El texto empieza como un ensayo sobre la filmografía del finlandés Aki Kaurismäki y termina como anuncio o alegato a favor de “un comunismo más ancestral o primitivo en el que . . . caen, junto a las promesas de la historia, los representantes o los mediadores, los lazos de sangre, la familia, el pasado o el destino, el sueño de un mañana despejado o el precipicio de un ayer irredimible hacia el que los hombres se lanzan” (125). No hay ya recuerdo ni espera, sólo la repetición transhistórica de un tiempo ocioso, no consagrado por el trabajo. La vida precaria se vuelca en la ausencia misma de la unidad de toda idea, o en la ausencia de la idea: comunismo impropio, dice Galende (120), o lumpencomunismo. Lo muestra un nuevo realismo que busca traspasar “una comunidad anudada en el corazón de un tiempo sin historia” (110), el tiempo de la desmetaforización (“porque no hace de historia y ficción figuras que de ahora en más se opongan” [110]). Sólo hay entonces “potencia de ojos que se buscan” (104). El comunismo del hombre solo es también el comunismo animal de los cuerpos “que comparten la capacidad de devolverse la mirada. Esa mirada no es ni la del espejo que enajena ni la de la comunicación que enseña, no es la de ningún medium; es la de lo abierto” (100-01).

Es una extraña figura la de este comunismo animal cuyo común es la mirada en lo abierto: “los ojos no son más que un umbral entre los cuerpos, una línea entre dos reinos que inaugura una y otra vez la potencia de lo abierto” (98). La mirada es mirada en lo abierto, pero es mirada de cuerpos a cuerpos incluso cuando los cuerpos miran al cielo o al mar—es lo abierto lo que mira en la mirada de los cuerpos. Y ese es el comunismo sin idea, el comunismo animal, pues “el animal es una forma que alza los ojos hacia nosotros” (97). Es el comunismo en deconstrucción: “lo común se crea deshaciendo lo común” (91), y así no importa cómo llamar a lo que, sin idea, sin historia, sin destino, es sólo acción impersonal, estado afectivo o punto de intensidad.

Galende habría propuesto “una idea del comunismo . . . según la cual el comunismo antes que residir en la capacidad del proletariado para avanzar en conjunto hacia la sociedad sin clases, reside en la manera que tienen los hombres de definir sus modos de estar juntos bajo un mismo cielo” (61). Habría entonces una manera comunista-sin idea-de “estar juntos bajo un mismo cielo” y otras maneras. A la primera se le llama “comunismo inmanente cuyas fuerzas se prosiguen en . . . solitarios disfuncionales que, a título de un pasado igualitario, sospechan de los caminos trazados por el pensionista de la historia” (62). Tales solitarios disfuncionales no se reducen al voyou desouvrée en el que pensaba Kojéve. Galende añade un componente de perdición. Así, su comunismo, como el de los del pueblo soviético de descendientes de los criminales de la época de Pedro el Grande, es “un comunismo de fracasados unidos por una red solidaria de la que nadie estaba a cargo” (70). Esos fracasados sólo intiman o aducen, sin nombrar, sin acceso al nombre, el comunismo animal de la mirada en lo abierto. “Introducen en su propio hacer la práctica de los otros” y esa es su “experimentación,” como forma de “deshacer la identidad a la que ha[n] sido confinado[s] por el otro.” “Lo que la experimentación destruye es el trascendental que el catastrofista o el adelantado inyectan en el movimiento de la experiencia con el único fin de inmovilizarla. Ahora estamos al tanto de que ese trascendental no era más que la máscara que cubre la vida vacía del sacerdote que frustra las potencias que se actualizan en su despliegue” (81, 82). “Probar ser el otro: la experimentación es una extensión en lo impropio. Nadie puede experimentar sin poner en común lo que no era en común, sin desanudar y reanudar a la vez aquello que estaba en relación, pero tampoco se puede lograr tal cosa sin renunciar en algún punto al atributo de identidad o a la serie de destrezas que a esa identidad le fueron dadas en exclusiva” (83).

Y esto es definido por Galende como política, o mejor: como la política, una política que, si pasa en las películas (de Kaurismäki, pero también de Melville, de Bresson, o Jarmusch, o Tarr), ha también “comenzado a ocurrir en la realidad más inmediata” (125). ¿De qué se trata?  Dice Galende que la vida es ya sólo apariencia de mundo, hacerse visible. La entrada en la visibilidad es la política, y el que entra elude la sombra hacia “un reparto de luz al que todos los seres aspiran y en el que es posible dejar atrás el hecho de ser una sombra en el reparto” (84). Entonces: “la política es la lucha por ingresar al mundo de las apariencias” (84) en la que “se pone eventualmente en juego la irrupción de una comunidad inédita en el espacio de otra que se presentaba como si fuese eterna” (85).

La comunidad eterna es suspendida por lo inédito de un común que deshace animalmente lo común—la mirada en lo abierto, mirada impropia y desobramiento improductivo. Pero eso es la política en su nueva figura, política transfigurada y política de la transfiguración: grado cero, antiheliopolítica de un azul sin sombra, experimentación y ejercicio.

 

 

 

 

El número está compuesto de los siguientes textos: un breve prefacio de Alejandra Castillo centrado sobre todo en la relación entre infrapolítica y política; tres ensayos, respectivamente, de Maddalena Cerrato, cuyo interés se centra en la inversión autográfica de la reflexión infrapolítica, dándole por lo tanto un énfasis especial a lo que es reflexivo en la reflexión misma, de Angel Octavio Alvarez Solís, cuya contribución fundamental es el estudio de la relación entre infrapolítica y el concepto de lo impolítico en Cacciari y Esposito, con referencias finales al llamado nuevo realismo de Maurizio Ferraris, y el de Samuel Steinberg sobre la infrapolítica como pliegue interno o excepción a la guerra entendida como unidad del ser.   Obviamente simplifico y reduzco mucho en estas descripciones.   Hay una segunda parte que consiste de un breve texto mío en el que intento dar una definición precaria de infrapolítica, y una entrevista conmigo de varios autores que se centra también en contribuciones a una posible definición de infrapolítica.   Hay después tres ensayos: el primero, de Benjamín Arditi, es sobre las modalidades de insurgencia contemporáneas, de las que hace emblemáticas a la llamada Primavera árabe y a la revuelta estudiantil chilena en Chile de los últimos años; el segundo es un ensayo de Pablo Pérez Wilson sobre la relación de la infrapolítica con la cuestión de la negatividad en Hegel, y secundariamente con el pensamiento negativo italiano de los años setenta y sus secuelas posteriores; y el tercero es un ensayo de Bruno Bosteels sobre el gramscianismo contemporáneo y la cuestión de si la teoría de la hegemonía constituye el corazón real de la contribución de Gramsci al pensamiento contemporáneo.   Por último, el número cierra con la traducción de Cristóbal Thayer del ensayo de Jacques Derrida, “Admiración de Nelson Mandela, o, las leyes de la reflexión,” anticipo de la próxima publicación en La Cebra del volumen dos de Psyché, de Derrida.   Recordaremos que el texto de Derrida está muy fuertemente comprometido con una reflexión sobre la democracia y la ley.

Así, el número es extrañamente coherente, con una coherencia que no va sin embargo de suyo, sino que habría que explicitar. Y lo que me parece de entrada explicitable es el desafío específico que el número le plantea al proyecto en curso sobre infrapolítica. Si podemos decir que, de manera harto efectiva y elegante, Cerrato, Alvarez Solís y Steinberg introducen y exponen perspectivas infrapolíticas desde un cierto nivel de compromiso interno con el proyecto, que están tratando de explicar y al mismo tiempo desarrollar, tanto el prefacio de Castillo como los artículos de Arditi, Pérez Wilson y Bosteels parecerían pedir—sólo Pérez Wilson es explícito: para Pérez Wilson la llamada por él “confrontación fundamental” es la confrontación entre la negatividad hegeliana y el pensamiento heideggeriano de la diferencia ontológica, y él le pide a la infrapolítica que se haga cargo de ella, que la asuma como su tarea esencial—una clarificación de las implicaciones políticas de la infrapolítica: le piden a la infrapolítica que haga o se declare política, que explicite su politicidad, o que no la esconda, aunque ni Bosteels ni Arditi mencionen en lugar alguno la palabra infrapolítica: digamos que es su posición estructural en el número, más que su interpelación directa, la que elicita esa pregunta, como pregunta en un caso por la noción de insurgencia, y en otro caso como pregunta por la relación con el marxismo. ¿Cómo se vincula la infrapolítica al marxismo, cómo se vincula la infrapolítica a la insurgencia contemporánea? ¿Cómo se vincula la infrapolítica a la gran tradición hegeliana, lo cual quiere decir, a la relación entre historia y sujeto humano? ¿Por qué, parece querer preguntar Castillo sin llegar a hacerlo, ese “afuera” de la política que Moreiras invoca debe también ser pensado como un adentro? Y por supuesto, entonces, la pregunta de Derrida: si hay admiración posible y necesaria por Nelson Mandela, si la admiración por Mandela es una necesidad de nuestro mundo, y si la admiración por Mandela pasa ineluctablemente por una relación con la ley más allá de las leyes, con la incondicionalidad de una democracia y de un pensamiento de la democracia donde nadie sea más que nadie, donde incluso el número no exceda nunca en dignidad a la singularidad, ¿dónde se sitúa la infrapolítica, en su pretensión de éxodo relativo respecto de la política, en relación con esas cuestiones?

Así, este ejemplar de Papel máquina supone un desafío, aunque sea también un amable y generoso reconocimiento, o mejor: es un reconocimiento porque es un desafío.   ¿Cómo reaccionar a él no defensivamente, cómo aceptarlo y darle la bienvenida sin que hacerlo sea un gesto meramente “político,” en el mal sentido, en el sentido de oportunismo, en el sentido hipócrita denunciado siempre por Kant como mal radical?

No es fácil para los que no estén en el grupo llamado Deconstrucción infrapolítica tener una idea clara de lo que la infrapolítica busca. La palabra empezó a usarse a principios de la década del 2000 en algunos textos que no tuvieron particular continuidad, pero fue retomada con entusiasmo entre 2013 y 2014, y llevó a la fundación de un colectivo de trabajo que funciona cotidianamente en red social y cuyos miembros más comprometidos se ven cara a cara y se reúnen en general un par de veces al año. Hay un blog en el que se han recogido algunas polémicas y que va creciendo en cuanto a tamaño pero que sigue, a mi juicio, infrautilizado por el grupo. Hay unos veinte artículos ya publicados, y dos números especiales de revistas, y quizá podemos considerar esta edición de Papel máquina un tercer número, y seguirán una serie de libros, uno de Sergio, dos míos por el momento, algunos más en preparación, varias tesis doctorales en curso, varios otros proyectos en preparación. Desde el principio nos autoconcedimos diez años para darle visibilidad real a la infrapolítica, y la verdad es que no tenemos ninguna prisa, y yo menos que nadie.   No me parece que ninguno de esos materiales en preparación o en trance de publicación vaya a solucionar ninguna de las preguntas que insistentemente se nos hacen o a aclarar de una vez por todas los muchos malentendidos que circulan en torno al concepto, o al cuasiconcepto—pero lo cierto es también que ninguno de esos materiales en preparación busca responder a esas preguntas ni deshacer definitivamente ningún malentendido.

Hizo falta una mirada fresca, de alguien del que ni siquiera sabíamos que habíamos logrado interesar, Michele Cometa, profesor de la universidad de Palermo en Sicilia, el que en una reciente intervención se animó a ofrecer una definición de infrapolítica como una práctica de escritura (y hay que oir escritura en el sentido barthesiano, blanchotiano y derrideano, como algo más y algo menos que escritura en el sentido convencional) caracterizada por cuatro rasgos que para Cometa son los siguientes: carácter postacadémico, o más radicalmente postuniversitario, empresa autográfica, en el sentido de escritura de la existencia, labor desmetaforizante, entendida como deconstrucción de toda tropología estable, y por último carácter de “non-finito,” esto es, carácter inconcluso y siempre abierto, no capturable por ninguna noción de fin. Todo esto le da a la infrapolítica un fuerte sabor de precariedad tenue.

Es más que posible que una práctica infrapolítica sea o busque ser ante todo una práctica de escritura, pero entonces habría que trazar su diferencia con cualquier modalidad de inscripción directamente política—no todas las escrituras son lo mismo ni la misma.   No que la infrapolítica sea antipolítica: no lo es. Pero la antipoliticidad lo es porque niega la política, y al negarla se hace sistema con ella. La infrapolítica aspira o desea una relación de retirada o de abandono de la política a partir de lo que no tendremos más remedio que llamar afectuosamente un cierto odio visceral a la relación entre pensamiento y política tal como se entiende en nuestra contemporaneidad.   En ese odio está la clave de su politicidad—la infrapolítica es sólo una práctica de abandono, y vive su política en ese movimiento de reflujo exódico que es también, sin duda, una forma explícita de insurgencia. Cómo negarlo.

Su condición postuniversitaria está también vinculada a ese afecto sosegado—el odio visceral, no a la universidad misma, sino a la universidad en clave corporativa, en clave neoliberal, a la universidad como el último reducto de colonización por el principio general de equivalencia que es, para nosotros, también el último nombre de la metafísica.

Su condición autográfica, consustancial a su condición como práctica de escritura, debe abrirse también a la noción de lucha existencial, de intento por encontrar en la propia vida, la de uno y la de todos, la vida común y también la vida corriente, los recursos para una cierta substracción a los mecanismos de tecnopolitización explotativa que caracterizan de forma cada vez más intensa la vida en la sociedad contemporánea, hoy más allá de la sociedad disciplinaria de Foucault o de la sociedad de control deleuziana, y ya francamente reconocible por doquier como la sociedad expositiva de la que habla Bernard Harcourt. Contra la exposición total, la total substracción, que no es por supuesto posible, pero que no por ello debe dejar de intentarse en alguna medida.   En ese sentido la infrapolítica es también práctica del secreto.

Y nos llevaría demasiado tiempo discurrir apropiadamente sobre el rasgo llamado desmetaforizador, vinculado a la empresa deconstructiva, y así también a cierta recepción del pensamiento heideggeriano, y así también a cierta recepción de la historia del pensamiento en clave hegeliana y antihegeliana al mismo tiempo, y vincularlo a su vez al último rasgo decidido por Cometa, ese rasgo de incompletitud o de inconclusión permanente que la infrapolítica cultiva como parte crucial de su estructura de deseo, de su propia máquina deseante.

