“In the conflicted essence of Aletheia is concealed the thoughtful essence of Eris and Moira, in terms of which Physis is also named.”  (Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying 265)

After the publication of Infrapolítica.  Instrucciones de uso (Madrid: La oficina, 2020) and now its English version Infrapolitics. A Handbook (New York: Fordham UP, 2021) I receive occasional queries regarding infrapolitics.  The most pressing question takes the form of wanting to know about the unsaid: “what is it that you are holding back?,” as one person put it.  It is a complex question, and the answer is even more complicated, as I myself do not yet know it and can only guess, or push, or imagine.  Nobody thinks in a void, and for me the challenge has for a long time been to take Heideggerian and Derridean thought to an extreme, insofar as I can or know or could learn how to do it.  Not because of doxographic interests, rather because I find both of those thinkers particularly attuned to what is worthy of thought in an eminent sense today. And this is already getting into secrets and exposing myself–to my own incompetence, to start with, but not only. 

In any case this might be the time to start thinking not about factical infrapolitics, the massive factum of its presence in practical reason, common to everyone, but about what I have sometimes called transfigured or reflective infrapolitics: the attempt to think, and to live, making it explicit, explicitating that facticity, in each case one’s own, as a praxis of existence. I think that the guiding issue is a particular take on the very notion of thinking as a form of “passive decision,” which could in fact be Jacques Derrida’s translation of Eckhartian, and then Heideggerian, Gelassenheit.  Which has to do with letting things be, not in the sense of abstaining from interaction, rather in the sense of opening to them and caring for them.  Another no less complex way of putting it: if “the work of mourning” is the very motor of Hegelian dialectics, if Aufhebung is in that sense the (bogus) word of Being, then the radical interruption of mourning, which leads to a different relation to death, which lets death be rather than appropriate it, is the motor of infrapolitics.  What could we make of a notion of thought, therefore of existential practice, that rejects mourning as a structuring principle?  It opens a different understanding of time, and of the time of life. 

I keep going back to Heidegger’s 1946 extraordinary essay “Anaximander’s Saying.”  Heidegger concludes that essay–itself published as the conclusion to an extraordinary collection of essays, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), from 1950 in the original German–by proposing a translation of Anaximander’s word to khreon, which is usually rendered as “the necessary,” with the German word der Brauch.  Brauch includes the notion of use, or usage.  Heidegger means to propose that as a good word to translate the “presencing” of what is present, that is, the first term of the ontological difference.  The “use” of something “hands it over to its own essence” (277).  If “to khreon is the oldest name in which thinking brings the being of beings to language” (274), then to khreon names the trace, what is for us a trace, of a forgetting: “The oblivion of being is oblivion to the difference between being and the being” (275). 

Use retains a trace of the ontological difference.  Say, the use of existence (Eris and Moira) is everyone’s apportionment, for a while.  Let us keep in mind the double genitive in that expression, “the use of existence.” There is existence, and then there is the use of existence. When did the use of existence take on the primary meaning of production: the production of existence, and existence as production?  Heidegger refers obscurely to the fateful rendering of Aristotle’s energeia as actualitas.  From actualitas we eventually move to objectivity.  But the use of existence retains an older meaning.  Can we retrieve it?  Is that not what infrapolitics proposes? 

There is a bifurcation.  That production is to be connected to the work of mourning is shown not just in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit but also in Marx’s mature work, from The German Ideology to Capital.  But what if we were to understand the imperative to “transform the world,” which Marx offers in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, not in the sense of ergon but in the sense of khreon, use, usage? 

The use of existence, transfigured into a passive decision, prompts an interruption of the work of mourning: death is also to be let be, and not at the end of life, not just at the end of life.  In another essay from the same period, in fact a lecture that remained undelivered in the seminar devoted by Heidegger to What Is Called Thinking?, in the early 1950s, “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34-41),” Heidegger concludes in a thoroughly enigmatic manner, as they are words that cannot be immediately connected to the rest of the essay: “As the outermost possibility of mortal Dasein, death is not the end of the possible but the highest keeping” (Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking 101). 

It seems to me, obscurely at this point, that the relation of the use of existence, in the bifurcated sense of the genitive, to death as highest keeping ciphers the secret of infrapolitics, if there is one.  But I wouldn’t know how to reveal it. 

