A Note on Gabriela Basterra’s The Subject of Freedom. Kant, Levinas (New York: Fordham UP, 2015). By Alberto Moreiras

This note does not measure up to a review, and it does not intend to. I simply want to point something out, controversial as it may be. The Subject of Freedom takes its initial bearings on an intricate examination of several antinomies of reason as presented by Kant in the first Critique and goes through Kant´s practical philosophy (essentially through the second Critique and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, although there are references to other texts) into some key issues in Levinas’ later thought as represented by Otherwise Than Being. The discussion includes the debunking of some influential positions on Kant´s ethics, such as Dieter Heinrich´s. Basterra is interested in showing how Kant´s critical categories must be subjected to the scrutiny of a post-structuralist understanding of reason as essentially connected to language rather than to the forms of spatio-temporal intuition.

The significance of Basterra’s book is the critical double turn that consists in presenting Emmanuel Levinas’ thought as a philosophy of freedom in the Kantian sense, and, conversely, Kantian thought as a philosophy of auto-heteronomy. The implications of this double move for political thought are significant: essentially, but still rather superficially, The Subject of Freedom gives us a chance to understand the Kantian-Levinasian subject of the political as a non-liberal if still republican subject, and consequently gives us the chance to revise our notions of democratic republicanism through an alternative understanding of ethico-political subjectivity. This is revisionist in terms of the dominant traditions in political philosophy that have linked Kantian republicanism with a mostly liberal, or perhaps liberal by default, conception of both subjectivity and the political.

But there is a more daring task for interpretation. Once through Basterra’s analyses, and thanks to them, it is legitimate to wonder whether Kantianism is as securely established in autonomous subjectivity as it has been presumed. Or whether Kantianism, in its ethico-political articulation, opens necessarily onto a radical critique of subjectivity—this would be a stumble, a scandal in Kant’s path, or in the path of Kantianism, hence of modern philosophy. And, conversely, it also becomes legitimate to wonder whether the path of freedom does not necessarily go through a renunciation of the liberal notion of the subject, which is of course also the modern one. Not that a new image of the subject needs to be formed as a consequence—rather, another game opens up, which goes through the difficult terrain of wondering whether there is, after all, a subject of freedom, as opposed to a freedom beyond the subject.

On Charles Hatfield’s The Limits of Identity. Politics and Poetics in Latin America (Austin: U of Texas P, 2015). By Alberto Moreiras

This is an important book that, in its understated and unassuming rhetoric, actually establishes a generational challenge of fundamental importance to the totality of Latin Americanist discourse in the humanities. Beyond that, it subverts the very basis of Latin American cultural self-understanding since at least José Martí´s “Nuestra América.”

Hatfield organizes his book on the basis of four chapters, with a short Introduction and an equally short Coda, although both of the latter are significant. The chapters cover four master concepts, namely, Culture, Beliefs, Meaning, and Memory. Through them Hatfield offers a relentless critique of the Latin Americanist cultural tradition and its bearing on the present. He also makes a historical argument, hence a genealogical analysis of how the apparent truisms of the present came to be what they are. His theoretical sources are to be found in a soft North American pragmatism, fundamentally indebted to the work of Walter Benn Michaels and Stanley Fish in particular. It is a politically committed book whose urgency derives from the fact that, as the book establishes, contemporary literary-cultural reflection, or at least its mainstream, has lost its bearings and fails to realize that, contrary to its own claims, it will have no impact on “correcting the region´s most grievous injustices.”

The Introduction presents an idea of universalism as neither a belief nor an ideology, but as an irreducible dimension of any truth statement as such. It is because truth claims assert themselves as universally valid that there can (and should) be disagreement. If truth could be taken to be always and in every case particularist, that is, only valid for a given location or site of enunciation, then the very notion of disagreement would become useless and incomprehensible. For instance, the very opposition to racism, sexism, or colonialism that a certain number of Latin Americanist thinkers, if not most, would consider their own privilege or obligation against Eurocentric impositions, Hatfield shows, is already universalist, and it would be considerably weakened if we were to claim that it is only the result of the particularism of their victims. In other words, it is not because of “our” particular identity but because of a belief in the universal wrongness of racism that we can successfully and persuasively oppose racism.