Quizá sea esa apertura inconclusa, y apertura e inconclusa con respecto de lo que el viejo Borges llamaba en un poema famoso la “antigua inocencia” de la felicidad, contraponiéndola al deber o la obligación de sentirse siempre miserables, quizá sea eso en última instancia lo que nos impide apresurarnos con la definición precisa, con la determinación de los límites del proyecto, con la mención final y definitiva de qué es aquello que queremos hacer o que hacemos, que es, por supuesto, la mejor forma de traicionarlo, y de no hacerlo ya nunca.

 

 

 

Maquinación ex universitate. (Borrador.)

Imagino que, para cuando me toque mi turno de habla en el congreso, la discusión habrá hecho alguna de mis posturas iniciales, o todas ellas, redundantes u obsoletas. Entonces, quizá sólo como mera nota o recordatorio privado, para no perder mi propio norte en estas discusiones, o para restituirlo cuando relea esto nuevamente, escribo ahora, sobre “la universidad posible,” que creo y siento que la pregunta que importa es sobre la universidad imposible, y cómo prescindir de ella y buscar instituciones alternativas. Al fin, no todo puede ser ni lamentar la pérdida de la modernidad de la razón, y sus pretensiones de que la universidad es máquina de ilustración efectiva, ni proponer o celebrar alguna concebible reforma que alargue ese añorado carácter progresista del juego universitario unos años más, ni tampoco, imagino, decir una vez más que vivimos en los resquicios, las grietas, las fisuras, las brechas, los agujeros, las madrigueras, y los boudoirs de la universidad, que somos excepción, porque uno está cansado de eso, que acaba por revelarse como formación compensatoria. Entonces, ¿qué?   Mi posición no es optimista ni pesimista, ni esperanzada ni quejosa.

Dentro de unos días cumplo sesenta años y entro así oficialmente en lo que Heidegger llamaba “el otoño de la vida,” que espero que llegue para todos y que dure mucho tiempo, por cierto. Para Heidegger, siguiendo en esto viejas palabras griegas, ese cambio de edad es todo menos trivial.[1] Es la edad, el tiempo de empezar a recoger el sedal, de abandonar la maquinación, de buscar cierto equilibrio entre pensar y ser y, por lo tanto, de eludir el desequilibrio de la pena y la protesta, de la furia y del rencor. No que no existan, sino que ya van dejando de tener importancia.   Y así este casi viejo profesor que soy yo, después de treinta y cinco o treinta y seis años de serlo, tiene ya poco interés en pensar la universidad como tal. No me queda sitio. Hace pocas semanas entregué el manuscrito de un libro cuya redacción final fue también la autopromesa de zanjar para siempre esa preocupación.   La universidad es mi facticidad, como dice Willy en el texto de convocatoria de esta reunión. Estoy arrojado a ella, llevo mucho tiempo arrojado a ella, han sido muchas batallas, y estoy ya no tanto cansado como aburrido terminalmente de pensar mi propio estado de arrojado, que nunca me ha hecho mayor bien. Quiero ya pensar otra cosa. Ex universitate. Y debo entonces preguntarme si esa situación personal o biográfica mía es sólo eso—en cuyo caso, presumiblemente, sería peor que banal exponerla—o si más bien confluye con algún estado de la cuestión más generalizado.

En este segundo caso podría constatar que mi propio cansancio y retirada de todo lo que huela a política universitaria—más allá de la enseñanza, por supuesto—responde a un síntoma epocal, no sólo a mi posición privada. En todo caso me importa señalar que el apartamiento explícito de la política universitaria no es un abandono de la política en general, sino que es en sí un acto de insurgencia contra la política universitaria realmente existente. El espacio universitario en mi ambiente—no me refiero a Texas sino a todo el espacio profesional norteamericano—es hoy políticamente improductivo y está bloqueado o secuestrado a favor de un imperio del dinero sin más.   Si en algún momento se produce un cambio que devuelva la posibilidad de agencia efectiva, no meramente administrativa, podríamos reconsiderar la situación para entonces.

Javier Marías cita, en su prólogo a la edición más o menos definitiva de Herrumbrosas Lanzas, de Juan Benet (Alfaguara, 1999), una carta que Benet le habría escrito el 25 de diciembre de 1986, justo cuando yo estuve a punto de abandonar la universidad para siempre y cambiar de proyecto de vida. Pero esa es otra historia. Creo que la carta puede extrapolarse a un pensamiento sobre la universidad, a una relación con la universidad, quizá para mí ya la única posible, aunque la universidad estaba sin duda infinitamente lejos de la cabeza de Benet al escribirla. La carta de Benet dice: “cada día creo menos en la estética del todo o, por decirlo de una manera muy tradicional, en la armonía del conjunto . . . [y esto no refiere, claro, a la armonía del conjunto realmente existente, del conjunto fáctico, diríamos, sino también a la armonía de su idea, a la concepción misma de la idea institucional, quizá siempre ilusa, quizá en sí basada en la razón produccionista, en la causa final aristotélica, que es la del carpintero que tiene una idea de mesa en la cabeza cuando se dispone a construir una mesa. Pero nosotros no tenemos por qué tener una idea de universidad en la cabeza cuando no nos disponemos a construir una universidad sino sólo a trabajar en ella, si nos dejan y cuando nos dejan. Y ¿por qué deberíamos o hubiéramos debido hacerlo, tener esa idea? ¿Cuál es la demanda política que se esconde tras la naturalización de la forma ideal de las cosas como horizonte de autoinscripción en ellas?]” Continua Benet: “‘El asunto—o el argumento o el tema—es siempre un pretexto y si no creo en él como primera pieza jerárquica dentro de la composición narrativa es porque, cualquiera que sea, carece de expresión literaria y se formulará siempre en la modalidad del resumen . . . [la universidad, por lo tanto, la idea de la universidad, no es literaturizable, sólo puede pensarse en la forma caricaturesca del resumen, mala letra. Sobre todo, tal resumen no debiera nunca ocupar el centro jerárquico, el vórtice fundamentador de nuestra tarea, o de nuestra desobra.]” Y sigue Benet: “Pienso a veces que todas las teorías sobre el arte de la novela se tambalean cuando se considera que lo mejor de ellas son, pura y simplemente, algunos fragmentos’ . . . Los fragmentos configuran el non plus ultra del pensamiento, una especie de ionosfera con un límite constante, con todo lo mejor de la mente humana situado a la misma cota.” Un non-plus-ultra del pensamiento de carácter no equivalencial, es decir, no jerárquico respecto de otros non-plus-ultras, todos en la misma cota.   Cada uno hace lo que puede, si puede, y hacer eso que se puede es lo único posible-imposible, y es también lo que hace tambalearse toda teoría institucional, toda charla sobre la universidad, devolviéndola a su mero carácter de impotente resumen. “Por eso te hablaba antes,” continua diciéndole Benet a Marías, “del magnetismo que ejerce esa cota y que sólo el propio autor puede saber si la ha alcanzado o no, siempre que se lo haya propuesto, pues es evidente que hay gente que aspira, sin más ni más, a conseguir la armonía del conjunto” (20-21).   Francamente, no creo que la mayor parte de la gente aquí reunida tenga esta última aspiración, y conviene por lo tanto hacerlo explícito, decirlo sin más.

¿Fue la crisis financiera de 2008 la que determinó un cambio en la universidad global de carácter profundo, cuyas consecuencias estamos sólo empezando a notar, pero que son posiblemente irreversibles?  ¿Es plausible imaginar que el fin del ciclo histórico del neoliberalismo y su subsunción real, su conversión sin precedentes de la política misma en dinero, su reducción infinita de la totalidad de lo real al principio general de equivalencia, es plausible imaginar que sea lo que sea lo que lo suceda operará un cambio en la condición equivalencial, rendible, calculable del pensamiento, y restituirá la posibilidad de non-plus-ultras singulares? No tengo razones para pensarlo, y tengo razones para no pensarlo. Para mí, para alguien como yo, sin prejuzgar en absoluto lo que la gente más joven puede o debe querer hacer, se ha hecho claro que sólo queda lo más serio, lo que quizá siempre fue lo más serio o incluso lo único serio, lo que lo explica todo, lo que explica por qué estamos aquí, a pesar de todo, aunque a veces lo olvidemos: que hay, para cada quien, un non-plus-ultra del pensamiento que es de su absoluta incumbencia y de su incondicional responsabilidad, y que hay que dedicarse a él, contra la universidad en la universidad, contra el mundo en el mundo, contra la vida en la vida, puesto que ese y no otro es y habría debido de ser siempre el deseo. Aunque sea tardíamente, aunque se juegue sólo en fragmentos, y aunque nadie sino el propio autor, como dice Benet, llegue a saber si hay, en esa tarea, triunfo secreto. El público es cada vez menos importante. Por razones quizá también coyunturales, pero coyunturales en un sentido fuerte, histórico. Pensar hoy en la “armonía del conjunto,” en la idea de universidad, en la inclusión armónica de la universidad en la totalidad social, en una narrativa para el campo profesional en su conjunto, es, me parece, por lo pronto improductivo, si no terminalmente ingenuo. No puede haber ya contra-maquinación en ese sentido, porque ahora, y quizá desde mucho antes que 2008, todo es maquinación. No hay memoria cuando todo es memoria, no hay olvido cuando todo es olvido, y no hay contramaquinación universitaria cuando no hay afuera de la maquinación universitaria.

En Conversaciones en un camino rural Heidegger habla de “la devastación” de la vida como, entre otras cosas, el robo de lo innecesario para ella. Refiere a un diálogo chino sobre lo necesario y lo innecesario para la vida. Lo único necesario, diría uno de esos sabios chinos que tanto le gustan a Willy, sería un palmo de tierra para plantar los pies. Pero si alguien viene y remueve toda la tierra innecesaria que rodea el necesario palmo ya no podrás nunca más dar un paso sin caerte al abismo. Esa es la universidad tendencialmente hoy, para los profesores y para los estudiantes, y quién sabe desde cuándo—siempre nos enteramos demasiado tarde. Veremos si esa tendencia devastadora culmina en total éxito o hay reacción contra ella, y cuál puede ser el alcance de tal reacción, y si la reacción misma no es a su vez también devastadora. En todo caso, políticamente supongo que conviene pensar desde ahí. Ese es quizá el lugar estructural del pensamiento hoy, incluido el pensamiento “universitario,” en su dimensión políticamente autorreflexiva. Y lo que queda, lo que falta, lo que dura es refigurar nuestra vida innecesaria, nuestra vida intelectual, postuniversitariamente. La universidad ha dejado de ser, tendencialmente, es decir, es hoy imperfectamente, un espacio productivo, en la medida en que casi todo lo que es interesante, para estudiantes y profesores, debe hacerse o vivirse ex universitate, desde la universidad fuera de la universidad, al margen de la universidad. Se lo debemos a nuestros colegas y administradores, que se lo deben a nuestros políticos. ¿A quién se lo deben ellos? No a la gente. Y es este no debérselo a la gente, la no-deuda, la falta de deuda política, la que quizá abra, improbablemente, un espacio no sólo ya político para el pensamiento postuniversitario—yo lo llamo infrapolítica.

Hubiera querido, para este coloquio, elaborar un trabajo sobre el pensamiento de Derrida sobre la universidad. Y quizás lo haga si hay planes de publicación de estas intervenciones. En inglés se publicó en 2004 el libro titulado Eyes of the University. Right to Philosophy 2, que incluye las páginas 281 a 663 del enorme tomo publicado en francés en 1990, Du droit á la philosophie, que recoge intervenciones preparadas entre 1975 y 1990. Todo esto pertenece por lo tanto a la época media de Derrida, y hay que pensar si, hacia el final de su vida, Derrida hubiera dicho lo mismo que decía entonces.  Pero pienso que, dadas las limitaciones de tiempo, mejor que ni lo intente, excepto de una forma indirecta. Parto de la sospecha de que lo que dice Derrida entre 1975 y 1990 es en última instancia indefendible, es decir, defendible sólo sincrónicamente, como intervención histórica. Pero hoy ya no hay quizá recurso a esas propuestas del pensamiento derrideano, no en último término, quizá no, en la forma más obvia, y eso hay que pensarlo.

Hace unos años, al final de un libro cuyo intento parcial era justificar un acercamiento subalternista a los estudios culturales latinoamericanistas, escribí sobre el capítulo tres de Los espectros de Marx, de Derrida, que es muy poco tiempo posterior a Du droit á la philosophie (de 1993). Allí Derrida trata de convocar una “nueva Internacional” sobre la base del marxismo, de uno de los “espíritus,” “espectros” o “fantasmas” del marxismo. Derrida se refiere a una “doble interpretación” (81) cuya necesidad siente irreducible a la hora de recibir el complejo legado marxiano y marxista.   En cuanto al marxismo, dice Derrida, “no hay ningún precedente para tal acontecimiento. En toda la historia de la humanidad, en toda la historia del mundo y de la tierra, en todo aquello a lo que podemos darle el nombre de historia en general, tal acontecimiento (repitamos: el acontecimiento de un discurso de estilo filosófico-científico que pretende romper con el mito, con la religión y con la mística nacionalista) ha quedado vinculado, por primera vez e inseparablemente, a formas mundiales de organización social” (91).   Esta es la “promesa mesiánica”del marxismo que “habrá grabado una marca inaugural y única en la historia” (91). Y quizá este coloquio sobre la universidad posible, no tan incidentalmente, asuma esa herencia y esa promesa.

Derrida situa entonces su trabajo en relación a tal promesa mesiánica: “la deconstrucción habría sido imposible e impensable en un espacio pre-marxista;” “la deconstrucción nunca ha tenido sentido ni interés alguno, en mi perspectiva por lo menos, excepto como radicalización, lo cual es decir en la tradición, de un cierto marxismo, desde cierto espíritu del marxismo” (92).   Si la deconstrucción puede presentarse, en 1993, como un “intento de radicalización del marxismo” (92), tal intento se mueve inevitablemente, y funciona, en y a través de la doble interpretación de lo que Derrida, unas páginas antes, había llamado las “diez plagas” de la tardomodernidad capitalista, del “nuevo orden mundial” organizado en torno a los diez problemas estructurales en los que se detiene Derrida, “telegrama de diez palabras” (81), y que yo me limito ahora a mencionar sin especificar.