Se trata de una novela de Gonzalo Torrente Ballester de 1992.  Yo la tengo en edición de bolsillo publicada por Planeta en 1999.  La debí de comprar en algún verano en España en 1999 o poco después, y nunca la leí.  Ayer, buscando en mi biblioteca el Sepharad de Antonio Muñoz Molina, que voy a incluir en un curso el semestre próximo, me la encontré y empecé a leerla.  Ocurre en Santiago de Compostela a finales de los años cuarenta del siglo veinte, y cuenta la investigación que sucede a la aparición del cadáver del Decano de Filosofía y Letras y Catedrático de Historia Antigua en sus aposentos en uno de los Colegios Mayores de la universidad gallega.  Los personajes relevantes son el Juez, el Comisario, el Fraile, don Enrique y Francisca, casada con don Enrique.  El pobre don Enrique es el asistente o auxiliar del Decano, un hombre joven, de alrededor de treinta años, que acompañó al Decano a Santiago desde Barcelona y está preparando sus oposiciones.  Don Enrique le debe todo al Decano, pero en la novela se presentan indicios de que el Decano prepara su propia muerte para hacer aparecer a don Enrique como su asesino. 

No quiero estropearle la lectura de la novela a ningún incauto lector de este blog, así que no revelaré nada referente a conclusiones.  Lo extraordinario (para mí, por esa coincidencia en la que no creo) es que el texto de Torrente Ballester incide de forma un tanto siniestra en la nota que redacté ayer para el blog, la llamada “Plata o plomo.”  En respuesta a una pregunta de Edwin Culp en los comentarios a esa nota, yo decía:  “Dado que no es posible eludir la opción plata o plomo, solo cabe encontrar una relación a ella. El abanico de opciones ofrece algo así como una fenomenología psíquica–desde la opción más abyecta, que es el sometimiento puro al imperativo llamémosle institucional, sin residuo, hasta la opción del que no quiere renunciar al propio deseo y pasa su vida tratando de encontrar resquicios de aire en lo abrumador del imperativo. Hay más de lo primero que de lo segundo, sobre todo porque sabemos que esa primera opción de sometimiento se camufla tantas veces bajo diversos disfraces. Vivir en lo segundo, en cambio, es difícil y doloroso y no siempre puede ejercitarse sin fracaso. Yo le llamaría a la primera opción Torquemada, mientras que la segunda sería la opción marrana. Entre ellas estamos todos.”  Lo que me resultó intrigante fue pensar qué posición ocupa don Enrique en esa fenomenología psíquica a partir de las siguientes palabras de Francisca al Juez instructor: “Nunca creí que Enrique pudiera alcanzar un sometimiento y una ceguera tales.  Su identificación con el Decano llegó al punto de no darse cuenta de que quien pensaba era él, y no el Decano.  El Decano era hombre agotado desde hace ya tiempo, pero mi marido no se dio cuenta.  Uno dejó de pensar, pero pensaba el otro” (113-14). 

Ese sometimiento auto-identificatorio de don Enrique parece colocar a don Enrique en una posición abiertamente torquemadesca.  Don Enrique, aun sin darse cuenta, canibaliza el cuerpo institucional hasta el vampirismo, aunque todavía no ha pasado las oposiciones a cátedra, o quizá justamente por ello.  Y es curiosamente esa autoidentificación extrema la que le llevará al presunto fracaso.  El Decano no puede sino reaccionar con violencia insólita e insólitamente autodestructiva ante la pretensión o la práctica excesiva de don Enrique, que ha conseguido engullir simbólicamente su pensar mismo: ya no piensa el Decano, solo don Enrique piensa.  Así, el Decano encarga a don Enrique, o eso dice don Enrique y corrobora Francisca, que le compre un poco de cianuro en la farmacia para matar a una rata, y se hace visitar por él la noche de autos, con la consecuencia de que don Enrique es la última persona de la que se sabe que vio al Decano, en cuyo estómago la autopsia encuentra cianuro, en vida.  La misma tarde del suceso el Decano le cuenta al Fraile su sospecha de que su asesinato es inminente.  Pero ¿es asesinato o suicidio?

