrupción, definitorio de su posición, y que tal gesto consiste en un retorno a la pureza de la revelación original, del acontecimiento de Cristo como revelación.  A lo largo de todo el libro Illich insiste en la parábola del Samaritano como momento clave o cifra de esa revelación.   Si el pecado es, desde el punto de vista de esa revelación original, simplemente la traición del amigo, que es también traición al dios encarnado, Illich insiste en que la criminalización de tal traición, que equivale a la conversión del pecado en crimen, tiene consecuencias incalculables en el proceso de corrupción secularizante constitutivo de la civilización cristiana y europea. 

Todo se retrotrae al siglo XII, para Illich un momento histórico en el que se produce una extraña conjunción histórica, que es la conjunción de una serie de cambios de formas de vida y de mentalidad y de prácticas eclesiásticas cuyo interés principal era el control de tales cambios.  Por eso podemos entender esa extraña conjunción histórica como un momento señalado en el itinerario que va de la conspiratio original a la conjuratio ya siempre necesariamente corrupta porque vela y oculta el flujo original del espíritu al darle concreción institucional y política, político-institucional.  “Cristo vino a liberarnos de la ley, pero la cristiandad permitió que la mentalidad legal fuera inserta en el corazón mismo del amor” (87), dice Illich refiriéndose a la institucionalización del matrimonio como contrato entre personas en el Cuarto Concilio de Letrán (1215). 

Son las disputas de investidura, sin embargo, las que terminan por originar la criminalización del pecado.  La Iglesia quiso asegurar sus derechos de control y dominación sobre los fieles contra los derechos del imperio sobre sus súbditos.  E intentó hacerlo mediante la reivindicación de autonomía en su autoridad espiritual.  La institución del sacramento de la Confesión, que obliga al fiel a declarar sus pecados a un sacerdote un mínimo de una vez por año, es entendida por Illich como un paso esencial en la criminalización del pecado, es decir, en la idea de que una falta espiritual habría de tener consecuencias seculares en el terreno del castigo.  Así nace el forum internum por oposición al forum civile, según el cual el fiel debe acusarse a sí mismo ante Dios y su representante sacerdotal por faltas a la ley divina.  Illich piensa que tal creación sacerdotal o eclesiástica implica ni más ni menos que el nacimiento de la conciencia.   Dice Illich:  “la implicación primaria de la idea de forum internum es que la ley ahora gobierna lo que es bueno y lo que es malo, no lo que es legal e ilegal.  La ley eclesiástica se convirtió en norma cuya violación llevaba a la condena al infierno–un logro fantástico y . . . una de las formas más interesantes de perversión del acto de liberación de la ley consagrado en el Evangelio” (90). 

El Concilio de Trento es un paso más, notorio, en la medida en que en él la Iglesia, que ya no es identificable con la Cristiandad sin más, entroniza la noción de que su autoridad ha abolido ya la diferencia entre lo que es bueno y verdadero y lo que es mandado, impuesto por la Iglesia misma.  No es que esto consume una colonización de la conciencia, sino que, para Illich, constituye la conciencia misma como interiorización, no ya del evento de revelación cristiana, sino de la autoridad eclesiástica.  Para Illich, siguiendo a Paolo Prodi, esta “criminalización del pecado” “guarda la llave para entender los conceptos políticos de Occidente de los próximos 500 años” (89)–por ejemplo, sienta las bases para entender el concepto de ciudadanía, y de ciudadanía democrática o tendencialmente democrática, como algo obligado por la conciencia. 

El capítulo 16, que empieza con la demanda de David Cayley a Illich de elaborar la noción de fuero interno, por un lado aclara la noción del nacimiento de la conciencia en la criminalización del pecado y sus repercusiones políticas, y por otro, en mi opinión, revela su posible problematicidad.  No tengo más remedio aquí que citar con cierta amplitud, también porque no es seguro que ustedes hayan vuelto a ese capítulo en la medida en que la conversación de hoy tenía que centrarse en los capítulos 5 a 9.  La primera cita que quiero traer a su consideración es la siguiente:

La criminalización del pecado hace posible hablar de conciencia.  Olvidamos con demasiada frecuencia que la conciencia, en el sentido en el que hablamos de dolores de conciencia y de que debemos actuar según nuestra conciencia, o, a la manera kantiana, derivar normas de la conciencia, porque lo que no quiero que se me haga a mí no debería yo hacérselo a otros, la conciencia en ese sentido es producto de la criminalización del pecado, y esa criminalización del pecado puede atarse plausiblemente al siglo doce, y particularmente al intento del Papa de expandir la victoria ganada en la lucha de investiduras.  (190)