So that universalism already commits us from the moment we have beliefs. Universalism is therefore not a particular form of ideology, much less a Eurocentric one, but rather a constitutive and irreducible dimension of everyday speech that cannot be disavowed without a cost. The cost is the reduction of thinking to an identitarian program–we, in other words, would not endorse a truth because we believe in it, only because it is ours or we have come to be persuaded that it is. The consequence is nefarious: “to invoke identity as the reason for a belief in a disagreement is to actually end the disagreement by refuting the universality that enables it” (“refuting” does not seem the right word here, as there is no refutation at play: “refusing” seems more like it).

It just happens to be the case that Latinamericanism in general has been throughout its history essentially preoccupied with “preserving, no matter in how contradictory or tense a manner, an idea of Latin America as the repository of a cultural difference that would resist assimilation by Eurocentric modernity.” The way this has been done–the rhetoric that sustains the concern for cultural difference–has followed patterns of anti-universalism that could only lead to identitarian dead ends. “Latin Americanism´s crucial work involves converting what is true or false into what is yours and mine.” The net result of this, in practical terms, is not a resounding denunciation of cultural oppression, or even a brave refusal of racism, but rather the trap of proposing a “liberationist” discourse that “implicates itself in many of the same discourses that it sought to repudiate.” When Doctor Francisco Laprida, in Jorge Luis Borges´s “Poema conjetural,” experiences a “secret joy” at the moment of his violent death, the complications of Sarmiento´s inaugural discourse on “civilization versus barbarism” are rendered moot: “liberation” is for Laprida, as for so many Latin Americanists, a mere return to atavistic identification with a tellurian force and a more than dubious authenticity, from which nothing but disaster can ensue.

If “Laprida´s demise at the hands of gauchos is, in a sense, the fulfillment of what Latin Americanist thinking ever since José Martí´s ‘Nuestra América’ has desired,” Chapter 1 offers an analysis of “Nuestra América” whose main thrust is the recognition that Martí´s discourse, “far from offering a post-racial vision,” “reinstates the concept of race that it repudiates” at a cultural not biological level. It also happens to be a reinstatement that has become functional to the neoliberal regime of rule, which thrives on cultural difference as a substitute for economic equality. Given Martí´s status as a cultural hero, this chapter is bound to be controversial if not fiercely polemical, and it is of course part of the merits of this book that Hatfield is courageous enough to risk the cost of debunking civilizational figures.

Chapter 2 deals with yet another cultic intellectual presence over the last century, namely, José Enrique Rodó, whose Ariel has been described as “the most important Latin American essay.” In Ariel Rodó inverts Sarmiento´s dichotomy and claims that Latin America, far from being the site of an impotent failure of civilization, should emerge as the true repository of spirit–the culmination, not the limit place, of Western civilization. But Rodó does this through a reaffirmation of “nuestroamericanismo,” that is, through the repeated assertion, which organizes the core of his essay, that a pursuit of identitarian strategies counts as the highest example of thought, and the only one available to Latin Americans. Hatfield complements his analysis of Rodó with the analysis of a book that would seem to be its direct antagonist, namely, Rodolfo Kusch´s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, to the extent that, if Rodó´s target audience is the Latin American liberal-criollo class, Kusch places his civilizational bet on a recovery of indigenous cosmovisions. But Hatfield persuasively shows that Kusch shares with Rodó “the idea that the only arguments that we can make for or against beliefs are that they are ours–or not.” An understated aspect of this chapter happens to reside in the fact that today the field of Latin American studies could be easily defined as the combat between “arielistas” and “decolonials,” which is still a combat between Rodó and Kusch, were it not for the marginal if persistent existence of a number of dissidents (Hatfield himself, for instance). One of the arguments that Hatfield deploys with devastating effect is that this kind of thought is circular and therefore vicious: “Seminal thinking is the thinking to which Kusch wants to return and simultaneously the theory that makes available that return.” And he shows that the contradictions internal to current-day proposals for a return to indigenous thinking have a terrible price, if it all comes down to “lining up your philosophy with your skin:” “all of this in no way means that it is impossible or intrinsically contradictory to make a case for indigenous thinking, or any mode of thinking. It means only making a choice between the commitment to indigenous thinking on the one hand, and difference on the other.”