Hay torquemadismo en don Enrique, consciente o no.  Las condiciones en la España de los años cuarenta no permitían demasiado marranismo activo.  Aunque quizá, desde otro punto de vista, el marranismo activo fuera precisamente todo lo permisible, lo únicamente permisible.  No sé si han cambiado tanto las cosas.  Don Enrique no podía permitirse la mínima disidencia intelectual o vital con respecto de su maestro y mentor, su protector institucional.  Y entonces elige la máxima identificación simbólica con él.  La pregunta que parece insinuar Torrente es entonces la de si esa máxima identificación simbólica no implica por lo tanto un marranismo también máximo y así máximamente denegado.   Ese marranismo podría entonces fácilmente evolucionar hasta el parricidio patente y grosero.   La investigación, por otro lado a cargo de un Juez y un Comisario de poca experiencia, este último, aunque alférez provisional, habiendo aprendido de las novelas policíacas que leía en el frente casi todo lo que sabe sobre homicidios y asesinatos, debe establecer si eso fue lo que pasó.  O si pasó alguna otra cosa.    

Todo tiene que ver con “unos papeles,” notas de escritura que el Decano le dice al Fraile haber mandado al archivo de la Academia de la Historia para que sean leídos solo veinte años después de su muerte.  “Entonces, usted supone que el Decano montó toda esta máquina complicada y confusa sólo para aniquilar intelectualmente al acusado” (179). El Decano quiere protegerse del robo de su propiedad intelectual–sus esbozos y notas de investigación, si es que eso es lo que son, demostrarían retrospectivamente el plagio indebido de cualquier impostor advenedizo, incluido el mismo don Enrique. “Algo referente a su pensamiento, así como un resumen.  Temía que se lo robasen. Pasados veinte años, al publicarse ese escrito, se vería que ciertas obras eran un plagio” (129).  El Decano, al final de sus posibilidades de pensamiento, en opinión de Francisca, encuentra fuerzas de flaqueza para pensar y tramar su propia vindicación póstuma.  Si es que es eso lo que está haciendo. 

La alternativa plata o plomo ya está insinuada en el intertexto, aunque de forma invertida.  El Decano, esa es su función, demanda y requiere sometimiento: plata o plomo.  Pero el excesivo sometimiento invierte la encrucijada.  Es ahora don Enrique el que le hace comer plomo al decano, prefigurado en la alarmante cena en Casa Ramallo, en la noche de autos del invierno gallego, en la que el Decano deglute dos raciones inmensas de empanada de lamprea (contra la ascética merluza cocida de don Enrique) sabiendo que le van a sentar como un tiro. 

Si es incapaz de demostrar su inocencia, don Enrique debe enfrentar cuarenta años en la cárcel de La Coruña.  ¿Es esa la intención oscura del Decano, que habría conseguido con ello la inversión de la inversión y así restituir la verdad primera de la alternativa plata o plomo?  Tu total sometimiento es falaz y marrano, rebelde, insumiso, diría el Decano, y pagarás por ello aunque yo también haya pagado con la pérdida de mi pensamiento por confiar en ti.  Más te hubiera valido ser un idiota abyecto.

Y eso así sería incluso si el Decano le dice la verdad al Fraile cuando le confiesa estar enamorado de Francisca.  Querer apropiarse de Francisca sería no más que una extensión de su prerrogativa, frustrada en este caso, y así sin duda ocasión de una terrible venganza.  Solo los Decanos tienen ese privilegio, contra todos nosotros.  Al menos este murió, justo antes de indigestarse de lamprea. 

Empezando a enseñar un curso sobre narco, y fijándome en la noción de “plata o plomo,” tan distinta de la opción más antigua, “la bolsa o la vida,” de la que habla Lacan.  Aparece desde las primeras lecturas del curso: en la versión nueva de Miss Bala de Catherine Hardwicke y en el libro de Sergio González El hombre sin cabeza.  Pero estará en todas o en casi todas las lecturas del curso.  Con “plata o plomo” la cuestión es: “entrégate o muere.”  Hay jouissance en la entrega, claro, pero también la hay en la muerte, esto es, en el “no.”  Eso es lo que los chicos del “lying flat movement” a la vez saben y todavía tienen que averiguar, y veremos cómo va. 