La primera interpretación derrideana se acerca a lo que Etienne Balibar, en un ensayo de esos mismos años (Balibar se refiere en él a Espectros brevemente [64], y su ensayo es por lo tanto ligeramente posterior), llamó “universalidad total o ficticia” (Balibar 61). Para Balibar “la universalidad total o ficticia es eficaz como medio de integración . . . porque lleva a grupos dominados a luchar contra la discriminación y la desigualdad en el nombre mismo de los valores superiores de la comunidad: los valores éticos y legales del estado mismo (notablemente, la justicia) . . . Confrontar la estructura hegemónica denunciando la brecha o contradicción entre sus valores oficiales y la práctica real . . . es la forma más eficaz de poner la universalidad en obra” (61-62). Y Derrida dice de este primer registro de interpretación: “Aceptemos provisionalmente la hipótesis de que todo lo que va mal en el mundo es producto de la brecha entre una realidad empírica y un ideal regulador” (86).   El ideal regulador de Derrida es lo que Balibar considera valores oficiales de la estructura hegemónica. Ambos pensadores, en el espíritu del marxismo, recomiendan una intervención crítico-política para cerrar esa brecha empírica que mantiene el ideal democrático tan lejos de la experiencia cotidiana. Podemos aquí aplicárselo directamente a la universidad—la historia de la universidad sería la historia de esa brecha empírica entre facticidad e idea de la universidad, historia principial en términos de Reiner Schürmann, historia ilusamente controlada por la postulación hegemónica de una causa final que nos redime.[2] La historia de estas intervenciones que buscan cerrar la brecha es por supuesto lo que Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe invocan como la larga tradición de las luchas populares y democráticas, luchas de posición o luchas sistémicas, luchas de maniobra, política de clase o política identitaria, política de solidaridad y política de representación.[3]

Pero ese primer registro de interpretación crítico-política no es suficiente para Derrida, que pide o postula una segunda articulación interpretativa que es, de hecho, también consistente con la “universalidad ideal” de Balibar, esto es, una “insurrección latente” que guarda una demanda absoluta e infinita “contra los límites de cualquier institución” (Balibar 64). En términos derrideanos, “más allá de los ‘hechos,’ más allá de la supuesta ‘evidencia empírica,’ más allá de todo lo que es inadecuado al ideal, sería cuestión de poner en cuestión otra vez, en algunos de sus predicados esenciales, el concepto mismo de dicho ideal” a través de una crítica radical de sus articulaciones (Derrida 86-87). Derrida supone que no es posible, políticamente, restringirse a la primera o a la segunda interpretación: ambas son necesarias, dado que la insistencia unilateral en una de ellas sólo resultaría o bien en idealismo fatalista o bien en escatología abstracta y dogmática: “No se debe sumar uno al otro, sino que hay que entrelazarlos. Deben implicarse el uno en el otro en el curso de una estrategia compleja y constantemente reevaluada. De otra forma no habrá repolitización, no habrá política. Sin tal estrategia, cualquiera de las dos razones podría llevar a lo peor, a algo peor que lo malo, si podemos decirlo así, es decir, a un tipo de idealismo fatalista o a una escatología abstracta y dogmática ante el mal del mundo” (Derrida 87).

La primera interpretación, por sí misma, presume que nadie puede extraerse de su propio contexto, que estamos siempre marcados por nuestro mundo, que no podemos librarnos del todo de nuestros prejuicios ideológicos, y que por lo tanto sólo es posible asegurarse de que nuestros prejuicios puedan establecer algún grado de consistencia con la realidad. Esto sería lo que Derrida llama idealismo fatalista. Y quiero aquí abrir la pregunta de hasta qué punto nuestro propio idealismo fatalista es activo en la pregunta misma sobre la universidad posible. Pero, si nos atenemos sólo a la segunda interpretación, caeríamos en un agujero sin fondo de crítica sin resto, una especie de negación absoluta a la que Derrida llama escatología dogmática y abstracta.   Quizás sea esto lo que está en juego en la inversión de la pregunta por la universidad libre hacia la certeza desencantada o terca de la universidad imposible. Cuando escribí Exhaustion of Difference asocié estas reflexiones derrideanas y balibarianas sobre morar en la ambigüedad del registro doble con lo que llamé entonces “afirmación subalternista” (Exhaustion 289; ver también 281-89).   Me parecía lo que era preciso hacer, crítica o académicamente, en nombre de una deconstrucción políticamente productiva, o de una estrategia política deconstructiva. Pero hoy ya no lo veo así. En otras palabras, ya no me parece que la conjugación doble de la pregunta por la universidad posible y la universidad imposible, como pensamiento del doble registro, pueda traer otra cosa que un cierto pragmatismo desencantado y voluntarista, quizás incluso oportunista.

No hace tantos años, pero el mundo parece haber cambiado, o cambió para mí. Quizá nos hayamos percatado de que la universidad no funciona ya en la brecha entre su idea pura y una realidad empírica que no está a la altura de su idea o bien por convencionalismo esclerótico o a través de algún tipo de reaccionarismo tendencial que sigue alguna ley de entropía decadente. Y ya no estamos convencidos de que sea suficiente luchar por un retorno de la vieja idea fundacional de una universidad libre.   La noción de universidad se ha modificado en años recientes hasta tal punto que cualquier forma de praxis “idealista” en ella, en el viejo sentido, debe asumir su ruina interna: ya no hay un ideal regulativo de la universidad, y decirlo no es ni fatalista ni idealista en segundo grado sino más bien la única forma de prepararse para evitar una esquizofrenia efectiva.   Por lo tanto el primer registro derrideano-balibariano es a estas alturas críticamente insuficiente, y debe ser abandonado.

¿Podemos mudarnos al segundo registro, según el cual lo que hay que hacer es poner bajo cuestión el concepto mismo del ideal en juego?   Podría uno decir que la práctica de este segundo registro de interpretación sería la práctica de destrucción crítica de la vieja idea de la universidad desde la perspectiva de su radicalización potencial. Pero ¿qué es lo que hay por radicalizar? ¿Y cómo hacerlo?   Si la posibilidad política prometida por el primer registro de interpretación falla, también falla entonces este segundo registro. Ya no hay una construcción hegemónica dotada de idealidad oficial que podamos someter a deconstrucción de forma políticamente productiva. O, si la hay, está embarazosa o vergonzantemente denegada. Si la labor de radicalización no tiene ya un referente institucional, si no podemos encontrar un horizonte que delimite parámetros seguros y reconocibles, entonces cualquier ejercicio de desmantelamiento corre el riesgo inefable de acabar de contribuir a la transformación de la universidad en la empresa comercial-instrumental que ya es de hecho.   Las preguntas que surgen no son particularmente hospitalarias, en el sentido de que sus posibles respuestas no pueden aspirar a producir un espacio de hospitalidad: ¿cómo morar institucionalmente contra la institución, cómo trabajar contra el trabajo de forma que, día a día, podamos encontrar alguna vislumbre de otro mundo, alguna perspectiva que pudiera quizás sostener subjetivamente nuestras acciones en la universidad?   ¿Qué se puede hacer?

Vuelvo a mi comienzo.   Ya no tengo más tiempo. ¿Cabe reinscribir el segundo registro derrideano y balibariano sin atender al primero y sin caer en la dogmática escatológica contra la que previene Derrida?   ¿Cabe renunciar al pensamiento del doble registro en cuestiones universitarias?   Creo que hay un principio de respuesta en lo que Juan Benet le cuenta a Marías: en esa apuesta por un non-plus-ultra singular del pensamiento en cada caso, pensamiento en fragmento, olvidado de la armonía del conjunto, pensamiento inconcluso, desvinculado de todo sistema, e incidente en algo otro que una política universitaria que metaforiza una imposible sutura con un ideal no tanto caduco como por siempre ya ilusorio; incidente en la existencia siempre de antemano infrapolítica de cada uno de nosotros, hayamos llegado o no al otoño de la vida, y por mucho tiempo.

 

[1] Referir a las edades en la Retórica de Aristóteles. En una comunicación pública ara celebrar el sesenta cumpleaños de un amigo del colegio, Bruno Leiner, dice Heidegger: “La edad es ese tiempo en el que nos hemos hecho suficientemente viejos para reconocer al Dasein humano como es, y atesorar, de todas las cosas, como son. La edad es el tiempo en el que saber y ser se han hecho maduros el uno para el otro. La edad es el otoño de la vida; aunque el otoño sea la estación más gentil, puesto que todo está equilibrado por su equivalencia, en el que la felicidad y el pesar pertenecen con la misma esencialidad al Dasein, en el que la calma de una superioridad libre ha llegado al corazón de todo movimiento en cada obra y en cada emprendimiento” (citado por Andrew Mitchell, 22).

 

[2]  Remitir al libro de Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies.

 

[3]  Combino aquí los dos lados de la distinción entre luchas populares y luchas democráticas clásicamente teorizados por Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe en Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pero conviene notar que Laclau y Mouffe se distinguen, por supuesto, por un interés largamente sostenido en la fenomenología de las luchas políticas dentro del primer registro interpretativo derrideano-balibariano.

 

Obras citadas

Balibar, Etienne. “Ambiguous Universality.” Differences 7.1 (1995): 48-74.

Benet, Juan. Herrumbrosas lanzas. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. Eyes of the University. Right to Philosophy 2. Jan Plug y otros

trads. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.

—. Specters of Marx. Peggy Kamuf trad. Nueva York: Routledge, 1994.

Heidegger, Martin. Country Path Conversations. Brett Davis trad. Bloomington:

Indiana UP, 2010.

Laclau, Ernesto y Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Londres: Verso,

Mitchell, Andrew J. The Fourfold. Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 2015.

Moreiras, Alberto. Exhaustion of Difference. The Politics of Latin American Cultural

Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

This comes from a thread below, following on Gerardo Muñoz’s “A Reply to Buttes.”  It is a reply to replies, so it will only be fully understood if the previous comments are read as well.  Or perhaps it won’t!

Of course Gerardo will speak for himself in terms of the issue of exploitation if he chooses. As for myself, I agree that exploitation exists, and in my opinion it is becoming more invasive than ever (although in some segments of western liberal-democratic societies, perhaps in other places as well, it may be less brutal than it has been in the past; but not less insidious). We do not need to accept a Marxian framework as THE framework (for me Marxism is still crucial for social and political analysis, but it is not the ultimate framework of my thinking, so I am a Marxist but not dominantly so–I could say a similar thing about Freudian and Lacanian thought), but it is simply not possible to deny the existence of exploitation at the very core of capitalism, which is our fundamental mode of production and pervades our lives. Infrapolitics projects itself in a world almost entirely hijacked by exploitation at an economic and social level, that is, at a political level.So in fact for me the attempt to take some distance from exploitation and not allowing it to define our lives is really at the very root of the thought of infrapolitics. From that perspective (I think I said this to Emilio Sauri in a previous discussion along similar lines) infrapolitics is always already a response to exploitation, and attempts a (precarious) subtraction from it to the extent that it is possible (again, the gap between lives exploited and infrapolitical lives, the punctum in that gap–the site of Borges’ “ancient innocence”). I think it is important to note here that does not mean that subtraction from exploitation is equivalent to sticking one’s head into the sand and pretending it does not exist. It is a subtraction with open eyes and even with a snake’s heart, as Nietzsche would put it. I make some remarks on the precariat in my first response–the point is that it is not a matter of adopting the precariat from academic thinking, as one adopts a cat, as one exerts a piety.  This has been an endemic problem in subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, and generally in Marxism. Thought must assume its own ceaselessly precarious condition through the undoing of the mystifying separation between theory and praxis. Infrapolitics is always already a praxis–but not in the militant Marxist sense, that is, not in its very separation of a theory from actions that would then need to be carried out laboriously–practice as always already representation, whatever the thesis on Feuerbach meant to say, defines the history of Marxism even today.  Let me just repeat my sense that there is a differend between us at the level of presuppositions, and that it is very difficult to look both for agreements or disagreements if the differend is not recognized as such. This is not the same as saying that you, for instance, insist on focusing on the pine trees whereas infrapolitics looks for everything else as well. Rather, the very perception of the “everything else” already goes through the recognition of the differend. At that level, I would say that “your” pine trees, from this side of the divide, are not the same as the pine trees we can see and deal with. In the same way, say, lust has different connotations for different ethical positions: a puritan sees lust where a libertine sees only desire, etc. When you think of exploitation, you are looking at an ultimate horizon from a productionist perspective that is consubstantial to Marxism. I think of exploitation in a way that recognizes productionism, the principle of general equivalence, and the reduction of the life-world to class struggle as in itself part of the system of exploitation organized by principial thought, of which capitalism is a symptom rather than a cause (and classical Marxism is also principial thought along Hegelian lines).  On values, I would think the object of desire is not to be conceived as a value. If it is, well, then, you are smack in the middle of idealism in a rather fallen sense. (After all, the notion of value in Western thought is a direct derivation of the Platonic theory of ideas.) Regarding actuality-potentiality, it may be that I have not thought the issue through, but in principle it is because I am rather reluctant to do it, since it is difficult for me to see how potentiality as discussed today for the most part is anything but a hypostasis of the modern theory of the subject, that is, of the Cartesian subject. I have not studied the issue in Aristotle, but again, I suspect Aristotle himself lays some traps for us (the tendency today is to read potentiality through variations on the Nietzschean will to power.)

(Photo Stefano Franchi; my thanks for his permission to use it).

No pretendo hacer una reseña formal de Fuerzas de flaqueza, tan sólo redactar una nota parcial relacionada con un problema concreto en ese libro: la “opción hegemónica” en la política de Podemos, cuya justificación es a mi juicio su motor fundamental.   Quiero plantear un problema o una objeción que podría tener más peso del convencionalmente previsible, aunque no esté ahora en condiciones de desarrollarla adecuadamente. Mi intención es sólo indicarla. La objeción es: Ernesto Laclau, cuya teoría de la hegemonía es la decisiva en Cano y en Podemos, dice que la hegemonía es la forma misma de la política, y que no hay política sin hegemonía.   Aceptémoslo.  El intento de literalizar la forma de la política en su contenido es, sin embargo, un paso más, y parece estar abocado al culatazo, y particularmente hoy, en un tiempo histórico en el que no hay ya referentes naturales que permitan su secuestro efectivo a favor de una práctica hegemónica particular.  Si se me permite invocar aquí al Giorgio Agamben de El misterio del mal, cito: ““Si la crisis que nuestra sociedad cruza es tan profunda y grave, es porque no sólo coloca en cuestión la legalidad de las instituciones sino también su legitimidad; no sólo, como se repite con demasiada frecuencia, las reglas y modalidades del ejercicio del poder, sino también los principios mismos que lo fundan y lo legitiman” (6, edición italiana).