Y la segunda:  “Mi hipótesis es que las certezas de hoy son . . . el resultado de los intentos occidentales de institucionalizar la idea cristiana fundamental de que la fe, la caridad y la esperanza no están vinculadas a una norma sino que son interpersonales.  . . . Las ideas occidentales sobre la democracia son un intento de institucionalizar un ‘deber’ que por su propia naturaleza es una vocación personal, íntima e individual” (191).  Y la tercera:  “parece extraordinariamente difícil . . . concebir la conciencia excepto como apelación a una norma . . . El Samaritano no actuó desde su conciencia.  ¿Cómo debemos entender desde qué actuó?  Pablo habla de amor, fe y esperanza” (192).  El capítulo termina con ciertas reflexiones sobre la angustia desde luego nada casuales pero que debo dejar al margen por el momento. 

Cabe entonces resaltar dos cosas, y con esto concluiré.  En primer lugar, la confesión y la obligación de confesión son cruciales en este proceso, pues es la confesión la que inscribe en el cuerpo del fiel la noción de que más allá del bien y del mal está lo que es correcto o incorrecto legalmente, esto es, atendiendo a las normas de la Iglesia.  Y por otro lado, la conciencia es entendida por Illich como sometimiento a la norma, o bien exógena o bien, a la manera kantiana, ya internalizada como mandato interior. 

Me gustaría invocar las reflexiones de Hegel sobre la conciencia desdichada en el capítulo cuarto de su Fenomenología del espíritu.  La subjetividad está para Hegel, en ese período de la historia del espíritu subsiguiente a la dialéctica del amo y del esclavo, escindida, alienada radicalmente.  El llamado sujeto se encuentra autónomo o abandonado y al mismo tiempo soberano, en el sentido de que todo lo que existe existe para él.  Pero el sujeto también entiende que su particularidad y su finitud burlan su pretensión de soberanía universal.  Soy capaz de incorporar la totalidad del mundo a mi conciencia pero el mundo al mismo tiempo me rechaza como ejemplo o instancia particular de finitud ridícula, como egoísta patético.  Desde el punto de vista del otro, es decir, para el mundo, soy solo otra cosa, un cuerpo, un donnadie.  El conflicto entre mi autoentendimiento interno y mi autoentendimiento como resultado de una perspectiva externa me liquida, me hace miserable.  La Iglesia, para Hegel, presentó una solución histórica a ese problema de la conciencia desdichada mediante el sacramento de la Confesión.  La Confesión es el mecanismo mediante el que excedo mi propia finitud.  En ella me reconcilio conmigo mismo, pero a un coste, a un precio.  Es el precio del autosacrificio.  La confesión, mi confesión, es la realización del hecho de que hay un tercero, y de que necesito un tercero, un mediador.  Ese tercero, el espacio de la comunidad, es el espacio en el que me alieno absolutamente para recuperarme a mí mismo, excepto que ahora mi verdad ya no es la mía sino que es siempre ya la verdad del otro.  En el retorno a mí me he sacrificado a mí mismo.  Encontré un nosotros, y ese nosotros me hará inmortal, me dará vida eterna.  Por fin hay un sentido en el mundo. 

La figura de la conciencia desdichada es la figura que media entre la vieja relación con lo divino, anterior a la “muerte de Dios,” es decir, entre la epifanía de la revelación en el sentido de Illich, una revelación siempre olvidada en el pecado, y por lo tanto también siempre recordada en él, y la versión moderna y secularizada que es la relación con “el pueblo,” la nación, la comunidad identitaria, en otras palabras, la política.  Podríamos incluso entender a partir de estas reflexiones de Illich sobre el siglo XII que la muerte de Dios no es un fenómeno de los siglos XVIII y XIX, vinculado a los nombres de Kant, Hegel, Marx y Nietzsche, sino que es ya parte de la reforma gregoriana, como momento en que la mediación eclesiástica reemplaza la mediación divina y hace al dios redundante.  Después de eso, ya todo es política.  Hasta que aparezca otra posibilidad. 