Mi pregunta es si es correcto pensar que “plata o plomo,” lema del mundo narco, es válido como alegoría general de la condición humana en el presente (quizá siempre, pero pensemos el presente de momento).  Sería una alegoría infrapolítica.  Por ejemplo, sin ir más lejos, el miedo general de los assistant professors a no recibir tenure los clava en una situación de la que muchos no salen ya jamás: internalizan el miedo, y encuadran su vida profesional en la pulsión de sometimiento.  Todo conformismo universitario es siempre ya de antemano consecuencia de un “plata o plomo” original.  La política empezaría entonces una vez hay un acomodo inmemorial con el “plata o plomo,” que es extendible, claro, a todos los trabajos asalariados.   En mi universidad esa estructura es tan visible que resulta imposible no verla.  Es explícita.  En Duke era menos visible pero quizás por ello todavía más insidiosa.  Las recompensas eran más obvias y así disimulaban mejor, o incluso exacerbaban, la violencia soterrada. 

El miedo–el miedo a que no nos reconozcan como suficientemente entregados, suficientemente listos a sacrificar nuestra libertad o nuestro deseo–es la condición bajo la que vivimos nuestra vida como ciudadanos productivos.  La reciente decisión de la legislatura texana sobre el aborto–el hecho de que a partir de ahora toda mujer que quiera un aborto puede ser denunciada por cualquier cazador de botines–es un síntoma significativo.  En ese sentido el mundo del narco es un espejo oscuro: nos devuelve una imagen de la existencia tal como es, contra las mistificaciones y las ilusiones de la existencia “legal.” 

¿Cómo vivir, entonces, una vez reconocemos que “plata o plomo” es el imperativo categórico real de nuestro presente?

It is sometimes said that infrapolitics is subtractive, and it is said as a critique–in other words, to be subtractive would be bad in the context of the necessary commitment to the onward march of history, the need to push forward in the name of the people, the vanguard representation of subaltern interests against their hijacking by capitalism, and so forth. But recent movements, still not particularly self-aware, still inchoate, such as what the New York Times recently called the “lying flat movement,” that is, a particular kind of work refusal connected to the experience of the COVID pandemic in the US, brings up the question “what if the people chose subtraction?” It is a simple question. I am not sure the contemporary conventional left is prepared even to hear it.

A recent book by Ian Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019) brings the question home. The theme is Gelassenheit, that is, releasement, or in Spanish, dexamiento, which is the word chosen by the 16th century Spanish alumbrados to describe their practice. Dexamiento would be a fancy word to refer to the goals of the lying flat movement but, in my opinion, not an inadequate one. Dexamiento is very much a form of refusal, and it certainly is a subtractive critique of contemporary politics, including the participatory and representational politics of the left.

This note does not intend to be a review of Moore’s book. Only to notice that it exists, and that it is a great read. So I will limit myself to a very partial comment on a particular issue.

At the very end of the book, that is, before the three appendices, Moore makes the connection between Gelassenheit and death: “a matter of life and death,” he says (143). But, if the thought of releasement is a thought of death, and of life, it is so because it is connected to temporality, that is, to history as it conditions every one of us. Moore uses in this context the word “infra-historical.” He says that Heidegger, when engaged in Eckhartian thought, “tends toward a non-epochal or infra-historical sense of being” (141). I am not sure that is the case. This is the way I think about it:

It is politics, that is, the particular configuration of any given time, that determines, in every case and for whomever, their relation to history, not history that determines the relation to politics. Infrapolitics would then be the critical subtraction from the historical relations that impose a specific political framework. As a subtraction from historical relations (releasement is releasement from history and to an alternative form of life, to be found in the practice of releasement itself) infrapolitics is eminently historical, even if in the negative form of refusal.

If Gelassenheit, releasement, is a practical apriori, that is, an imperative dimension of thinking connected to a certain experience of death, linked to the ontological difference also because it refuses to think of death as a mere termination of productivity in the ontotheological sense, infrapolitics emerges as a necessary subtractive critique of politics not even in the name of justice, not even in the name of equality, rather in the name of what calls for thinking for any given epoch. What calls for thinking is historical, could never be otherwise than historical, but the response to it, rather than infrahistorical, would be infrapolitical.

The lying flat movement, the reference to slow time, the refusal of work and productivity under contemporary conditions, is a subtractive critique of politics absolutely conditioned by historical determinations. It is, as such, a thoroughly political, that is, a hyperpolitical movement. But of course one must have ears for it.