La carencia de legitimidad principial implica necesariamente una situación de poshegemonía que ningún voluntarismo puede paliar. Lo cierto es que cualquier opción hegemónica hoy es sólo el disfraz de una carencia de hegemonía estable—carencia de principios, carencia de arkhai o referentes últimos—que llevará a cualquier política que la niegue o la esconda (por ejemplo, negando la pluralidad de intereses que excederá cualquier posible cadena de equivalencias) a su ruina más pronto o más tarde, pero ineluctablemente.   Si la hegemonía es la lógica de la política, si toda articulación política es también una articulación hegemónica, se entiende la táctica hegemónica en política. Pero si el contenido de la política se pretende también hegemónico en su naturaleza misma, y atendiendo a la lógica laclauiana misma, la diferencia entre forma y contenido, entre significante y significado, entre plano literal y plano figural, condena a toda política hegemónica a su desastre. Es una falta de imaginación política no entender que la situación fáctica es hoy necesariamente poshegemónica, y que la política debe adaptarse al mundo, porque el mundo no se adaptará a la política.

Cuando Cano dice en su página 163 que “la cuestión de si el 15M constituye un movimiento social orientado a la hegemonía o poshegemónico es, en efecto, objeto de interés,” no cita en apoyo de la poshegemonía más fuente que un casual Paolo Virno sin precisar la cita, revelando en ello su propia concepción de la “opción” poshegemónica como “la idea de una multitud autopoiética entendida como una agrupación de singularidades ‘unidas’ en una relación de variación continua” (164).   Contra la multitud autopoiética, Cano opta por la opción hegemónica, a la que considera “la pista correcta” (164).   Dice, añadiendo nuevas precisiones: “La visión antipolítica del mundo desde la que hoy se ‘recoge’ con éxito la comprensible indignación popular no es el resultado de la estupidez o de la falsedad ideológica de unas masas necesitadas de ilustración sobre sus auténticos intereses, sino de la inoperancia e indolencia exquisitas que ha mostrado la izquierda tradicional desde hace tiempo a la hora de construir hegemonía social y mancharse con estas realidades psicosociales” (170-71); y la “dimensión horizontal de ‘autonomía,’ como resalta Ernesto Laclau, suele conducir, más tarde o más temprano, al agotamiento y la dispersión de los movimientos de protesta. De ahí la necesidad de complementarse con un movimiento orientado a la hegemonía” (171). La hegemonía–una hegemonía no simplemente procedimental, sino una hegemonía sustantiva–es claramente el horizonte intelectual de este libro, aunque la posibilidad poshegemónica aparezca indicada brevemente, y solo para ser rápidamente zanjada. Pero hay poshegemonías que no tienen nada que ver con las multitudes autopoiéticas, a las que en todo caso siempre exceden.

La obsesión más o menos táctica del texto tiene que ver con “el fracaso de la izquierda tradicional” (173), su tendencia a ser hoy poco más que un lecho de Procusto: “La articulación popular hoy pasa por no ajustar a la gente a la cama de la izquierda, sino por dejar el lecho en busca de los muchos que aún nos faltan en el camino de cambiar nuestra sociedad” (174).   Fuerzas de flaqueza es un libro astuto, pero escrito desde el partidismo, es un libro político, sin distancia: escrito desde dentro de Podemos, y no pretende otra cosa.  Lo que busca es por lo tanto justificar sin someter a examen una opción fundacional para el partido: “el proceso formativo de la lucha política como lucha hegemónica que ha impulsado Podemos desde el principio” 175).   Cano dice claramente que se trataba siempre de desbloquear una situación política congelada en un bipartidismo estéril, pero también de romper otro bloqueo, a saber, el impuesto por una izquierda anquilosada, “cada vez más encerrada en su alicorto posibilismo” (176), en confrontación ruinosa con unos movimientos sociales que no llegaban a encontrar camino propiamente político.

En ese contexto la opción hegemónica es presentada como la única posible, la única razonable. Cierto que en el capítulo segundo hay también una consideración crítica que rechaza, a partir de ciertas críticas de Alain Badiou, la llamada teoría de la multitud de Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri, sobre cierta presuposición, sólo a medias correcta, de que cualquier alternativa a la articulación política hegemónica tendría que pasar por alguna vinculación a esa teoría (que no es el caso). Incluso se entiende que la otra posibilidad latente, que tanto el 15M como la formación misma de Podemos como partido habrían evitado o al menos retrasado en España, la de un populismo de derechas, sería también una forma de opción hegemónica. La hegemonía es claramente el límite de la imaginación política de Cano o de Podemos.

No sabemos todavía—estamos a 15 de abril, y parece que habrá nuevas elecciones ante el fracaso en cuanto a la formación de gobierno después de las elecciones del 20 de diciembre de 2015—si la estrategia política seguida por Pablo Iglesias y su partido en las negociaciones que hoy por hoy han fracasado es coherente con las metas del partido, y coherente con la estrategia hegemónica misma. Sólo podrá darse una contestación positiva a esa incógnita si, en las próximas elecciones, Podemos crece y aumenta su número de votantes y diputados—de otra manera, la estrategia tendrá que reconocerse como un error de cuya gravedad tendremos que hacernos cargo en su momento.   La hegemonía, cuyas condiciones mínimas son la invocación de un antagonismo y la invocación de un significante vacío (vacío, no arbitrario) que suture una cadena de equivalencias, busca alianzas, no separación excepto de ese antagonismo que debe ser de antemano identificado como minoritario y vencible.   Cuando el antagonismo incluye más de la mitad de los presuntos votantes, sólo hay fallo hegemónico. Y catástrofe política, quizá pero no necesariamente remediable. Ahora bien, mi objeción primera supondría también que incluso la formación en alianza de un gobierno de coalición, con o sin la participación activa de Podemos, no hubiera hecho más que retrasar el problema para estos últimos. Y nos jugamos demasiado para no tratar de señalarlo.

Al comienzo del libro Cano discurre sobre lecturas posibles de la dialéctica del amo y del esclavo en Hegel, y se pronuncia en contra tanto de la lectura que promovería que el esclavo se esfuerce por tomar sin más el lugar del amo como de la lectura “estoica,” que llevaría al esclavo a imaginar un mundo sin opresión del amo, y a pretender vivir en él.   La única tercera opción imaginada es la que, en definitiva, puede lograrse a través de una cadena de equivalencias que incorpore y resignifique fragmentos del mundo del amo y fragmentos del mundo del esclavo—esta es la “guerra de posiciones” que marca el tiempo de la política y que acabará, Dios mediante, en la figura de un nuevo sujeto plebeyo que habrá no ya deconstruido, sino complicado la relación dialéctica entre amo y esclavo hasta el punto de confundirla terminalmente.   Esta es la primera presentación de lo que el libro llamará con cierta insistencia, y desde su título mismo, “nuevas gramáticas políticas.” David Soto Carrasco, en su reseña del libro, dice: “Frente a [las] pasiones tristes que encierran a los individuos en sí mismos, [Cano] nos propone una apuesta afirmativa que acepta la experiencia de la actualidad pero que no cae en fetiches heroicos ni tensiones idealistas. Este sería el momento propio de la irrupción plebeya, que extrae del malestar social, corporal y espacial nuevas gramáticas que aspiran a desplegar una experiencia inusitada de solidaridad. Con estas premisas se lanzó, a su modo de ver, la hipótesis Podemos.” Si los “fetiches heroicos” recogen una alusión a la vieja izquierda y las “tensiones idealistas” remiten a la desviación derechista o claramente fascista del populismo, la hegemonía plebeya es el único referente de las “nuevas gramáticas políticas” mencionadas con tanta insistencia.

¿Por qué llamarlas nuevas, sin embargo? La obra de Laclau da muchos ejemplos de articulación populista clásica en el siglo XX, atendiendo al tipo de gramática ahora invocada por Cano. ¿Qué es lo estrictamente nuevo en pretender la aplicación sistemática o literalización de la teoría de la hegemonía en Laclau (y Chantal Mouffe) a la situación política española? ¿Nuevo para España, quizás?   Y aun eso es discutible, en la medida en que el franquismo en cierto periodo o a partir de cierto periodo puede concebiblemente entenderse como aplicación de la gramática hegemónica laclauiana (y no es extraño, si tiene Laclau razón al decir que toda política es de cualquier manera siempre ya hegemónica, explícitamente o no).  En todo caso, si lo nuevo es la literalización hegemónica, la aplicación sustantiva de una mera lógica política, eso nuevo es lo que no va a servir, y conviene buscar otras opciones.

Hay política más allá de la hegemonía, la hegemonía es lógica de la política pero no consuma su horizonte. La hegemonía se instala en la política pero no la termina; cabría también decir que la hegemonía no es en ningún caso emancipadora, aunque pueda ser instrumental.   El fin de una hegemonía emancipadora es su disolución misma. Pero mi intento aquí es sólo marcar el problema, no indicar soluciones.   Las soluciones tendrán que salir del partido mismo, antes de que se haga tarde.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Pleased to publish here Julie Kelso’s recent paper with Julie’s permission.  She asks me to point out this is a first shot, really just a draft, and there is more to follow.)

My project concerns two principal questions. The first is this: how do we rest today, by which I mean retreat from the world in our wakeful hours (i.e. I’m not talking about sleep, though I love it!) when our waking lives largely seem to be describable as “harassed unrest,” to use Heidegger’s term from his lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking” for poor human being-in-the-world? [Do you feel this term “harassed unrest” adequately describes the bulk of your waking lives, including your waking times away from work? For Heidegger this is actually some kind of spacial trouble: do you feel yourself at home in the world if you live this way? When do you feel at home in the world?] Or, to put it another way, again drawing from Heidegger, though this time from another lecture from around the same time “The Question Concerning Technology”, do you feel yourself on “stand-by”, merely a resource to be ordered and extracted, a “standing reserve”, what today we can call life reduced entirely to biopolitical life? In other words, what can rest possibly mean if you feel yourself just one of the world’s resources…do you feel your restful times are akin to that of a battery on charge? {My thinking is very much indebted here, and throughout this paper, to Alberto Moreiras’ lovely paper on Harassed Unrest, never published.}

My second question is: why do we retreat from the world? For what purpose? In general, historically we can say that there are two reasons that have been given to us for why we rest. Either, we rest to rejuvenate ourselves so we can return to work refreshed (this is the Aristotelian position; Nicomachean Ethics X, 6)) or we work so we can rest (as we say in Australia, we live for the weekends). Essentially this is the Jewish model of rest about which I will speak today. Given what I’ve just said, though, I will argue in this paper that neither models are at all helpful. And yet, as I hope to explain to you, I am particularly interested in the recent call for a return of the Sabbath, though not for reasons of piety to a god in which I don’t believe.

The idea of a weekly rest day is, of course, in our culture, originally religious. The Sabbath (shabbath) was the day where one had to cease work in order to worship, but also in order to celebrate. We were ordered to rest by the God of the Hebrew Bible, and as the centuries unfolded this rest continued to take place in accordance with the rules of our religious institutions, Jewish and Christian. For Judaists, the Sabbath specifically involves two commandments: to remember (zachor) and to observe (shamor). The Sabbath is both a remembrance of the creation itself and of the escape from slavery in Egypt. But it is also an observance of a law prohibiting work. The type of work prohibited is said to be melachah, work that is creative or that seeks to control the environment, natural or otherwise. It involves the ceasing of any cultivation of the land or any building (derived from the rabbinic interpretation of Ex 31.13). [Interestingly, none of the biblical laws pertaining to the Sabbath include woman/wife among those who must rest from work. For example, Exodus 20:8-11 reads: “Remember to keep holy the day of the Sabbath. Six days you shall labour/serve (ta’abod; second person, masculine singular) and do all of your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. Do not do any work, you, nor your son (ubinka), nor your daughter (ubitteka), your manservant (abdeka), nor your maidservant (waamateka), nor your livestock (ubehemteka), nor the stranger who is within your gates.” See also Deut. 5:13-14; Ex. 23:12, 31:13-17. In all of these laws we see a proprietary model of subjectivity and objectivity—the “your” being second, masculine, singular—consistent with patriarchal social organization. And yet, “your wife” (ishteka) is never included. This will be important for me, not for the obvious feminist reason (a wife’s work doesn’t even register as work) but because I want to take advantage of the fact that women (presumably of childrearing age) are strangely absented from this proprietary model of rest and are thus able to explore their/our own relationship to time, space and restfulness.]

According to the ancient Romans and Greeks the Jewish people were considered lazy because of their practice of the Sabbath, of resting from work one day each week. For example, in his Fourteenth Satire the Roman poet Juvenal (c67-c145 CE) states: “It’s the father that’s to blame, treating every seventh day/ As a day of idleness, separate from the rest of daily life” (105-106). Idleness was clearly considered unacceptable to Juvenal and other non-Jewish people in the ancient world. And today we live with a similar viewpoint dominating our lives: restfulness and leisure are the enemy of economic growth (which is, apparently, limitless) and as such have become severely eroded. What is left of this time of retreat from work, originally the Sabbath, is also now largely determined for us by others not in the interest of life itself, but capital. Non-work time is understood as necessary to ensure the workers return to work able to do their work better than they would without any rest. As such, we have returned to the position of Philo, who defended the Jewish practice of the Sabbath against the charge of idleness by claiming that its “object is rather to give man relaxation from continuous and unending toil and by refreshing their bodies with a regularly calculated system of remissions to send them out renewed to their old activities” (De Specialibus Legibus, II, 60). As the Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel points out, however, this is an Aristotelian understanding of the need for rest (Philo being the representative voice for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria), contrary to that of the biblical rendering:

To the biblical mind, however, labor is the means toward an end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life…The Sabbath is not for the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living…Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art. It is the result of an accord of body, mind and imagination…The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. (Heschel 2005, 14-15)

In his much-loved book The Sabbath (1951/2005), Heschel famously argues that because Judaism is a religion of time rather than space, one that aims at “the sanctification of time” (Heschel 2005, 8), its teaching concerns how to live according to “holiness in time” (8). He characterizes the rituals of Judaism as the “architecture of time” (8) and the Sabbath as a cathedral (8) or “palace in time” (15).

Heschel wants us to refuse to dispense with what he considers to be the greatest gift from his God: the Sabbath, which he understands as “a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord” (3).