Pienso que todo esto es consistente con, y al mismo tiempo va más allá de las reflexiones de Illich.  Illich no habla de conciencia desdichada como aquello que el cristianismo histórico, en su corrupción o perversión institucionalizante, supera.  Mi idea es que no lo hace porque Illich es incapaz de asumir la necesidad de cancelar el sacrificio–su posición es sacrificial, abiertamente sacrificial, como la hegeliana.  En él el cristiano de la revelación debe aceptar su sacrificio en la marcha de la historia, y el cristiano histórico debe también en el límite aceptar su sacrificio en cuanto al dios de la revelación.  La desecularización en Illich todavía es práctica sacrificial, como lo es la secularización. 

En cuanto a la conciencia, ¿estamos seguros de que la noción de conciencia se agota en la conciencia moral que propone Illich?  Tenemos por supuesto un modelo alternativo, que es el heideggeriano.  Para Heidegger, desde la analítica existencial de Ser y tiempo, la conciencia no responde a la interiorización de la norma y no es por lo tanto primariamente conciencia moral.  Más bien todo lo contrario.  Por lo tanto cabría decir que Heidegger establece las condiciones para un abandono de la estructura sacrificial de la historia en los términos de Illich, que son los términos de toda contraposición entre cristianismo y secularización, incluyendo la hegeliana pero también a otros pensadores de nuestra contemporaneidad como René Girard, Vincenzo Vitiello o Gianni Vattimo.   La conciencia heideggeriana no lleva a la construcción o consolidación de ningún “nosotros” comunitario o político o político-comunitario que sea a la vez la apoteosis y la negación de la comunidad de fieles, sino que atiende más bien a un abandono y desplazamiento radical con respecto de los términos de la conciencia desdichada solo resolvibles en el sacrificio.  No hay por supuesto tiempo de entrar con detalle en el análisis heideggeriano, así que debo limitarme a proporcionar dos breves citas que podemos discutir, y con ellas termino mi exposición:  “La llamada de retorno a través de la cual la conciencia llama hacia delante da a entender al Da-sein que el Da-sein mismo–como fundamento nulo de su proyecto nulo, en pie en la posibilidad de su ser–debe sustraerse y retrotraerse de su perdición en el ‘se,’ y esto significa que es culpable” (Sein und Zeit 287).  “Cuando el Da-sein se deja ser convocado a esta posibilidad, ello incluye hacerse libre a la llamada: su disposición para la potencialidad-de-ser a la que se le convoca.  Entendiendo la llamada, el Da-sein escucha a su posibilidad más propia de existencia.  Se ha escogido a sí mismo” (287).

Ese entendimiento de la conciencia no pasa por la criminalización del pecado ni por la sublimación político-comunitaria de la muerte de Dios–tampoco por la ley moral kantiana.  Busca, sobre todo, eludir el sacrificio en el retorno a una concepción trágica de la existencia opuesta al drama histórico cristiano que Illich tan brillantemente propone.  Saber si la analítica existencial en Ser y tiempo es en última instancia compatible con la posición existencial de Illich, y cómo,es algo que no excluyo de antemano, pero que nos llevaría lejos de estos capítulos que debemos comentar hoy. 

I just finished rereading José Antonio Gabriel y Galán’s Muchos años después. I still think it is an extraordinary novel. Pierre (Klossowski), Gilles (Deleuze) and Felix (Guattari) show up in less than very dignified garments at some point–staging an enigmatic body-without-organs performance.  But essentially the novel is a very tough take on the Spanish democratic transition in the 1970s.  Too many years ago, so this doesn´t strictly matter anymore except in a now allegorical sense.  Those of us who came of age at that time, it is true, were under the illusion that a promise had been made to us in terms of a liberation of desire–political, libidinal, existential.  But the promise did not pay off.  The three main characters in the novel: Silverio the communist, who spends his days writing and rewriting what ends up being a monstrous volume on the fate of communism–revolution or reform?, leftism or pragmatism?, and so forth.  He tries repeatedly to bring his work to the attention of the Central Committee, but the Central Committee could not care less even if poor Silverio was always ahead of the times and anticipated everything.  At the end, his monumental oeuvre ends us in ashes in three shoeboxes forgotten on a bench in the park, eventually thrown into the sea.  Julián published a very successful novel on inner exile, in French no less, but as it turns out it was the only novel he was ever able to write, and he ends as a ludopath, gambling his life away, and naturally losing it, in the new Madrid Casino.  And Odile, a great dancer, also goes through her own spiral of destruction in drug addiction.  The political illusion, drug addiction, and ludopathy stand in, therefore, for the promised liberation of desire, with tragic consequences.   Perhaps these few lines towards the end of the text address the role of the writer or the thinker reflecting on that existential predicament: “la verborrea podía considerarse una terapéutica eficaz, si bien desde el punto de vista de la dignidad no dejaba de ser un truco más o menos barato, dependiendo del estilo de la facundia.”   As a reader, muchos años después de Muchos años después, I need to wonder whether my own path was so divergent from the paths that Odile, Silverio and Julián took, which are also the paths of some of my brothers and sisters.  I expatriated myself partly as a consequence of what I saw as clear dead ends available to me, but then I am not sure my expatriation was not another dead end.  It was marked by work, and by an attempt to gain dignity in it or through it, perhaps too desperately, perhaps too enthusiastically.  Now I despise all of it, in certain precise ways, as nothing more than a “truco más o menos barato.”   And what remains is both a sense of relief that things were not worse than they actually have been and a sense of wonder that I could have been so stupid.