The notion of “fugitivity,” which Fred Moten and Stefano Harney reconfigure in a positive sense in The Undercommons, must be anchored in a prior sense.  “Fugitive being” for Moten and Harney means its disentanglement from insistent hegemony, for the sake of a liberation.  But it seems to me there is a prior fugitivity, which is the fugitivity of insistence as such: the refusal to ex-sist, the absolute concern with in-sistence.  This could have been portrayed in the starkest terms with the Ethan character (John Wayne) in John Ford’s The Searchers.  Ethan is the in-sistent, his rage and tribal hatred, his obsession (which at the end redeems itself), are fugitive, they are fugitivity itself.  This is the fugitivity Moten and Harney invert, for the sake of freedom.  To be thought out is then the connection of primary or original fugitivity with the notion of revenge: such is Friedrich Nietzsche’s overwhelming concern.  At some point in the film Ethan tells the Reverend that he cannot swear himself in as a Texas Ranger, since there is only one oath given to any man, and he has already given his oath to the Confederate Army.  For Ethan this frames his essence as both fugitive and vengeful.  And he cannot escape (although at the end he does).  This final escaping, which no doubt Ford proposed as some kind of fantastic national allegory, is precisely a fugitivity from fugitivity, which I would argue is the one Moten and Harney propose (even if they never make it explicit.) There is a residual question, which is whether Moten and Harney’s inversion must still keep a reference to a national allegory of any kind, or whether for them any kind of national allegory is no more than in-sistent hegemony.

The Guardian publishes today (August 10, 2021) an article that begins by saying: “Texas, which exterminated or displaced most of the Indigenous people in the State, now wants to cash in on them.” This has to do with the fact that the Texas Historical Commission has asked the three remaining officially-recognized tribes in the State (Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Ysleta del Sur-Pueblo) to name sites that could be useful as tourist sites.  It continues: “[Governor Greg] Abbott and the Republican-controlled legislature have backed bills that prohibit the teaching of critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society, and effectively bans teachers from discussing racism and the state’s history of racial violence.  Lawmakers also approved a patriotic education initiative called the 1836 project, named for the year Texas won its independence from Mexico and a rebuke to the 1619 project, the New York Times series that examined the legacy of slavery in the US.” 

That is the context in which I am preparing to teach for the first time a course on the Apache Wars–which, admittedly, happened in New Mexico and Arizona, in Chihuahua and Sonora, and not in Texas for the most part (although there were some Apache tribes in Texas that have since vanished).  It is a course for undergraduate students, HISP 363: Borderlands US-Mexico.  Since the Apache Wars lasted for many years, and they were at first wars between Apaches and Spaniards, then Apaches and Mexicans, finally Apaches and the United States and also Mexican forces, they are clearly a borderlands issue, although I do not believe such a class has been taught before, not at Texas A&M, not in the entire history of the institution.  In my class I will have students read books such as José Cortés’ Views from the Apache Frontier, Antonio García de León’s Misericordia.  El destino trágico de una collera de indios en la Nueva España, memoirs of the Apache campaigns by US army officers such as Britton Davis, Charles Gatewood, and John Gregory Bourke, and Paul Hutton’s The Apache Wars.  They will also watch films such as John Ford’s The Searchers or Walter Hill’s Geronimo.  And we will read two Mexican novels, Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and Alvaro Enrigue’s Ahora me rindo y eso es todo.  I will encourage the students to take a weekend to drive north three hours and visit Geronimo’s grave in the Apache cemetery at Fort Sills, in Oklahoma (it is too difficult, there is too much red tape for organizing a field trip, particularly in COVID-19 times). 

I have no idea whether my course will be indicted by someone or other as a transgression of the letter or the spirit of some of the Texas regulations on teaching, but I intend not to pay attention to it or let it bother me.   The fact is, bringing up the Apaches and their de facto quasi-extermination (certainly as an independent people) in this day and age could by itself be taken as a morose act inspired by critical race theory, even if my intent is not particularly to discuss race, only the confrontation between colonizers and native inhabitants of some of the lands that ended up becoming Mexican or US lands. 