These are beautiful words and since the publication of his book many Jewish and Christian scholars have continued to argue for the need for the Sabbath today as an antidote to the war on rest and leisure, as a way of countering the dehumanizing effects of late-capitalist demands on our time and energy. However, despite the frequent calls for the politics and economics of the Sabbath to be re-considered, most scholars envisage a return of the Sabbath in terms of piety, of reverence for the father-god of the Judaeo-Christian traditions, and his creation. As Benjamin J. Dueholm argues:

The ethos of the sabbath goes much deeper than an individual commitment to prioritize worship…It will take more than individual piety for us to avoid permanent exile from time’s palace. We will need a sabbath politics and a sabbath advocacy. We will need a commitment to life as its own rationale, its own form of wealth, its own glory. (Dueholm 2014, 25)

These too are beautiful words. However, I want to question the ability of the Sabbath as it has been conceived to achieve what Heschel, Dueholm and others claim as its possibility: the promotion and practice of a reverence for life. I shall argue that because the Sabbath has only been considered from a masculinist perspective, notably as a gift of rejuvenating spirit and rest from a creator father-god who dwells beyond the cosmos he created on his own, the Sabbath can only continue to serve the masculine subject and the promotion of his perceived well-being. I shall suggest that this promotion of his well-being is not in fact accomplishable because of the failure to consider the sancity of time and space from a woman’s perspective.

Luce Irigaray claims that in order to construct a world that honours and cultivates the life and living of two irreducibly sexuated subjects, man and woman, along with a respect for nature and especially the air required for life, we “must reconsider the whole problematic of space and time”(Irigaray 1993 ESD, 7). I suggest that the Sabbath is a valuable spatio-temporal concept in need of such a rethinking. Indeed, I shall argue, with the help Irigaray and (somewhat ironically) Heidegger, that the Sabbath needs to be recast as the sanctification of time and space for the promotion of “the two”, a time and space for man and woman each in their own way to cultivate their self-affection and their love for each other as irreducibly different and un-appropriable.

2. Heschel’s “Palace in Time”

The rest of this paper is structured according to the three principal problems I have with Heschel:

1. I have a problem with what Heschel seems to think about the realm of space and our way of relational being within it. “Man”, according to Heschel, is naturally preoccupied with the realm of space, which is also the world of things. In particular, “man” seeks to gain control of space and its things, possibly as a way of attempting to convince himself that time is not a problem for him, not a “slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace, incinerating every moment of our lives”(5). Indeed, technical civilization is how “man” controls and conquers space, and it derives from his “desire…to subdue and manage the forces of nature” (3-4). The world of commerce, of building, of farming, of business, of education, of power, of the arts and crafts, etc., these pertain to the realm of space. For Heschel, this fascination with space and its splendor (“with the grandeur of things of space”) is simply part of being human. Because our minds interpret the world primarily via the senses, we have tended to privilege the “thinginess” (5) of the world, at the expense of the immaterial, which scares us. In fact, we have become almost completely beholden to the task of gaining control of space, at great cost not just to the world but to ourselves:

To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time…Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern. Nothing is more useful than power, nothing more frightful. We have often suffered degradation by poverty, now we are threatened with degradation through power. There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain. Many hearts and pitchers are broken at the fountain of profit. Selling himself into slavery to things, man becomes a utensil that is broken at the fountain. (Heschel 2005, 3)

So, it is not that we must develop a new relationship with space and the things in it, including nature; we naturally seek to subdue and control them; he tells us this is “certainly one of our tasks”. Of course, this idea is actually biblical (Genesis 1:26) and we can and indeed today should reconsider this idea of space as the realm in which we dominate and subdue anything. We need to resist this language of control and work more towards the language of space as the realm of being-with. And for that, I shall argue, we need a conception of space and time as sanctified dwelling in the world (emplacement).

2. Relatedly, the second problem I have is Heschel’s insistence that “the danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time.” What does he mean by aspirations in time? He states:

Time is man’s greatest challenge. We all take place in a procession through its realm which never comes to an end but are unable to gain a foothold in it Its reality is apart and away from us. Space is exposed to our will; we may shape and change the things in space as we please. Time, however, is beyond our reach, beyond our power. It is both near and far, intrinsic to all experience and transcending all experience. It belongs exclusively to God. Time, then, is otherness, a mystery that hovers above all categories…We share time, we own space. Through my ownership of space, I am a rival of all other beings; through my living in time, I am a contemporary of all other beings. We pass through time, we occupy space. We easily succumb to the illusion that the world of space is for our sake, for man’s sake. In regard to time, we are immune to such illusion. (Heschel 2005, 99)

For Heschel, the problem is not that we understand space as something we bend and shape according to our will or that this is merely an illusion; the problem is that our conquering of space cannot solve our problem with time, and it is only with respect to time that we are immune to the illusion of control. The only way we can deal with the problem of time is through the combined conquering of space and the sanctification of time: “We must conquer space in order to sanctify time. All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is the heart of time” (Heschel 2005, 101). Do we really sanctify life by employing the things of space; are we sanctifying life by owning space and thus being “a rival of all other beings” (Heschel 2005, 99)? Heschel simply finds it unproblematic to think of the Sabbath as a day where we get to retreat from our task of conquering space, so that we can “share in the holiness that is the heart of time.” In fact, there is the suggestion that our dominion over the things of space is celebratory and the real problem is that we don’t know how to also celebrate time: “The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time” (Heschel 2005, 10).

The problem as I see it is that Heschel simply accepts that for six days a week we lives of “harassed unrest.” For Heschel, this is natural and unavoidable, and the Sabbath is our way to take respite from the demands of our spatial dwelling amongst things. But is this actually respite? For Heidegger, we need to attempt to move beyond such a perverse or sham mode of dwelling in the world, for the best we can do is long for rest. As Moreiras puts it:

If rest defines a temporal point in our private negotiation with the deprived space of our lives, the interruption of a spatial flux, the desperate reach for the oxygen of the night, then we could say that time is today nothing but the stasis of unrest. In dislocation, in disposition, we are disposed temporally into the avoidance of harassed unrest, and the avoidance of harassed unrest is the final disposition of our lives. We are all, as it were, turtles dreaming of the end of the race, wishing for the night, for final torpor.   The Roman historian Tacitus said of his compatriots once: “they created a wasteland. They called it peace.” We could say of our ourselves: “we dream of resting. We call it a life.”

3. Returning to Heschel for my final point: Tellingly, there is also a, well, very familiar hierachicalised gendering of space and time happening in Heschel’s book. Again, Heschel argues that Judaism is a religion that shifted away from the idea of sacred space toward the idea of time as holy: “Holiness in space, in nature, was known in other religions. New in the teaching of Judaism was that the idea of holiness was gradually shifted from space to time, from the realm of nature to the realm of history, from things to events. The physical world became divested of any inherent sanctity…The quality of holiness in not in the grain of matter” (Heschel 2005, 79). We learn that matter is maternalised, and we can infer that maternal matter (our original dwelling place) belongs to the thinginess of the world, to matter not spirit: “We usually think that the earth is our mother, that time is money and profit our mate. The seventh day is a reminder that God is our father, that time is life and the spirit our mate” (Heschel 2005, 76). Furthermore, he spends two or three chapters discussing the ancient sages’ notion of the Sabbath as a bride and a queen and informs us that this is not a personification of the Sabbath, but “an exemplification of a divine attribute…it does not represent a substance but the presence of God, his relationship to man” (Heschel 2005, 60). At this point I realized that Heschel all along means man when he says man. In short, my problem is this: Putting aside the question of belief (which is unimportant for my study) I agree with Heschel’s insistence that we need to combat the theft of time and rest that seems almost to be the very nature of our being today. And consider these words: “Gallantly, ceaseless, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty. Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people…This is our constant problem—how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent” (89). Well, indeed, but Heschel’s conception of the Sabbath as “a palace in time which we build” is a masculinist construction of the relationship between work and rest, space and time, immanence and transcendence. And it seems women simply have to follow the guidance of men like Heschel when it concerns the question of how and why we rest our weary bodies and minds, knowing however that we seem to be placed on the side of nature, not spirit. At best, we can just try to imitate men. But, following Irigaray, I refuse to do such a thing. I have a different body, I live in the world differently to a man. Why should I try and imitate something that cannot promote my well-being in the world, as mind-body-spirit?

In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray, evoking Heidegger, states that each age has but one issue “to think through” (Irigaray 1993, 5). For Irigaray, this one issue of our time is sexual difference, a project with far reaching implications for other major issues of our time (racial, ecological, economic, political and social). If we think through sexual difference, understood as recognition of two irreducibly distinct sexuated subjects, man and woman, we will effect a change for the better in our world:

Sexual difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date – at least in the West – and without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh. For loving partners this would be a fecundity of birth and regeneration, but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of a new poetics. (Irigaray 1993, 5)

This is currently impossible for us to imagine, but we must begin trying to think it anyway. Like Heidegger, Irigaray believes that thinking the very problem of dwelling as our distinctly human problem is how we begin to move towards proper dwelling in the world, and thus potentially changing our world. However, Irigaray chastises Heidegger for his “forgetting of air” and his obsession with the mystery of things, but also for his failure to recognise that different body types (of which there is at base two, man and woman) produce and need different houses of language. Part of her work over the last two decades has been about fairly practical approaches to moving us forward into what she believes could be a new epoch: the cultivation of the breath (remembering air) and silence, especially, as a means to becoming spiritual (which in her terms is to become properly human, as a woman, and as a man). Given that breathing is our first autonomous act, Irigaray believes that learning to breathe properly is akin to learning to live autonomously, which means learning to live without the need to appropriate others or things or cultures, which in her terms is nothing more than the continuation of placental living. The breath about which Irigaray speaks is thus not simply that which sustains our existence, operating only at the level of needs, but it is the breath that pertains to the spirit. There is vital breath and spiritual breath and we need them both to survive and flourish.

In order to become spiritual, it is necessary that we be able to transform the vital breath in such a way that it can attend to the promotion of ‘the heart, of thought, of speech and not only in the service of physiological survival’ (Irigaray 2005: 76).

As far as I am concerned, becoming spiritual signifies a transformation of our energy from merely vital energy to a more subtle energy at the service of breathing, loving, listening speaking and thinking (sic). This implies going from merely individual survival to the capacity of sharing with the other, and not only goods but breathing, love, words, thought. We thus find again the link with the other(s) but through a personal becoming, which otherwise runs the risk of being paralysed. When I speak of a spiritual virginity, I allude to the capability of gathering, keeping and transforming an energy of one’s own…(Irigaray 2008a, 104-105)

The term here, “virginity”, is no doubt confusing. Irigaray rethinks virginity as the cultivation of autonomy; wrt to women, it is akin to woman’s gathering together of herself, a feminine in-dwelling, her interiorization and nurturance of herself as a woman. This enables woman to remain faithful to her gender (or genre), understood as an horizon toward which she strives in the continuous process of ‘becoming woman’. In other words, Irigaray (2008: 88) uses the term ‘virginity’ to refer to a woman’s ‘capacity of reaching and keeping her own integrity’. In her work, this must begin with the cultivation of breathing such that vital breath is transformed to spiritual breath. Then we become capable of thinking in a way that promotes our human well-being:

After listening to the other and to the world – and not only the world built by us—we have to return home, to return to ourselves, within ourselves…Thinking is the time of turning back to the self. Thinking is the time of building one’s own home, in order to inhabit one’s self, to dwell within the self…Thinking has to secure the return to home, the dwelling within oneself for reposing, for a becoming of one’s own, for preparing future relations with the other, the world. (Irigaray 2008b, 234-235)

Returning to my two original questions:

How do I retreat from the world?: Through the cultivation of silence and breath so that my thinking, speaking, listening, breathing, loving are changed.

Why do I retreat from the world?: to build a home of my own as a woman, in internal-dwelling that enables me to dwell in the world properly as a woman, such that I can return to the world of others and things, especially natural things, without the need to dominate or appropriate them (people, things, cultures, etc). Most importantly, thinks Irigaray, men and women need to do this (each in their own way given their embodied difference) so that we can start to build a world together.

In other words, we need to rethink the Sabbath so as to promote an ethics of Sexuated Difference.

References:

Dueholm, B.J. 2014. “Sabbath Piety and Sabbath Politics: The War against Rest.” Christian Century November 26: 22-25.

Heschel, A.J. 2005 (1951). The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Irigaray, L. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. 2005. Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. Trans. S. Pluháček. New Delhi: New Age Books.

Irigaray, L. 2008a. “A Feminine Figure in Christian Tradition: Conversation between Luce Irigaray, Margaret R. Miles and Laine M. Harrington.” In Conversations, 85-106. London and New York: Continuum.

Irigaray, L. 2008b. “Listening, Thinking, Teaching.” In Luce Irigaray: Teaching. Eds. L. Irigaray with M. Green, 231-240. London: Continuum.

 

 

(I am prompted to make of this, which is a response to Steve’s post below, a separate entry here.)

Dear Steve,

I thank you for your interest and the work you have put into this, which is in itself flattering to the Collective.   While I only mean to give you a general response—I do not think I am the owner of infrapolitics, of course, or any kind of gatekeeper—I will also try to follow the thread of your discourse and will make comments as they appear relevant. It is not for me to pass any kind of judgment on the force of your analyses, since I am involved in them in ways too conflicted for me to take a step back.

Infrapolitics stands indeed in a paradoxical relationship to politics which may have something to do with religion—recently there has come up within the group the notion that marrano infrapolitics (which is a kind of assumed militancy, as opposed to infrapolitics as such, which simply happens) is a religion without religion–, but it does not however think of itself in any kind of ethical commitment to anything or anyone: neither to the poor nor to the rich. It is simply not a thinking of the ethical commitment. So the comparison with liberation theology or with any charity politics kind of breaks down in my opinion.   The subaltern relation in infrapolitics hits a different register, and it has to do with its very precise abandonment of social hegemony: it makes exodus of it, whatever the social hegemony happens to be (say, even if it is postsubalternist in Beverley’s parlance). This is not because infrapolitics, in its assumed or “militant” dimension, is antipolitical; it is rather because it affirms a directly posthegemonic politics: a demotic republicanism of equality based on the notion that nadie es más que nadie, which means: nobody occupies the site of representation, neither the rich, nor the poor. It is an-archic in that sense. It does not support the precariat, not directly (I mean, it may, if it comes to political choice, but the action that results from a political choice is no longer infrapolitics): it is itself precarious, and it lives in precarity. Joyfully.