I imagine there is some comfort in waking up to the fact, even if belatedly, that, yes, we are always ahead of ourselves, and we are thrown into circumstances not of our own making. And there is no return. The only lesson to be learned is that newer generations may not be free of the illusions and delusions mine had to undergo. Things are not better now than they were so many years ago. If the promise of a liberation of desire was empty, the actual predicament, as I glimpse it from my students, is more like a promise of continued incarceration within tedious parameters they themselves seem unable to recognize as such. Let us see how they deal with it.

I have reread some of the Derridean texts on messianicity without messianism.  And, concurrently, I have been rereading Being and Time’s pages on being toward death and resoluteness.  As a result, I am convinced (for now at least) that Derrida’s messianicity without messianism, which is for Derrida the very cipher of his position on politics,  relates precisely and univocally to what Heidegger calls “authentic existence.”  As you might remember if you have read the text, but then you might not, “authentic existence” is the existentiell recognition of the fact that death is not to be bypassed, and that it is the “possibility of the impossibility of existence in general.”  In “resoluteness,” which is the “anticipatory revealing” of the impossibility of existing, always and in every case for me, we come to “understand” existence as radically singular and individual, subtracted from the “they.”  It is a freeing for existence in the very face of the impossibility of existence, which “initially and for the most part” remains entangled and obscured in everydayness.  Heidegger says something towards the end of his analysis of being-toward-death that seems inconspicuous but where in fact everything comes together: “Because anticipation of the possibility not-to-be-bypassed also disclosed all the possibilities lying before it, this anticipation includes the possibility of taking the whole of Da-sein in advance in an existentiell way, that is, the possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-of-being.”  It is here, I think, in this possibility of full existence that Derrida situates his messianicity without messianism–in other words, the structure of the to-come, always already perhaps-to-come.  Which means that even politics, as democracy-to-come, hinges for Derrida on the messianic possibility of full existence.  The other side of this is of course that apocalypse must then be understood as the revelation of a certain (I mean, certain with certainty) sacredness or sacrality in death (which Angst confirms and sustains).  The sacrality of the understanding of death, mine, opens for Da-sein “the complete authenticity of its existence.”   “Passionate anxious freedom toward death,” which is the Heideggerian formula, remains to a certain extent hidden in Derrida, but not so hidden if one reads, say, “Circumfession” carefully.  For me, this calls for a rereading of Derrida in exactly the same way Schürmann read Heidegger: from the end back to the beginning.   Needless to say, but I should say it: if the very condition of politics, particularly in the sense of democratic politics, is to be found on the “messianic” (remember: a waiting without horizon, which is the waiting for death/the event in the understanding that death/the event is always already here, has always already happened) project of authentic existence, then we are talking about infrapolitics.

In the first page of “Exscription” (in The Birth to Presence) Nancy sets up a differend–the so-called transparent communication of the sort that is commended by general hegemonic discourse, which “serves only to obscure violence, betrayal, and lies,” and a different communication, the communication of exscription, where something like a spillage of meaning would take place.  This notion of a “spillage of meaning” becomes then what the essay must try to grapple with. 