My impression, which has grown out of teaching experience, and leaving aside the fact that every class is different as it has a different group of students, is that current-day students in the State of Texas have no knowledge, no awareness, of the Indian Wars.  They don´t know what “Apache” names, even if they have heard the word (not all have).  People who grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s, like myself, had access and exposure to Western films, many of them depicting, in whatever manner, the Apache Wars, so we did know about the Apaches.  But Westerns have gone out of fashion, and they are indeed difficult to find even in the usual film platforms that are available today.   So I must assume pretty much a blank slate for this course.  At the end of the semester a number of students will probably tell me: “Oh! I had no idea.”  So be it. 

But say: part of my intent is to get the students to see that their current presence in life as they see it is grounded in the Apache Wars, and that their frame-of-mind is partially but significantly constituted by the privation of historical memory.  Privation is of course a form of presence–steresis, the Greek called it.  One also lives determined by whatever one is deprived of.  It is part of the reason why I will also have the students read, on a weekly basis, Martin Heidegger’s 1951-52 seminar What is Called Thinking?–because the seminar thematizes the issue of what calls for thinking even as it admits that what calls for thinking is mostly concealed from view.  In the first lecture Heidegger tells his students: “All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft [the draft of what withdraws], this current, and maintain himself in it.  This is why he is the purest thinker of the West.  This is why he wrote nothing.  For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them.  An as yet hidden history still keeps the secret why all great Western thinkers after Socrates, with all their greatness, had to be such fugitives” (What Is Called Thinking? 17). Thinking became literature for the West as a result, part of its fugitiveness. But the Apaches had no literature–for them, thinking never became literature.  I have invited a couple of friends (Arturo Leyte, Laurence Paul Hemming) to lecture on these issues within the class.  (I have also invited John Kraniauskas, but he will lecture on Apache refusal, not Heidegger’s ideas).

Some of the students–perhaps even some parents, or administrators, or busybodies in general–might want to claim that it is absurd to visit this history that can only be understood as a privation, since privation does not exist, it is the inexistent.  So my play will be to try to convince everyone that privation does exist, that it accompanies us, and that it determines us.  And that even knowing nothing about the Apache Wars, for a Texan, is a substantial fact of life, not precisely positive as these things go. 

In the summer semester of 1932 Heidegger taught a class on Anaximander and Parmenides, early Greek thinkers.  In the early lectures he reflected on whether we may have access to things that have been clouded over by history, by distance, by historical change.  He proposed the following image:

“A wanderer in an arid region must distance himself more and more from the spring at which he first and last drew water.  Viewed soberly, his distance from this spring is thereby increasing.  He leaves the spring behind, and with the increasing distance he loses his orientation; the spring in the end lies inaccessibly far behind.  Assume the wanderer then dies of thirst.  Why did he die?  Presumably because at too great a distance from the spring he no longer had a relation to it.  Yet how is the too great distance from the spring no longer a relation to it?  At a sufficiently great distance, does this relation cease to be a relation, or is the excessively great distance from the spring always still a relation to it, a negative relation but still precisely a relation and even one that is hardly inconsequential?  . . . Does not the spring pursue him more importunately the closer he comes to dying of thirst?”  (Heidegger, The Beginning of Western Philosophy, 31)

            Of course it will be hardest to convince my students that they themselves may be dying of thirst.  Governor Greg Abbott, after all, says otherwise. 

The second part of Calila e Dimna no longer stages the dialogue between the two jackals.  It is probably an addition to the original text. And it is interesting that, always within the conventions of the mirror of princes genre, where a philosopher advises the king on how to act, the first chapter of the second part focuses on politics, at least apparently, where the rest of the chapters are clearly infrapolitical in intent: they propose no ethics, they offer nothing about political action, they dismiss rhetoric, but they concentrate on practical life and how best to live it. 

That first chapter of the second part refers to a war between crows and owls after the crows have been defeated.  The crows must deliberate on how to deal with the winning enemy.  They determine five possible positions:  fleeing, continuing the fight, negotiating, partially submitting, or pretending to submit while setting up a devious and fundamental trap that would enable them to destroy the owls.  The last and cleverest one of the murder of crows advising the king of crows suggests the latter option, and then becomes a sort of undercover agent in the realm of the owls until he succeeds in having them all killed.  Good for the last crow. 

But I came to understand that I myself am not interested in any of the last three options: negotiating with the winning enemy, partially submitting to them, or pretending to submit for the sake of a secret plan to be enacted.  All of it is boring, time consuming, and uncertain.   So for me, fighting and then, upon losing, fleeing, in the sense of leaving, abandoning the fight, are the only real options.   And then I thought that the first two options are the properly nonpolitical options.