Re the notion of “pequeño ajuste,” I think it is true this is a major theme. But perhaps not in the messianic (without messianism) way you describe it following Lerner, who himself takes it out of Agamben discussing Benjamin and Scholem. The “pequeño ajuste infrapolítico” involves a lot but, I would say, in a radical, strictly, thoroughly antimessianic way, way beyond any structure of the promise. It is precisely a step back from any kind of promise, and from the economy of the promise. We have talked about this frequently in terms of letting-be, and also more particularly in terms of the notion of Gelassenheit taken from Meister Eckhart, Heidegger, Schürmann.   My position is that, while there is ever a practice of Gelassenheit in infrapolitics, while infrapolitics lets-be and is a practice of letting-be, there can be no final letting-be, there can be no final Gelassenheit, since the human is forever trapped in the tragic condition between natality and mortality and all that it entails.   The gap between the practice of Gelassenheit and the impossibility of a final state of rest calls for that “pequeño ajuste” that might ground all aspects of existential infrapolitics—it also organizes, I would think, what I will call the politics of infrapolitics in the widest sense. Because it opens up the terrain of action. There is nothing peaceful about infrapolitics.

This would not have much to do with the Borgesian “imminence of a revelation as yet unproduced” in the sense in which you read it. The revelation is unproduced not because it remains invisible—the “production” of the revelation would never be its coming into visibility (the revelation remains unproduced). Infrapolitics does not search for, nor does it desire, the invisible. On the contrary, it is a radical concern with existence such as it is, which also means with desire such as it is.   It takes the structure of desire seriously, of course, which makes it take less seriously the notion that desire may have a goal that has to do either with traducing the invisible into the visible or, in a more Baudelairian (but also more perverse) way, with keeping the invisible invisible. It sees what it can, it desires what it must, and it lets it be. And it knows and acknowledges whatever pain or joy that brings along. To that extent I would make the claim that only infrapolitics is properly material, or materialist.

Re the saying and the said, or nature and the landscape, the reference here is to the ontico-ontological difference in the Heideggerian sense. I would also, myself, say, the Derridean sense, but there are differences in the group regarding Derrida’s use of the Heideggerian notion. For me infrapolitics is above all an exercise (exercitium, we take this word literally) in the region of the ontico-ontological difference, that is, in the difference between being and beings.

The punctum is also a crucial concept for me, as precisely the site of desire, redefined by infrapolitics as the crossing of the ontological difference in every case.   I should use this precise point in your paper to warn you that when I wrote Tercer espacio, or even Exhaustion of Difference, I was not yet thinking of infrapolitics. So for me the inferences are very interesting, but I am not ready to endorse them without going over them with a very fine comb.

My general impression, Steve, is that you come at infrapolitics with framings and enframings of your own and have not yet moved into the terrain where infrapolitics may become fertile: you are, if you will, still missing the “minor adjustment.” This is probably the reason why your questions at the end do not strike a chord in me—they are not my questions, which means I cannot provide answers for them, I am sorry.   But, as I said, I am not the gatekeeper, so you are very welcome in terms of doing your own theorizing and your own extrapolations. And I am not asking you to “take the step” or anything of the kind. If there is one thing infrapolitics abhors, it is any kind of pedagogy.

Let me only say one thing, though: there is extreme resistance to infrapolitics in the field, I rarely make “vague claims” regarding things I have patent experience of. And the sentence “infrapolitics is the canon, it is the archive itself” is, although flattering, since you can only formulate it out of a certain clear respect for the thing, is, I think, misleading. No, infrapolitics is a relation to the archive. A different and difficult one.

Thanks so very much again for having worried about it, written about it, and shared it so that we can discuss it.

Alberto

 

 

The last thing I want is to sound supercilious, and yet I have to say something.  Addressed, of course, against no one.  I  once told a friend of mine he seemed to be smoking too much marihuana on a daily basis, and that he should cool it down a bit.  He replied to me that yes, he regretted so much smoking, but only because it was smoking, not because it was marihuana.  Since I was a fairly heavy tobacco smoker at the time, the point hit home, and I never raised the issue again.  In terms of infrapolitics, the complaint is usually the opposite: we are told we never publish enough on it, thus leaving people who want to figure it out deprived and anxious.  This is very nice of them.  Yes, of course, we are not publishing enough, and we should publish a lot more.  But let us put things in perspective.  We always thought and said it was going to take about ten years for the infrapolitical project to reach some kind of tipping point or point of saturation, and we have only been at it two years.  So I think we are on the right track, even if people do complain rightly.  I remember going to a Hispanic Studies conference in the summer of 1987, there was a mysterious panel on deconstruction (mysterious because it was so out of character in a provincial Hispanic Studies conference–even though, after all, it was already 1987, and deconstruction had been kicking around the States for about, what, fifteen years or so).  But those professors, bless their souls, proceeded to read papers where they declared Bugs Bunny to be a paradigm of deconstruction among other things: “Bugs Bunny IS deconstruction.”  (That was the funniest, not the phoniest)  So, they could have said, if contested, that there was not enough clear writing on deconstruction for them to have been able to figure it out rightly, so they made do.  But it would not have worked, not really.   In other words, what I am trying to say is that the demand for more clarity, more precision, more dissemination, more encyclopedia articles, more definitions, and more examples is all well and good, but it is also an infinite demand whose tendential fulfillment will never satisfy anyone–by the time there were enough materials on deconstruction, deconstruction was deemed worthy of the dustbin of history.  It is now kind of back, but that is something else entirely.  My point:  at this time there are about a thousand pages worth of talk on infrapolitics in this blog alone.  We have published two special issues, and I count about twenty published essays on it, I think.  And of course we have been discussing the issues at many professional venues–from MLA and LASA to ACLA, to mention only the more visible ones.  I think that is enough to prompt an idea of what it is we are up to, for better or for worse.  But it does require work, as all good things do except perhaps taking a nap.  I do not, however, want to sound sarcastic at all: yes, we take the point, a lot more needs to be done, we have been lazy!!  And yet one wonders whether, within the present coordinates in the field, where people become thoroughly acculturated to just a handful of themes to which they call Latinamericanism (say, culture, identity, subalternity, politics: you mix those things up in some way, and you develop a perfectly proper professional position), there is an ear to hear what infrapolitics has to say.  My own answer is: probably not.  I regret this.  Perhaps the problem is not that people cannot see the forest for the trees.  The real problem is that we have educated our students to believe that all trees are nice pine trees.  But there are other trees out there, some of them beautiful, with obscure shapes that you will only recognize if you develop the sight for them.

I attended the 2016 ACLA at Harvard, but because my seminar overlapped with the afternoon session of the Línea de sombra seminar on Friday, I unfortunately had to leave the discussions before the conversations had really gotten under way and was unable to attend the Saturday session for the same reason. Such is our fate amid scheduling at large, important conferences like ACLA. But I should say that this was a disappointment for me because there is a great deal I find of interest in Línea de sombra, and I wish I would have had the opportunity to engage in the conversation fully since my own presentation modestly sought to dialogue with some of the claims made in the volume. What follows in my comments below was initially begun as a short response to Moreiras’ recent post “Some comments on the ACLA 2016 discussions,” but it has grown substantially as I started to write it two weeks ago. So, I apologize for the length and also if the comments I make were already addressed during the discussion.

One of the aspects I admire about Línea de sombra and especially his more recent work, such as the essay giving an overview of the infrapolitical project, published in Transmodernity last year, is the ways in which Moreiras continues his attempts to move past some of the limits of the project of subaltern studies. By acknowledging that we all are “subaltern or potentially subaltern in ways that would have been unimaginable only a generation or two ago” (“Some comments,” my emphasis, and more on that emphasis in a moment), he situates the infrapolitical project in a place to deal with one of the limits signaled but unresolved by John Beverley in Latinamericanism after 9/11:

“in the Haitian Revolution the slave-owning planter class became a subordinated group, in the sense that its own identity and interests were coercively negated—its plantations were confiscated, and many of the slave owners and their families and associates were killed and forced into exile. Does that mean that the former slave owners became ‘subaltern’? In a narrow sense, yes, if—to recall Guha’s definition—the subaltern is ‘a name for the general attribute of subordination. . . whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way,’ so that ‘in any other way’ could be understood as including having one’s slaves rebel and one’s plantations seized. But to insist on that point (rather than, for example, to characterize the former slave owners as counterrevolutionary émigrés) would seem to distort significantly the meaning and political valence of the idea of the subaltern” (Beverley, Latinamericanism After 9/11 112).

To think of these particular instances of dispossession as subalternization, Beverley notes, would be a corruption or “distortion” of the term, which for him, and for Ranajit Guha, as Javier Sanjinés has noted, sees “subalternity [as] a euphemism Gramsci used for the proletariat and peasantry” (88). For this reason Sanjinés expands the notion and “along with Beverley . . . [is] inclined to define [the subaltern] . . . as the poor in spirit mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount” (89). This links one version of subaltern studies and its transformation in discussions of the multitude and the marea rosada with Beverley’s account in in Subalternity and Representation (1999) of “subaltern studies as a secular version of the ‘preferential option for the poor’ of liberation theology” (Beverley, Subalternity and Representation 38). Indeed, like liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor, this version of subaltern studies possesses the “structure of the asymptotic curve: we can approximate in our work, personal relations, and political practice closer and closer the world of the subaltern, but we can never actually merge with it” (40). Subalternity can never come fully into view and so cannot be addressed in fullness, an affirmation, if followed to its end, leads to the conclusion that we can never actually eliminate poverty or make the poor and non-poor self same to each other: we can only ever approximate eliminating it. This is because, as Gustavo Gutiérrez puts it,

“poverty is an act of love and liberation. It has redemptive value. If the ultimate cause of human exploitation and alienation is selfishness, the deepest reason for voluntary poverty is love of neighbor. Christian poverty has meaning only as a commitment of solidarity with the poor, with those who suffer misery and injustice. The commitment is to witness to the evil which has resulted from sin and is a breach of communion. It is not a question of idealizing poverty, but rather of taking it on as it is—an evil—to protest against it and to struggle to abolish it . . . . It is poverty lived not for its own sake, but rather an authentic imitation of Christ; it is a poverty which means taking on the sinful human condition to liberate humankind from sin and all its consequences. (Gutiérrez 172, my emphasis)

Voluntary poverty, or “spiritual poverty” (the “poor in spirit”), is “an ability to receive, not a passive acceptance” of “the Lord” (171) and “above all total availability” (171) to that messianic witness.

Confusingly, this model of justice both requires poverty and also requires that no one actually be poor (that is, exploited or dispossessed). Poverty must always appear and be present because it is what produces the justice of the community: “[it is] not a question of erecting poverty as an ideal, but rather of seeing to it that there were no poor” (173). But poverty itself is “an act of love” (172) and indeed is the process by which the community can carry out the eschatological project set out by the Messiah and as a consequence cannot be eliminated. In other words, the poverty that appears in a truly just society—one that has eliminated exploitation—must be voluntary poverty, spiritual poverty: openness and incompleteness. But this category of poverty must necessarily be treated as if it were real, as if it were material poverty: “the meaning of the community of goods is clear: to eliminate poverty because of love of the poor person” (Gutiérrez 173). This is not love of the saint but love of the “marginated.” The poor must appear so that there can be no poor. In this sense, poverty can only ever be eliminated through something paralleling the painterly technique of trompe l’oeil. In this model of justice, the poor must appear as if they were exploited, and the community must believe that their poverty is a sin, but the poor must in actuality be voluntarily poor, be Christian witnesses employing an act of love. They must be an “an authentic imitation of Christ,” a trompe l’oeil representation of poverty: “being rich, [but appearing] poor,” material plenty appearing as lack, fullness and completeness as its opposite. We can only approximate closure so that closure is possible: the asymptotic curve.

This model, however, creates a difficult dilemma. Who, might we say, is choosing poverty of their own free will? How should we distinguish the person who loves their neighbor (voluntary Christian poverty as “an expression of love” (172)) from the one who is exploited by their neighbor (“material poverty” (171) as “a scandalous condition inimical to human dignity” (165))? Who is functioning as the necessary witness to justice and who is the victim of injustice? Who is “[living] . . . as an authentic imitation of Christ” (172) and can redeem the corrupted society and all the consequences of that corruption and who is victim of dispossession? How can we calculate these differences?

These questions, of course, make it perfectly reasonable to ask about what we should do with ruined oligarchs and white collar criminals and the flotsam and jetsam of the upper crust who are forced to work for a living after a crash or a revolution, and Beverley notes as much in the footnote that follows the passage I quote above: “[This] is not to say of course that elements of defeated classes, or of elite classes in decomposition, such as the petty nobility in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, could not migrate in class status terms to form part of the subaltern sectors of a given society” (141 n6). But it also makes Beverley’s demand that we distinguish who is voluntarily poor (the necessary witness) and who is not, who is a “counterrevolutionary émigré” and who is a victim of dispossession a difficult one to mesh with this earlier (and abandoned?) version of subaltern studies, which is why I suspect he makes the claim for a postsubalternist age and maintains little or no mention of Gutiérrez in the more recent book.

This dilemma is also where the infrapolitical intervention, as I modestly understand it, seems to fit, responding to the metaphysical and spiritual dilemma of voluntary poverty with an account of the marrano, with an account of those who do not quite fit into the regulated archives and structures of society, the remainders of projects of modernization: we are all potentially subaltern because the eschatologies of justice that structure society can always be captured. Línea de sombra, like liberation theology, views the possibility of the world in the poor, or, as it has more broadly been pointed out, in “all infrapolitical lives,” the “potentially subaltern,” those lives which cannot be properly political in existing modes of calculation and regulation. Might this share a genealogy with the “poor in spirit” that has “[a] relationship to the use or ownership of economic goods [that] is inescapable but secondary and partial” (Gutiérrez 171)? Perhaps, but unlike liberation theology, infrapolitics rejects communitarian forms of justice, championing unrepeatable forms of singularity, rejecting any mode of capture. The poor are the possibility of the world because they maintain an openness to the (denarrativized) world to come whatever it may be: the messianic structure without messianism.