Nancy does it through an extensive and rather cryptic commentary on the destiny of “the book,” which, he says, has been ruined by texts “bearing the names Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Bataille, Borges, Blanchot, Laporte, Derrida.”  Of course these are names of the infrapolitical canon.  They set up a task: a “repetition” and a “rewriting” “of what does not have its identity imprinted once and for all . . . in the untranscribable Book:” “for the sake of deliverance.”  If the first kind of communication sets itself up as the answer to a question the second kind of communication has more to do with the response to a call.  It is always therefore an autographic move, or pas—pas naturel, pas ordinaire.  “The autograph walks into the abyss.” 

For Nancy this abyss marks the very possibility of community, which the book betrays: “the book never aspires to anything less than the retracing of what exceeds it.”  “At the end of books, there is the Apocalypse:” we write necessarily “according to the logic of discourse and therefore under the nostalgia of the theological logos, also speaking to make possible a communication of speech that can be decided only on the basis of a communism of relations of exchange and therefore of production.”  But, decisively, we write “yet also not speaking, but writing in rupture with all language of speech and writing:” for the Apocalypse, “an impossible, unsustainable nakedness.”

“The reasons for writing a book can be reduced to the desire to modify the relations that exist between a man and his fellows.  These relations are judged unacceptable and are perceived as a dreadful misery.”  These words open the commentary on Bataille.

Bataille places his writing in the stage–“the Christian theater of confession, absolution, relapse into sin, renewed abandon to forgiveness.”  But it is a stage:  “Bataille always played at being unable to finish, acted out the excess, stretched to the breaking point of writing, of what makes writing: that is, what simultaneously inscribes and exscribes it.”  The “interruption of discourse” is the emptying out of the Christian theater, and the emptying out of inscription, “always a murky business.”  But it is Bataille’s “movement of thought.” 

The definition of exscription comes then, and I think it must be seen as a difference with the Derridean notion of “there is nothing outside the text,” in spite of everything.  This is the fundamental Bataillean gesture that Nancy sponsors for himself, and that I think is quite consistent with infrapolitics as second-order deconstruction: “writing exscribes meaning every bit as much as it inscribes signification.  It exscribes meaning or, in other words, it shows that what matters–the thing itself, Bataille’s ‘life’ or ‘cry,’ and, finally, the existence of everything that is in question in the text (including, most remarkably, writing’s own existence)–is outside the text, takes place outside writing.”  “This outside–wholly exscribed within the text–is the infinite withdrawal of meaning by which each existence exists.”  Nancy now makes his own proposal, as I see it, linking Bataille to the thought of the ontological difference.  The “empty freedom” through which existence comes into presence and absence is “certainly not directed toward a project, a meaning, or a work.”  It only passes through them “to expose . . . the ungroundable being of being-in-the-world.  The ‘fact’ that there is being . . . this is the very place of meaning, but it has no meaning.” 

Writing and reading are therefore an exposure to the exscription of the ontological difference: “the being of existence is not unpresentable: it presents itself exscribed.”  “The heart of things: that is what we exscribe.” 

É(x)criture, then.  And through it “the implacable, joyous counterblow that must be struck against all hermeneutics, so that writing (and) existence once more can expose themselves: in the singularity, in the reality, in the freedom of the ‘common destiny of men.'” 

So writing existence is a praxis of existence, and existence is exposure to the ex-. 

The notion that metaphysics is the hegemonic configuration of the West, through the centuries and also now, has been disregarded, when not ridiculed and rejected.  Its counterpart is of course that any hegemony–always both a product and a foundation of sovereignty–is necessarily metaphysical.   This has not only been disregarded, ridiculed, and rejected, but just abominated and declared more than unacceptable, casus morti.  And yet, at the very heart of Agamben’s State of Exception, Agamben offers a thought that confirms it all:

He is talking about the Schmitt-Benjamin disputatio on sovereignty and the state of exception.  He says: “at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law–in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action.  While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it–as pure violence–an existence outside the law” (217 in The Omnibus Homo Sacer).  The following passage is crucial:

“For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Wester politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the ‘battle of giants concerning being,’ that defines Western metaphysics.  Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the ‘thing’ of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exceptioin, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being in the meshes of the logos” (217).

Things get more complicated, or cryptic, after that, when Agamben attempts to show that “pure (or divine) violence is attested to only as the exposure and deposition of the relation between violence and law,” to such an extent that, as Benjamin’s essay on Kafka would show, the “law” whose nexus with power and violence has been deposed “blurs at all points with (infrapolitical) life” (220).