Chapter 3 opens up the frame of reference and avoids the concentration of the analysis into one master figure, like Martí or Rodó. In this chapter Hatfield goes through a number of more contemporary critics and writers in order to show the pervasiveness of the nuestroamericanist ideology in the present. He starts with a masterful reading of Borges´ “Pierre Menard: Author of Don Quixote,” examines a number of critical takes on it, seeks to establish its correspondence with pragmatic conclusions, and moves on to deploy those conclusions in the context of the work of people such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Ricardo Kalimán, Octavio Paz, and Doris Sommer. Through all of it Hatfield argues that identitarianism must recognize an impossible resistance in the literary text, which may point us in the direction of a denunciation of literature as insufficient for the political tasks it is expected to perform. But it can equally point in the direction of literature “as a site of disagreement, rather than of difference, and in so doing” show that “literature gives us a model for a better politics.”

Chapter 4, on “Memory,” is one of the most original and brilliant in the book. Taking its departure from the disturbing thought that neoliberalism has already managed to enthrone cultural difference and has hence deprived the contestatory dimension of mainstream Latinamericanism of any conceivable ground, it moves on to an analysis (again, understated and unassuming, but very powerful) of the critical constellation associated with “politics of memory.” In other words, this chapter analyses “the shift away from culture and towards history and memory as the cathected objects for Latin American identitarian thinking.” But history and memory are not the same thing: if history refers to knowledge, memory refers to experience. The thought that we could rehearse the memory of experiences we have not had is at the core of memory thinking over the last two generations of Latin Americanism. And it is a deeply limiting thought, because the project of turning history into memory cannot be distinguished from the project of turning knowledge into identity. Hatfield makes a historical argument that goes back to the 1960´s and the beginnings of testimonial writing in Latin America, through the rise of oral history as epistemic practice in the 1980s, through José Rabasa´s radically nihilistic account of the Acteal massacre in the 1990s (“truth and falsity do not matter for Rabasa, because the idea of truth makes identity irrelevant”), and into the curious conflation of apparently irreconcilable subjectivist thought in contemporary critique (Beatriz Sarlo and John Beverley are the examples in this section). But Eduardo Galeano, Gustavo Verdesio, Diana Taylor, and Raymond L. Williams are also gently brought to task, together with Carmen Boullosa. All of these authors are of course only examples of a widespread metonymy in the field. It is part of the elegance of the book´s rhetoric that the author lets the reader draw her own conclusions as to the general state of the field, including the position taken by some of the more popular or well-known critics that are barely mentioned and not frontally analyzed.

The Coda on New Latin Americanism is essentially an analysis of John Beverley´s recent Latin Americanism After 9-11. Hatfield presents the thought that, on Beverley´s own premises, if the neoliberal market has brought about “a play of differences that is not subject, in principle, to the dialectic of master and slave,” then the current predicament “equals a game-over on two counts for Latin Americanism itself. First, if ideologies of Latin Americanism at heart have always been about cultural dehierarchization, which is just another way of saying identitarian anti-universalism, then the recognition of cultural dehierarchization´s hegemony leaves it without anything to do. Second, the fact that Latin Americanism´s project of cultural dehierarchization was achieved by and in neoliberalism poses the question of whether that project ever–but especially now–counts as a progressive form of political resistance to capitalism.” This is the fundamental impasse today, and of course Hatfield shows that Beverley´s counterproposal does not work: “Beverley´s new Latin Americanism, boiled down, is almost like a definition of the old one,” which is quite unfortunate. There is a lot of genuinely new work to do, and it can change the game, but only if the playing field, Hatfield suggests, is rebuilt from scratch.