This is a deeply compelling way to view the world, and it is for this reason that these points of view have been gaining so much attention and are being widely adopted in contemporary literature and culture, despite the vague claims of a field-wide resistance to the infrapolitical that Moreiras asserts in his recent post.[1] What is so attractive about the infrapolitical project is the notion of the “minor adjustment,” the notion that there is a “pequeño ajuste infrapolítico” that is hiding in plain sight and already in all of us, the notion that the liberation of the world and the solution to exploitation and domination will emerge through a minor change, the notion that the world to come is just the same as this world but a little different. This idea, of course, owes one portion of its genealogy to Walter Benjamin, and for this reason the “minor adjustment” has emerged as a popular idea in contemporary culture, present in a wide array of contexts and texts like Ben Lerner’s recent novel 10:04 (2014), which, through its engagement with Agamben’s The Coming Community, cites as its epigraph Benjamin’s famous anecdote discussing the Hassidim’s vision of the Messiah’s world to come, which like the infrapolitical claim, sees that future as just the same but a little different: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”

An example of this dynamic appears about halfway through the novel (but really all throughout), when we meet a character named Noor, an Arab-American co-worker of the narrator-protagonist, to whom it is revealed that Nawaf, the Lebanese man she had been told was her father, and with whom she had always identified racially and ethnically, was, in fact, her adopted father, and that the identity of her biological father, a white man named Stephen, meant, in her view, that she had no claim to the Arabic-speaking world and Arab culture with which she had identified her entire life. This “minor adjustment” to her biography led her to begin “seeing [her] own body differently” (104), an invisible change that denies her “ownership” of a past (her own) that she feels she wrongfully claimed, even though nothing else about her lived experiences nor her beliefs about the Arabic world had changed: her world was the same but a little different. For example, when asked to speak about the Arab Spring at an Occupy protest, she felt she had no right to do so given this (invisible) revelation about her past, and she remained silent as a “new” member of a racially powerful group, as a “new” member of the group of imperialists who appropriate culture for their own ends.[2] And she compares this to a friend who felt wronged by his brother and who, in seeking to confront him, finally managed to tell his brother during a mundane cell phone conversation everything he’d been feeling for so many years. Towards the end of his cathartic airing of grievances, he realized, to his horror, that this deeply emotional experience—“a major event in his life” (107)—actually hadn’t taken place: the cell phone call had dropped before the brother could hear anything: “it happened but it didn’t happen” (107). And the brother, like Noor, must figure out how to live in this transformed world, which is really no different from the world before the transformation, in which major, life changing events happened but did not happen: they remain invisible to all except a singular witness. Their task is to prepare themselves to confront the transformations they recognize in the world. In these silences—Noor’s silent presence at Zucotti Park and the brother’s sudden absence from the cell phone call—we can hear an echo of the world Línea de sombra describes: “la posibilidad mesiánica del fin de la subalternidad en contraimperio es lo que no toma lugar, lo que está sujeto a un retraso infinito” (Moreiras 209). Infrapolitics is a constant preparation for “accounting for what was never on [the world’s] radar in the first place” (Moreiras, “Some comments”).

These infrapolitical intonations, of course, appear outside the literary realm as well, perhaps, I cautiously want to suggest, in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s now-famous book Nudge (2008). Using behavioral science, the book argues that through invisible modifications to the “architecture of choice” in both government and free markets policy makers and companies can significantly reshape the world. As an example of one of these “nudges” in “choice architecture,” Sunstein points to the mundane task of filling out forms for a driver’s license. Here, there is still a box to check relating to organ donation, but it is slightly modified: instead of opting in, one has to opt out. Instead of actively choosing to donate life-giving organs, instead of imagining one’s own heart in the body of another, instead of imagining ourselves become another—instead of thousands of dollars spent on marketing campaigns meant to mobilize this empathic or affective identification that would produce the necessary minor move of the pen or the mouse to choose yes— one has to negate, to actively choose not to donate life, to actively deny ourselves, which, through the transformation of the default option, through a shift in our immanent field of existence, has already been given to another. Here, the world is just the same—a box to check—but a little different: instead of choosing to give ourselves to another, we already have, but the choice remains: to give or not to give, movement and action are still possible. By making paternalism invisible—by modifying the “choice architecture” so that no one needs to decide on things about which they may or may not have beliefs, by making it so that no one need ask themselves if they have any beliefs at all, and by nudging and modifying habits by intervening with a modified default option—the invisible baseline around which society organizes itself transforms, and the “world reorganizes itself around you” as Lerner puts it time and again in his novel.

But as Sunstein points out in his more recent book Simpler: The Future of Government (2014), invisible paternalism—the invisible nudge in the restructuring of choice architecture—simply acknowledges the fact that most choices—indeed a good number of bad choices—are made because the truth of a situation—the clarity of the choices available—is distorted or obscured through existing modes of calculation. There are important aspects of all situations that remain invisible, and good governance must integrate, that is, must make these characteristics visible through the invisibility of the architecture of choice. A key example of this imperative is Sunstein’s description of the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment. Here subjects are asked to count how many times a basketball is passed between a group of players. In the middle of this, a person in a gorilla suit enters the scene and then leaves. Most subjects calculate the right number of passes, but they completely miss the gorilla. (The experiment is here: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html). The gorilla is beyond calculation because it cannot be described in the number of passes: it is simply not on the radar of those participating in the experiment. It is precisely for this reason that the White House—seeing the power of incorporating into choice architecture the gorillas we are likely to miss, the benevolent paternalistic witness who sees the gorillas we cannot—has transformed the nudge into a properly political tool: the possibilities for a progressive politics are always based on what is beyond existing modes of calculation, what is open to infinite modification.[3]

It is clear that the nudge shares something with the infrapolitical “minor difference”: transforming the world not by force but rather through the minor adjustment, they both prepare the ground for the world to come. But their differences are also fairly obvious: while one is a form of messianism (or paternalism), the other maintains a messianic structure without messianism; while one is a mechanism of control, the other is a mode of freedom; while the former is unabashedly managerial, the latter stakes a claim to the pure possibility of politics and a truly just world; while the former emerges from the behavioral and social sciences, the latter emerges from philosophy and literary and cultural studies. But these differences, if I understand Moreiras’ most recent comments correctly, cannot be made to matter, for these are ultimately academic or “straightforwardly political” debates. What can count as evidence, modes of access to truth and the importance of choosing one mode of expression (a novel) over another (a graph, a survey, an algorithm, an experiment) are all part of modes of regulated knowledge production; choosing what information to make visible to consumers or lawmakers (“just the facts” or “an argued position”) are part of political debates. To focus our attention on any of these issues, that is, to focus on what is currently visible would be to miss the “gorillas in our midst,” which is what is truly important.

And it is from here where one of my points of disagreement with Moreiras begins to become clear. Because for Moreiras, these differences only matter artificially, can only appear to matter and in fact are a product of dominating, managerial claims to knowledge. To decide whether something is a novel and therefore engaging particular kinds of constraints and approaching a problem from a particular point of view, or to decide that something, on the other hand, is the product of a series of experiments misses the gorilla for the passes: the truth of the world is “out there” in “the world,” in life itself which cannot be completely known and can never be knowable through the micromanaged institutions of the university and government that seek to calculate how many times the ball was passed, what counts as the humanities and what counts as the social sciences and so on. As Moreiras points out in his reflections on the ACLA seminar:

there is no ivory tower. The university is no more than a symptomal torsion of the wider society.  Which is why infrapolitics must abandon its original roots in university discourse, exit disciplinary configurations, and break away from any attempt to surrender at the capture of thought through increasingly domesticated, indexed, regulated, venued, and analytically-ranked self-insertion. This is one of the reasons why infrapolitics claims a savage terrain of engagement, beyond fields: because it understands that battles internal to university politics are always already rigged, always already lost battles. Hence infrapolitics prefers to hide in the plain sight of the world at large, and reflect away from any regulated archive: the real struggle is out there, particularly if we manage to escape from the boredom that threatens us from the rear, and from the sides. (“Some comments,” my emphasis)

On the one hand, there is no autonomous university discourse: “there is no ivory tower.” The university is the “wider society,” the modes of thinking that populate the university are the modes of thinking that belong to the “world at large.” And so it follows that university politics—the disciplinary border wars, if you will— are politics that have already collapsed into the world at large. But if the university is already heteronomous—if there is no ivory tower—in what sense can we claim, as Moreiras does, that there are still “battles internal to university politics” (“Some comments,” my emphasis). If we take the infrapolitical claim seriously, that the “real struggle is out there,” we also must say that the real struggle is also “in here” given that the university is the world—there is no ivory tower—and the world the university. Indeed, if we are all “potentially subaltern,” if the point of infrapolitics is recognizing the ever-shifting minor difference or nudge that sends us careening one way or another, it would seem that the space of engagement would not really matter at all: all battles are already lost, all modes of thinking already corrupt, everything already managerial, everything already controlled. I suspect that it is for this reason that the infrapolitical seeks to escape the boredom of what Moreiras calls here “regulation,” and the futility of already existing, already managed modes of thought to focus instead on that which escapes (something always does, Jon Beasley-Murray tells us), that which remains invisible, that which is pure potential, that which is free of all constraints. Infrapolitics tells us to search continually for the “invisible gorilla,” an object that may never appear in “gorilla form,” that may only ever emerge as the Augenblick—the blink of an eye—(as Patrick Dove has termed it, following Jacques Derrida) or as the figure that brushes against us and comprises a “secret index” (as Kate Jenckes has termed it, following Walter Benjamin).

But this is to imagine that as long as it remains invisible, undetected and off the radar that it remains free of constraining choices—that it is pure potentiality, that it is unchosen—and we are guaranteed an escape from capture and a path to secure the liberation from eschatology: the Augenblick, the passing touch, all infrapolitical “immaterials” (for lack of a better word) create a usable potentiality. But these usable potentialities, as Ignacio Sánchez-Prado notes in his recent critique of Rancière and infrapolitics, creates what he calls a fetish—“a form of thinking the political that fetishizes the undoing of power as a value in itself” (“Limitations of the Sensible” 375)—and what I argue we can call an icon: “an object that matches (is just like) the sign itself” (Ghosh 66), but a little different.[4] Of course, the infrapolitical icon is not exactly an object—“It names the threshold of the visible—the closing of the eye is also the prelude to its opening—and, thus, cannot itself become a possible object of vision” (Dove, “Aesthetics, Politics, Event”)—but the threshold, a passage that functions in the way that icons do, a product of the desire to escape that motivates the infrapolitical reflection. That which escapes regulation, visibilization through the metaphors chosen to organize the world—the unthought thought, that which “what was never [on the] radar” (“Some comments”), freedoms that remain beyond writing (Williams, The Mexican Exception), the unfinished manuscript (Cometa, “Non-finito”), averroist intellect (Muñoz “Esse extraneum”) and so on—always remains invisible, and as a consequence always emerges as something that looks like the thing it is: real life beyond calculation, beyond visibilization, beyond metaphoric capture. In other words, it is the image, as Dove has called it. This image, of course, is characterized by its invisibility, by its ability to be sensed but not seen, experienced but not known, used but not valued. In other words, infrapolitical “immateriality” becomes iconic in its invisibility, in its immanent potentiality, through the fact that the “infrapolitical minor adjustment” looks something like the Borgesian revelation that doesn’t take place, or like, if I can be a little more concrete, “The Unending Gift” memorialized by Jorge Luis Borges in Elogio de la sombra (1969).

The “gift” that gives the poem its title is a landscape painting that the Argentine painter Jorge Larco promised to Borges before Larco’s death in 1967 and which Larco never completed. What we see in the gift Borges cherishes is not the thing itself—an iconic landscape fully realized in watercolor—but rather the promise of the painting and its escape from full realization: “si [el cuadro] estuviera allí, sería con el tiempo una cosa / más, una cosa, una de las vanidades de la casa; / ahora es ilimitada, incesante, capaz de cualquier forma y / cualquier color y no atada a ninguno” (984, my emphasis). This, of course, sounds quite a bit like a map of the invisible, savage, uncapturable terrain of the infrapolitical, almost literally evoking the Derridean promise, an icon that is usable but not interpretable.

And yet, as Borges points out, despite this escape from habit, despite the landscape’s full invisibilization and despite the guaranteed “imminence of a revelation that [will never] produce itself” given that Larco died before realizing the work and fulfilling his promise, the painting has already been captured by existence. “Existe de algún modo,” Borges tells us, and this “de algún modo,” this mode of existence is what makes possible the transposition of gods and men Borges imagines (parenthetically) in his poem: “Sólo los dioses pueden prometer porque son inmortales . . . También los hombres pueden prometer, porque en la promesa / hay algo inmortal” (984). These temporal landscapes are linked with eternal ones through the linguistic “de algún modo” that imparts its “algo inmortal,” but it is clear that we should not confuse the signified—“the unending gift” of the absent landscape painting, the immortality or eternity of Larco’s infinite promise, the imminence of the revelation that will not produce itself—for any particular signifier, which can arbitrarily be evoked by “cualquier forma y / culaquier color,” and perhaps “cualquier hombre” as repeated singularities in time: a messianic structure without messianism.

But, if I am reading this poem as the infrapolitical approach would ask, what also becomes clear is that all of these singularities do not escape an eschatology: all of them are incorporated into the gift, into the infinite, eternal whole that is the unending landscape painting, Larco’s promise or gesture: the gift that functions as a mode of passage, a metaphor of metaphor itself, or more simply as a gap between what Moreiras calls in “Mules and Snakes” the saying and the said. These unrepeatable singularities or intonations are incorporated into this absent or indeterminate whole but also can never be domesticated into yet one more of the “vanidades de la casa” because there is always a new gap, a new approach to glimpsing what Moreiras calls in his essay “Mules and Snakes” “a non-caputrable exteriority” (“Mules” 203). This gap that Moreiras describes in that 2005 essay, this gift that escapes capture and is “non-capturable” defines what I understand as a version of infrapolitics, a version that he does “not hesitate to call neobaroque” (224).

Following this logic, I want to suggest that an infrapolitical reading of the landscape painting produces an iconicity that parallels Baroque hagiographic imagery. As Lois Parkinson Zamora points out in The Inordinate Eye, Baroque hagiographic images are premised “upon the separation of the image from what [they represent]” and their ability to “point to invisible realities but . . . not to be mistaken for those realities” (Parkinson Zamora 172): they are a mode of passage to the world to come. As Parkinson Zamora demonstrates in her reading of Frida Kahlo’s repeated, visceral self-portraits that parallel the Baroque tradition of serial portraits of suffering martyrs and virgins, the Neobaroque replicates “the process of metonymic displacement typical of the Baroque” in which the “association accumulation, and diffusion” of repetitive but individualized portraits serve to make visible an “indeterminate or absent whole” (186-87) to which new portraits, new fragments and, following Moreiras, new intonations can continually be added. These (Neo)baroque icons always maintain certain characteristics. While in Baroque iconography it is the situation of the death of the saint, in infrapolitical iconography it is what is sensed in the “sacredness of man”: the echo, the glance, the might have been, the intonation, the Augenblick. This creates a dynamic relationship between artwork and beholder that is theatrical in nature, a potentiality that can be created again and again in and on one’s own body as Borges does, metonymically relating the singular to an “indeterminate or absent whole:” “Vivirá y crecerá como una música y estará conmigo hasta el fin.” And here we can hear an echo of the discussion of subalternity above: el fin = el retraso infinito; or the asymptotic curve Beverley evokes from liberation theology. An end that is not an end because it can (and must) always be recreated in the gap between the saying and the said, in the gaps between the interlocking illusions that produce the Neobaroque spaces of our “world theater.”