The final passage of the section, thoroughly messianic, encapsulates in a sense my difficulties with Agamben in general–for me, the reason why a step back becomes necessary, that is, a step not forward towards a messianic deposition of the law (through divine or revolutionary violence), but back towards the region that is prior to politico-juridical capture (or metaphysical capture).

“One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.  What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it.  And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value.  This liberation is the task of study, or of play.  And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical” (221).

Finally, here is the last paragraph of the book, where Agamben seems to come to the infrapolitical neighborhood only to double down into politics, at the cost of proposing an archiutopian notion of it:

“To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics.’  Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law.  The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law.  And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life.  We will then have before us a ‘pure’ law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a ‘pure’ language and a ‘pure’ violence.  To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end.  And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception” (242).

Violence becomes a cipher for a life not captured by juridical sovereignty and at the same time the means for its extraction from it. This is why in Benjamin it appears as divine violence. Agamben aims at a time of posthegemony, but it shows up in his text as a sacred time, the time beyond the second coming, an after-time. This is a messianic projection that can only become so either from religious eschatology or as an ideological offshoot of a democracy-to-come.

No, I am talking about the absolute arrivant, who is not even a guest.  He surprises the host–who is not yet a host or an inviting power–enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies.  (Jacques Derrida, Aporias 34)

To say “I am a Jew” or to say “I am a Christian” or to say “I am this and that,” and by “this and that” we mean any form of being that has been culturally produced, politically produced, historically or historiologically produced–that is insistent existence.  It is existing, alright, but it is a form of existing where ontical identifications have been made primary and defining.  We call that in-sistence, a dwelling that is primarily or exhaustively concerned with our ontical relations, our relations to beings, to entities.  Of course the same is true if we primarily think of ourselves as professors, or engineers, or federal agents.  Of if we think about ourselves in terms of the identitarian register, whatever it is we claim under that determination.  This does not mean we should not do it (we would do it anyway)–it only means that, as long and for as long as we do it, we live in insistence as a mode of being, and we exclude or neglect ex-istence, which calls for a different relation to beings as such, that is, to Being. 

Being cannot be grasped, cannot be retained, we get a glimpse of it as a clearing-in-withdrawal, it can only be the ground of a questioning.  We access it in the slackening of insistence for the sake of existence, that is, for the sake of something in us which constitutes us more fundamentally than any insistent allegiance–and that constitutes everything else as well. 

This is the reason that Heidegger, in Section 16 of The Beginning of Western Philosophy, says that an approximation to ex-istence, that is, to ex-istent existence from in-sistence, insistent existence, is first of all to be understood as a liberation: “Assuming that the Being of humans came to existence, then a transformation of them has occurred.  In the transition to existence, they are determined on the basis of existence.  And existence as understanding of Being is letting-be: freedom.  The transition to freedom leads to lack of shelter, thus to a liberation from something to something” (70). 

Liberation to the freedom of existence.  Heidegger does not talk about what makes some human beings capable of taking the step from insistence to existence.  He claims it is a universal capability, even though not everybody acts on it.  Those who do step into a letting-be which enables not just oneself but all beings to be what they are, in freedom. 

“The questioning directed to Being is the basic act of existence; this questioning inaugurates the history of humans as existing humans” (72).  And yet we choose, generally and for the most part, to withdraw ourselves from it.  “We can withdraw from it only in the way the wanderer, distancing himself more and more from the spring, semblantly dissolves every relation to it and yet perishes precisely through and on this relation of distancing himself” (73). 

Some of us, for whatever reason, get a bitter taste of the emptiness and hollowness of insistence.  We can certainly double down and perish from it, heroically or abjectly.  But we can also understand that the exclusion from insistent shelter opens up the field of freedom.  It is a difficult freedom, but there is no other freedom.

Heidegger says: “To be actually existent means for us: to become the ones we are” (74).  Far from “persevering” in identity, becoming the ones we are also means becoming mortal and becoming timely.  It is a simple matter: to give up our exclusive dependence on insistence for the sake of existence, in difficult freedom.  So that, by becoming the ones we are, we also let all beings be what they are. 

What does the Greek morning have to do with it?  If we are enabled “to begin again the unbegun beginning” (74), to recover originary freedom, and if that is the “essential task” of our lives, we do it out of our own resources.  We have nothing else, short of the boring and anxiety-producing refuge in insistence.   

The Greek morning is only a historical referent.  But it is also a historical referent.  It helps. 