On Professional Bliss. By Alberto Moreiras

So many constant misunderstandings eventually come to our ears one no longer knows the battles one wants to fight—surely not the battles we have not sought, whose result is indifferent in the best of cases? Yes, this group (not the blog, but the group the blog is connected to) is composed mainly of people who are not professional philosophers, whatever that means, and mainly of people from the academic disciplines of Hispanic Studies, which is for many a double problem (first, we are said to speak out of line, as whatever we say has “nothing to do with our language and tradition,” whatever that means, which makes us incomprehensible; second, we are said to speak as mere impostors and amateurs, because we have no proper legitimation—say, through the Heidegger-Gesellschaft or the Derridean establishment, one would suppose, or through philosophy departments perhaps?) And yet we are trying to develop a path of thought, which takes many years, particularly against such obstacles, depressing. And that is rarely granted. Much less helped. We do not complain (we like marranismo, and dis-inheritance is part of what we do), but at some point—now, for instance—this must be registered.

Infrapolitics is to be understood, genealogically, as a repetition of the Heideggerian adventure in the destruction of metaphysical thought (which of course Derrida took up and continued). It seems to me we can date the notion of infrapolitical legacy, in the restricted but nevertheless immediate way that concerns Heidegger, to the moment, in the 1920 lecture course on Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, in which he says: “Philosophy has the task of preserving the facticity of life and strengthening the facticity of Dasein.” This is of course the precise moment that Agamben takes up–quoting, through Foucault, some other, later text–at the beginning of Homo Sacer, and that marks the beginning of what he conceives of as his own project in biopolitics. Essentially, if philosophy, or thought, which is in itself a particular way of factical life, must make it its business to understand that which it is a part of, then two main possibilities ensue: one of them has been called biopolitics. But the essential problem with biopolitics is that its horizon is and cannot not be politics. The other one is infrapolitical, which includes politics but is not constrained by politics. I suppose this is difficult to understand, or to accept, for many? But we only claim to want to do what we can.

So yes, there are many of us by now but we are on our own (like in the old joke about Galicians lost in the desert), provided we keep it up (otherwise, not even that). It is hard to know why–surely we have not historically militated in favor of isolation and silence? And yet that is what we usually get, insofar as we speak up. But never mind: the real thing, if it ever was, is no longer in these battles that we cannot win precisely because they are battles we have not sought and do not want to fight. What seems much more sensible is to persist, to persevere, and the writing will have to speak for us by itself eventually and in the future, if that is important.

Postscriptum a Tiempo universitario y deseo. Por Alberto Moreiras

Se me pregunta qué es o cómo se define “lo que no tengas más remedio” que escribir, o enseñar, o servir. Depende de la situación en cada caso. Para un profesor asistente que busca continuidad en su empleo “no tener más remedio” que terminar un libro y empezar la publicación de materiales para un segundo libro es condición de su salud laboral, con la que no vamos a interferir. Lo demás debería en cada caso depender del estómago y de sus señales—no hay que escribir para producir cháchara que no le sirve a nadie para nada, hay que escribir porque pesan las palabras de las que hay que librarse, y sólo por eso. Ahí es cuando el “no tener más remedio” coincide con el deseo. Y los habrá que escriban mucho y los habrá que escriban poco, o quienes no tengan prisa porque la prisa mata, y específicamente mata no ya el pensamiento sino su misma posibilidad. Pero vaya usted a decírselo a su comité de evaluación, a quien en general le importa sólo la publicación cuantitativa, y que estructuralmente no sabe ya qué es la cháchara.