Seen as a Neobaroque icon of potentiality and passage, the infrapolitical does not avoid the eschatology that Moreiras seeks, because the recognition of immanence always requires a witness, a particular kind of viewer: the marrano, the unbelieving beholder, the remainder of modernity, the witness who refuses to (or cannot) count the passes and sees the “invisible gorilla” and “invisible mules” and “invisible snakes” and other members of the Baroque bestiary who will seminally enter the scene and require infinite minor adjustments that briefly integrates the beholder into and then releases him/her from the absent whole. The Neobaroque icon of potentiality, then,—the echoes, the breaths, the blinks, the invisible remainder or fallen fur or scales of the gorillas or mules or snakes that pass before our very eyes in the gap between the saying and the said—pairs with the trompe l’oeil logic of a secular liberation theology. While infrapolitics opts for the materials over the mediation, negating or denarrativizing the illusion, Beverley opts for the illusion that can escape the frame.[5] But both models remain squarely within Baroque modes of trompe l’oeil thought, requiring either believing or unbelieving beholders. In choosing image over metaphor, in choosing the invisible over the visible, in choosing the icon of potentiality over the icon of actuality, there is little ground from which the infrapolitical minor adjustment might escape the nudge noted above since the kinds of absent wholes into which the infrapolitical minor adjustment and the nudge are integrated cannot be distinguished without some recurrence to categories that pass through disciplinary and political debates, the world of the visible and the world of constraints, the world of calculating what was chosen and valued and what was not. Indeed, it is impossible to follow Borges in his valorization of Larco’s gift without recurrence to these same sorts of categories. In reducing lived experience to the singular category of potentiality and by iconizing what we cannot see, infrapolitics seems to valorize its own form of calculation: the accumulation of the unchosen, the piling up of non-commensurable possibilities. Making us all miners of life’s raw material, infrapolitics seems to value what appears unchosen and so unconstrained. But the moment it passes into active choice, into regulation, into visibility, into the representative, into the metaphor, into the aesthetic, it loses all value, loses potentiality and thus demands a return to a savage terrain. But what do we make of choices we have made, including the choice not to choose one non-commensurable option over another (e.g. choosing to visibilize lived experience through a novel instead of a painting or an experiment or a blog post or a government report or a street performance or a day at the park)? What to make of choosing one set of constraints and not choosing another?

A path out of this dilemma contrasts the infrapolitical of Borges’ account of Larco’s landscape painting with a Friedian one, one that acknowledges that particular kinds of choices have been made and one that seeks to explain the importance of making something other than simply another everyday object. It is notable that Borges highlights the fact that Larco’s painting is not “una cosa / más” [just another thing or object] that is placed in the world for him or by him. The promise is perceived by him but also transcends him (is eternal, has “algo inmortal”). It is possible to read here a radicalized antitheatrical demand paralleling that highlighted by Michael Fried in his reading of Barthes’ punctum and extended by Walter Benn Michaels in his recent book. One question that emerges from thinking through this possible reading, then, which marks the difference between the promise of the landscape painting and the promise of graphically represented statistics on organ donation, or, we might add here, poverty, is the extent to which infrapolitics shares its orientation with Barthes’ punctum as well.

In the beautiful and (for me) moving opening pages of the Exergo in Tercer espacio, Moreiras analyzes a personal photo that serves (as I understand it) as a “foundational allegory,” highlighting certain confluences between “el tercer espacio” and the punctum by way of the “baroque [barroco]” mirror that makes the reflection (in both its literal and critical senses) possible. Indeed, such a claim emerges in Moreiras’s extension of this photographic reading in his account of the photographed images of painted landscapes, or “pinturas campesinas” (Tercer 375), that appear in Cortázar’s “Apocalipsis de Solentiname.” Following Rosalind Krauss, Moreiras calls the “failed fetish” that is the photographic image of these landscape paintings “la opción antióptica” (377) that is an extension of Barthes’ punctum. Is this a demand for something antitheatrical, something that arrests us and holds us in our place because it appears as if it were not there for us, doesn’t quite fit into standardized modes of representation and in a flash or an instant captures us in a demand for contemplation of that which is structured beyond the habitual world created by or for us? And if so, how does that demand map onto the critique of visibilization, metaphorization and narrative fiction we’ve seen above?[6] The landscape paintings were made with a particular form of community and a particular end in mind as were the photographs of them: there is a critical mode of potentiality made available through each particular visualization, whether they be the painting, the photography, the fictional narrative or the essay of literary criticism. As Moreiras himself notes, “[el] efecto literario [de “Apocalipsis de Solentiname”] no puede ser asimilado automáticamente al tipo de eficacia lograble por el texto histórico, periodístico, científico-social o testimonial” (355). How does the “opción antióptica”—efecto literario? translation?—map onto the infrapolitical and dialogue with the antitheatrical account of the punctum? Does the infrapolitical assert a difference between the unassimilable “efecto literario” and the “eficacia científico-social”? How does this connect to the “savage terrain . . . beyond fields” demanded above?

To try to make my ultimate question a little clearer, I’ll end with one last landscape artist admired by Borges: the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg, as Borges notes in his 1978 lecture on Swedenborg, developed an account of the world to come—“el otro mundo” (196)—“un poco a la manera de los cabalistas” (196). Above all, Borges notes, “su visión de la inmortalidad personal . . . está basado en el libre albedrío” (196). Borges continues:

[En Swedenborg] los muertos [no] son condenados por un tribunal [que les dice que] merecen el cielo o el infierno . . . Nos dice [en cambio] que cuando un hombre muere no se da cuenta que ha muerto, ya que todo lo que le rodea es igual. Se encuentra en su casa, lo visitan sus amigos, recorre las calles de su ciudad, no piensa que ha muerto; pero luego empieza a notar algo. Empieza a notar algo que al principio lo alegra y que lo alarma después: todo en el otro mundo, es más vívido que este . . . . Hay más colores, hay más formas. Todo es más concreto, todo es más tangible que en este mundo . . . este mundo, comparado con el mundo que yo he visto en mis innumerables andanzas por los cielos y los infiernos, es como una sombra. Es como si nosotros viviéramos en la sombra (196).

Obviously there is something in this description of a world to come that is just the same but a little different that is shared with the account of the Hassdim’s world to come admired by Benjamin and connected with “pequño ajuste infrapolítico.” But it is also notable that the known world, the visible world is described by Swedenborg in Borges’ reading as “like a shadow,” precisely that which is valued by the infrapolitical approach. What we know and what we see, what we choose and our desired modes of expression, metaphors visibilized and calculated are, without our knowing it, open to change. In this model, there is no messiah that saves or condemns. Rather, it is a messianic structure without messianism: “hay una región intermedia, que es la región de los espíritus. En esa región están los hombres, están las almas de quienes han muerto, y conversan con ángeles y con demonios. Entonces llega ese momento que puede durar una semana, puede durar un mes, puede durar muchos años; no sabemos cuánto tiempo puede durar. En ese momento el hombre resuelve ser un demonio, o llegar a ser un demonio o un ángel” (197). As Borges notes, this would take place through lengthy “theological conversations” between angels and humans in Latin and would lead to decisions for self-condemnation or self-salvation “por la inteligencia, por la ética y por el ejercicio del arte” (199). In Swedenborg, that recognition takes place in Latin, but Moreiras’ recent reflections on Florencia Mallón’s work asks us to think about what those conversations might be like in Guaraní (likely much to the horror of the elder Borges in “El otro” who laments the loss of Latin in favor of Guaraní).

Given the parallels between infrapolitics and Borges’ account of a Swedenborgian world to come and the centrality of Borges to both, my question for the infrapolitical collective, then, is what role art and particularly literature might take in these accounts. Can the difference between the nudge and the “pequeño ajuste” be distinguished, and if so how? Does it dialogue with the reading of Cortázar in Tercer espacio? If so, is there a role for artistic visibilizations in infrapolitical projects? Are the terms “neobaroque” and “infrapolitical” synonyms for each other? Do the punctum and the “opción antóptica” come to bear on the infrapolitical project? Do these concepts dialogue with the concept of the antitheatrical, which shares a common space through the punctum? And finally, can poverty—which can be defined with Amartya Sen as the depravation of freedom to live the kind of life one has reason to value—be brought to an end given its central role in the open-ended eternities imagined by the processes of Neobaroque or infrapolitical iconization?[7]

The questions I have attempted to pose throughout this reflection serve as an effort to take seriously the critiques posed by infrapolitics, that is, the hidden forms of exploitation that emerge in developmentalist logic and that I understand as motivating these critiques. At the same time, I question the iconization of potentiality, possibility and invisibility and wonder if it is possible to move beyond Neobaroque modes of thought to create real possibilities for an end to certain specific modes of existence such as unchosen hunger and other aspects of poverty and to what extent art and particularly literature can (if it can) play a role in that process.

 

 

Notes

[1] If it is true that infrapolitics spans writers from Javier Marías, to Borges, to Lezama Lima to Cormac McCarthy to, as I note below, Ben Lener, and also, plausibly, Sergio Chejfec or Alberto Fuguet, then infrapolitics is the canon, it is the archive itself.

 

[2] Amartya Sen has an account of a transformation very much like this one that takes place in Tagore’s novel Gora. See Identity and Violence 38. For an account of the centrality of beliefs to Latinamericanism see Hatfield’s book.

 

[3] I include links to how these are being incorporated into aspects of governance through reports from White House committees and a short article giving an overview of them: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/15/executive-order-using-behavioral-science-insights-better-serve-american

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/sbst_2015_annual_report_final_9_14_15.pdf

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/10/obamas-effort-to-nudge-america-000276

 

[4] For an account of the icon that links its religious, commercial and fetishistic aspects, see O’Connor and Niebylski’s essay.

 

[5] See DiStefano and Sauri for a discussion of this: http://nonsite.org/article/making-it-visible

 

[6] I try to think through versions of these question in “Towards an Art of Landscapes and Loans”: http://nonsite.org/article/towards-an-art-of-landscapes-and-loans

 

[7] Shortly before citing a version of Moreiras’ demand to critique Latin Americanism, Enrique Dussel cites Axel Honneth’s “struggle for recognition,” which some have claimed has parallels Sen’s capabilities approach to poverty. See p. 343-44

 

Works Cited

Beasley-Murray, Jon. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. U Minnesota P: Minneapolis,

2010.

Beverley, John. Latinamericanism After 9/11. Duke UP: Durham and London, 2011.

—. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Duke UP: Durham and London, 1999.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Unending Gift.” Obras completas II. Emecé: Buenos Aires, 2007.

414.

—. “Emmanuel Swedenborg.” Obras completas IV. Emecé: Buenos Aires, 2005. 194-203.

Buttes, Stephen. “Towards and Art of Landscapes and Loans: Sergio Chejfec and the Politics of

Literary Form.” http://nonsite.org/article/towards-an-art-of-landscapes-and-loans

Cortázar, Julio. “Apocalipsis de Solentiname.” La autopista del sur y otros cuentos.

Penguin: New York, 1996. 283-89.

Cometa, Michelle. “Non-finito: Antonio Gramsci’s Infrapolitical Writing.” Infrapolitics Deconstruction

Collective 6 April 2016.

DiStefano, Eugenio and Emilio Sauri. “Making It Visible.”

Dove, Patrick. “Metaphor and Image in Borges’ ‘El Zahir’.” The Romanic Review 98.2-3 (2007): 169-

87.

—. “Aesthetics, Politics, Event: Borges’s ‘El fin,’ the Argentine Tradition and Death.” CR: The New

Centennial Review 14.1 (2014): 25-46.

Dussel, Enrique. “Philosophy of Liberation, the Postmodern Debate and Latin American Studies.”

Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Ed. Mabel Moraña. Duke UP:

Durham and London, 2008.

Ghosh, Bishnupriya. Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular. Duke UP: Durham and London, 2011.

Jenckes, Kate. Reading Borges After Benjamin. SUNY P: Albany, 2007.

Fried, Michael. “Barthes’ Punctum.” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 539-74.

—. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. Yale UP: New Haven, 2008.

Hatfield, Charles. The Limits of Identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America. U Texas P: Austin 2015.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. Orbis, 1973.

Lerner, Ben. 10:04: A Novel. Faber and Faber: New York, 2014.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy. U Chicago P:

Chicago and London, 2015.

—. “Neoliberal Aesthetics.” nonsite.org 1 (2011). http://nonsite.org/article/neoliberal-aesthetics-

fried-ranciere-and-the-form-of-the-photograph

Moreiras, Alberto. Línea de sombra: el no sujeto de lo político. Palinodia: Santiago, 2006.

—. “Mules and Snakes: On the Neobaroque Principle of De-Localization.” Ideologies of Hispanism. Ed.

Mabel Moraña. Vanderbilt UP: Nashville, 2005. 201-29.

—. “Some comments on the ACLA 2016 discussions.” Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective 22 March

2016.

—. Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en América Latina. LOM: Santiago, 1999.

—. “Infrapolitics: the Project and its Politics. Allegory and Denarrativization.

A Note on Posthegemony.” Transmodernity 5.1 (2015): 9-35.

Muñoz, Gerardo. “Esse extraneum.” Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective 31 March 2016.

O’Connor, Patrick and Dianna C. Niebylski. “Reflections on Iconicity, Celebrity and Cultural

Crossings.” Latin American Icons: Fame Across Borders. Vanderbilt UP: Nashville, 2014. 1-18.

Parkinson Zamora, Lois. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque in Latin American Fiction. U Chicago P:

Chicago and London, 2006.

Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. “Limitations of the Sensible: Reading Rancière in Mexico’s Failed

Transition.” Parallax 20.4 (2015): 372-83.

Sanjinés C., Javier. Embers of the Past: Essays in Times of Decolonization. Duke UP:

Durham and London, 2013.

Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Norton & Co: New York and

London, 2006.

—. Development as Freedom. Knopf: New York, 1999.

Sunstein, Cass. Simpler: The Future of Government. Simon & Schuster: New York, 2014.

Thaler, Richard and Cass Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.

Penguin: New York, 2008.

Williams, Gareth. The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, Democracy. Palgrave: New York, 2011.

 

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/giqbxm6r79k7hqy/cometamicroent_04-08-16.mp4?dl=0