But I wonder whether this difference between insistence and existence, which repeats of course the difference between Leitsfrage and Grundfrage, and ultimately repeats the ontological difference in its second, non-metaphysical modality, should be read as aporetic:  as both necessary and impossible.  Perhaps Heidegger would not deny its aporetic character–both insistence and existence cross each other’s borders, and they do it all the time, perhaps time itself is the ceaseless aporetic crossing of the borders between insistence and existence and back to insistence–but I think he would still insist on the absolute need for the paradoxical experiencing of the aporia as such (I call it paradoxical because, in principle, there could be no ex-perience of the a-poros).   Perhaps the Parmenidean fourth way is the experiencing of the aporia created by the impossible difference between the first way and the third way.  As usual, I fail to locate the second way in this uncanny map.

Unless . . . the second way is the way of what Derrida calls the arrivant in the epigraph above, of whom he says: “it no more commands than is commanded by the memory of some originary event where the archaic is bound with the final extremity, with the finality par excellence of the telos or of the eskhaton” (34).   Death, in other words, which is no longer insistent or existent, but rather marks the passage from existence to non-existence.  Non-existence is no longer the opposite of insistence, not quite, since it is mediated by existence.  And yet perhaps non-existence, as the most proper possibility of Dasein, which is aporetically the possibility of its impossibility, the certain possibility of its impossibility, determines in advance the flight from existence to insistence, through anxiety and fear.  Insistence would be in a way a warding-off of non-existence and not so much a flight from existence.  If both existence and insistence are modalities of being, non-existence is the border upon which they both crash and lose their impossible purity and reach exhaustive contamination.

The second way of Parmenides, the impracticable way, the impossible way, the way of no-way–is it not the way of death? 

Dasein‘s most proper possibility (death) is also its impossibility (the impossibility of existence)–this is the aporia.  In Aporias Derrida, at the end of a vertiginous analysis of Heidegger’s existential analytics of death, links this up with what he calls “a universal Marrano, if one may say, beyond what may nowadays be the finished form of Marrano culture” (74).  Why is that?

Derrida has exposed in his analysis that Heidegger must impossibly hold to his distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic, which is the difference between existence and insistence, “as well as that among the different forms of ending: dying properly speaking, perishing, and demising” (77): “These distinctions are threatened in their very principle, and, in truth, they remain impracticable as soon as one admits that an ultimate possibility is nothing other than the possibility of an impossibility and that the Enteignis always inhabited Eigentlichkeit” (77).  There is no existence without insistence, which means that the distinction does not hold. 

Derrida gives the name of “Marrano,” with a capital m, to what we may call the vortex of disappropriation for any possibility of authenticity.  In a clipped and all–too–rushed manner Derrida concludes his 1992 Cérisy lectures by claiming that the analytics of death in Being and Time does not exceed the Christian experience, “indeed, the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic experience of death to which the analysis testifies” (80): “this fundamental questioning cannot protect itself from a hidden bio-anthropo-thanato-theological contamination” (79).  From that perspective, the deconstruction of the existential analytic, which is also the deconstruction of the existence-insistence polarity, is a marrano adventure.  Derrida concludes: “Let us figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret that he has not chosen, in the very place where he lives, in the home of the inhabitant or of the occupant, in the home of the first or of the second arrivant, in the very place where he stays without saying no but without identifying himself as belonging to.  In the unchallenged night where the radical absence of any historical witness keeps him or her, in the dominant culture that by definition has calendars, this secret keeps the Marrano even before the Marrano keeps it.  Is it not possible to think that such a secret eludes history, age, and aging?” (81).

Incidentally, this seems to me the textual site where Derrida links deconstruction and the marrano position, thereby inserting himself, autographically, as a marrano thinker within the history of thought.  But his critique of Heidegger, which he makes extensive to Freud and Levinas (“The same could be said for Freud’s and Levinas’s thought, mutatis mutandis.  . . . the only characteristic that we can stress here is that of an irreducibly double inclusion” 80), is in fact the accentuation of an already explicit, perhaps still inchoate marranization of thought, already active in Heidegger in the original displacement from insistence with entities to the outside of an ex-istence “in the unchallenged night”–and the argument could be repeated for Freud and Levinas.  If so, Derrida’s universal Marrano, il y vas d’un certain pas (6), is a figure of difficult freedom whose drive would have intensified the voiding out of the double inclusion into the double exclusion where the secret of existence could live on, in a wait for the arrivant unentangled by falsely hospitable contamination.