One fights in order to keep doing what one wants to do, or one escapes in order to salvage whatever may be salvaged.  The infrapolitical interest here is not an interest in power, even in the diluted form that comes from participating, whether through negotiation, partial submission, or even secret subversion, in a hegemonic regime. 

So my thesis here is that anarchy, that is, the an-archic dimension of action, is totally contained within the first two options.  Refusal or passive resistance are forms of fleeing.  Continuing to do what one wants to do is a form of fighting.  The rest is politics, which is a diversion posited on an archic drive. 

The crows succeed–they annihilate the owls.  Deprived of an enemy, they will have to look for an alternative enemy to sustain their archic drive.  I doubt they would find an enabling peace.  The notion of coming to terms with one’s ventura, presented as the sovereign wisdom in the chapter before last, cannot be realized under those conditions. 

Ventura–is there a better term for the translation of the Heideggerian Ereignis?–can only be released into its own in the ad-venture of fighting and fleeing. 

In Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves (U of California P, 2015) one finds the argument that, say, a rattlesnake in the Sonora Desert is a political, although nonhuman, actant in an enterprise of necroviolence organized and structured by US state policies (such as the Border Patrol’s Prevention Through Deterrence program, which funnels border crossers into areas where death and disappearance are likely to happen).  So, two questions that seem important to me, and that I want to consider in the context of establishing some foundation for Latinx thought in the US:  first, are a rattlesnake, a black scorpion, the heat of the desert, dehydration, or even the assassin mofos who just shoot migrants when they think they can get away with it properly political actants?  And the second question: what happens in the border deserts’s zones of confinement, zones of exception, is it political violence or is it better understood as infrapolitical violence? 

It seems to me that the questions are significant because, if everything is political, including desert rattlesnakes, then we lose the possibility of establishing distinctions that might prove useful not just in the register of understanding what happens but also in the register of political action as such.  In other words, one could imagine political action meant to curb infrapolitical necroviolence much more effectively than through thinking that the confrontation between different actants in a zone of exception is straightforwardly political.  Antigone comes to mind here.  Creon did not forbid Antigone’s political actions, rather her infrapolitical actions, which were, as such, more threatening and dangerous to him.  In other words, Creon’s pretense that he was in a merely political confrontation with Antigone will always give Creon the advantage, even if it is a fallen, spiritually mediocre one.  We could reverse that.  Say, Texas Republican policies concerning the border are not a matter of politics, they are rather a matter of infrapolitics.  To that extent, they are not even policies, or whatever policies they develop are founded on a previous infrapolitical determination. The Texas Republicans are not engaging in a heroic political defense of the integrity of US sovereignty; they are rather engaged in craven infrapolitical necroviolence that they have long disguised as politics. 

The paradox is that infrapolitics restitutes a dignity to political practice that the denial or disavowal of infrapolitics undermines. Caging children, for instance, or letting border crossers under surveillance go deeper into the desert until they face likely death, should not be dignified by calling them political practices.

Today we were supposed to have a zoom meeting on Lundi Matin’s Elementos de descivilización, but only Gerardo and I showed up.  Which of course did not keep us from a conversation.  We ended up talking about the encounter or the notion of the encounter as it is displayed in some texts by Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee–and later in the evening I ran across the word in a particularly important chapter in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which is where Zeitblom tells us how Leverkühn went in search of Esmeralda, who tells him she has syphilis.  Leverkühn accepts his fate and they make love.  My claim is that it is a false encounter, which makes it real: real because false, and it could not be otherwise.  I would make the same claim about Tiqqun’s encounter, and I would make the same case, say, about whatever is meant by the notion of general mass intellectuality “in the hold” in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. 

We were talking about encounter since there is so much mysticism about communitarianism, which is to my mind a particularly pernicious way of talking about the common.  For some, the encounter leads to community, and community is the site of encounter. So, I will elaborate a bit: there is no political encounter unless we place encounter under erasure.  For there to be a political encounter one must give up every notion of an encounter.  And that is all we get. This is a direct consequence of Lacanian teaching: il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.  We could say: il n’y a pas de rapport politique, unless politics is already understood as always expressive of a lack of rapport, a lack of relation, a separation.  By the same token there is no political dialogue–politics is always essentially monologic, which is why it is always confrontational, polemic, and the more so when it attempts to cover itself up–when political depredation becomes a form of intended superdepredation.  To those who think that this makes democracy impossible–that community is a condition of democracy–we could respond that, on the contrary, separation is the hyperbolic condition of democracy.  I think it is simply untenable to think that an equivalential chain of demands in hegemony theory organizes a political encounter that justifies the hegemonic articulation in view of a fundamental antagonism.  There is no encounter in the antagonism, and there is no encounter in whatever equivalential relation allows for the formation of an empty signifier.  In fact, the equivalential relation and the empty signifier are only to be posited in the absence of every possibility of an encounter.  If then, community already fails in hegemonic democracy (hegemony theory is itself based on the absence of community), the fact is a fortiori true for posthegemonic democracy. In posthegemonic democracy there is only one (political) community: the community of those who have no community.

If the case were to be made that community is precisely not politics, but the absolute end of politics–well, then, perhaps the conversation would become more interesting.  Lenin says something similar in State and Revolution.  But–and this seems to me not to be dismissed: Lenin is not talking about community, he is only talking about communism. 

“To move towards the mode of living that we like” (119) means to dismantle the general structure of contemporary oppression, to get beyond it, in order to reach a place where one always already is: what does it take?  In the first place, a refusal, even if in the name of a preservation.  A refusal of the choices that are offered, which are, as such, the very organization of the structure of oppression.  We choose a general antagonism, which is, from the understanding of the commitment to war, which causes oppression, also a commitment against the commitment to war. 

To think about the refusal we need study, over against institutional thought, and fugitivity, over against the actions of the settler. 

This would lead to a revolution without politics.  Politics are delusion, also part of the structure of oppression.  We must, therefore, also cultivate a general antagonism to politics.

There is an outcast mass intellectuality of the undercommons, a general intellect that is always already fugitive.  The structure of oppression (the ideological state apparatus, not just prisons, hospital, asylums, also universities, churches, NGOs) means to turn outcast intellectuality into deputized state agents. 

In the university, for instance, there is a (fugitive or) subversive intellectual opposing the critical (or institutional) intellectual.  The fugitive intellectual cultivates, through study, a prophetic organization.  The critical intellectual is a policy maker.  An oppressor. 

The fugitive intellectual accepts a radical passion and passivity, which makes him or her unfit for subjection.  The critical intellectual seeks subjection through policy.  And agency.

The fugitive intellectual (but this is the intellectual of mass intellectuality, that is, everyone) remains in an exteriority, which is the non-place of the undercommons.  That is his or her fugitivity.  It is the infrapolitical field, where “wayward labor, surplus, waste” obtain. 

The political field is the field of sequestration.  It can only countenance what is sequestered and what is to be sequestered, ceaselessly so.  By governance and policy, by deputized policy agents, which form the other “everyone.”   Subtraction from sequestration is the attempt to dwell in the ontological difference. 

Hence, fugitivity is a dwelling in the exception to the general equivalent.  It is a break in/out of capitalist discourse.

Black study is a persistence in the refusal of sequestration.  It seeks the prophetic organization of life against all manner of policy commands, against the night riders of the state of the situation.  Hence against the imposition of consensus, the imposition not on selves but of selves.  From the general antagonism of the social, which is the site of the ontological difference. 

Fugitivity, explored and channeled through study and planning, is not only a refusal to be governed, it is also a refusal to govern.  It stands against any imperative of submission, and against any command for participation (since “the participant is the deputy’s mirror image”). 

One must choose:  will you be the police or would you find an alternative relation to world?  Provided you would want “to move towards the mode of living that [you] like.”

If “to work [to live] is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption” (87), that is, if today’s choice is: “Logistical populations will be created to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to connect without interruption, or they will be dismantled and disabled as bodies in the same way they are assembled, by what Patricia Clough calls population racism” (91), the imperative is:

1) to submit to the contemporary structure of oppression under those determinations.

2) to opt for prophetic, that is, infrapolitical life: “the prophet is the one who tells the brutal truth, who has the capacity to see the absolute brutality of the already existing and to point it out and to tell that truth, but also to see the other way, to see what it could be.”