En cuanto a la enseñanza uno enseña sólo lo que sabe y a veces se sabe poco. Pero enseñar—que nunca es otra cosa que dejar aprender–lo que uno sabe, en su pobreza misma, es todo lo que deberíamos hacer para no inundar las cabezas de los estudiantes de tontería. Enseñar lo que no se sabe es malo para todos—para el enseñante y para el enseñado, porque lo que no se sabe no puede dejarse aprender. Claro, a veces dejar aprender lo que se sabe, algo que uno mismo aprendió, puede llevar años. Pero nuestra profesión, en su ritmo cada vez más condicionado a lo que se presume “gustable,” traiciona toda enseñanza en nombre de una pedagogía barata e instrumentalizada por razones hoy ya explícitamente meretricias. Sin vergüenza alguna.

Y en cuanto al “servicio,” ¿a quién servimos? Sí, los comités son necesarios para llevar adelante el departamento. Pero es “servicio,” por ejemplo, y de la peor especie, orientar nuestro tiempo universitario a buscar bequitas (no otra cosa es accesible en humanidades, o muy raramente) y premios, señal de supuesta “excelencia,” queriendo la recompensa de la palmadita en la espalda por habernos esforzado en adaptar nuestro deseo y por lo tanto nuestro ser, y nuestro estar, a las demandas con frecuencia inanes de esos grupos anónimos designados por la administración cuya función es aplicar en cada caso el criterio raso de una “excelencia” que no es más que conformidad a las normas corporativas en la mayoría de los casos. Lo cual no quita para que ningún trabajo no excelente deba hacerse (nada peor que el que busca la “excelencia” convencional y aun encima lo hace mal.) En fin, lo “estrictamente necesario” en el servicio tiene que ver con la lealtad a la idea de la universidad que todos deberíamos entender, y justamente con ninguna otra cosa.

Un viejo profesor mío, Bernard Dauenhauer, decía que hay libros que son meras colecciones de páginas y libros que son otra cosa, en los que hay algún favor o gracia, y que en la universidad norteamericana—supongo que en todas—la noción de libro está falseada desde el principio por la noción de publicación urgente, enemiga de la gracia. Que uno se puede pasar la vida escribiendo sin llegar nunca a un libro, y que así son las cosas, aunque por el camino se publiquen muchos “libros.” Y que por lo tanto hay dos clases de escritores, dos clases de intelectuales: aquellos que entienden que el libro se espera y aquellos que entienden que el libro se produce. “Libro” aquí significa otra cosa que libro como mero producto editorial, por cierto, al menos en la imaginación de mi profesor. Y tiene todavía menos que ver con su “éxito” o “impacto” público. La universidad nunca tuvo ese valor como valor, y deberia volver a olvidarlo.

Roberto Esposito’s L’origine della politica. Hannah Arendt o Simone Weil? (1996). By Alberto Moreiras

(The news that this book will soon be published in an English translation by Gareth Williams and Vincenzo Binetti in Fordham UP prompts me to post this review here. The connections between infrapolitics and Esposito’s “impolitical” are as intricate perhaps as the connections between Arendt and Weil Esposito explores here.)

This 1996 book occupies an important place in the context of Roberto Esposito’s work. It marks the transition from a dominant or primary concern with the deconstruction of the fundamental concepts of political modernity associated with a sustained reflection on the “impolitical” to the emphasis on the understanding of the constellation of concepts around the Latin munus (immunity, community) and its derived biopolitics. And it marks it in rather complex ways.

For instance, there are different ways in which Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil are thinkers of the limits of the political. On their lifelong reflections, however, it is possible to sustain that they are both still thinkers of the limit, and that both were finally unable to renew the ontological horizon of political modernity. If L’origine studies both authors, it is primarily with a view to the dismantling of a tradition in and through the work of two of the authors that, for Esposito personally, nevertheless originate the possibility of a genealogical move towards an ontology of the present. But, if Esposito will later sustain that Arendt’s entire discourse becomes exhausted in its very productivity as a modality of political thought, Weil will retain her force in the post-munus stage of Esposito’s thought, and will be influential in his formulation of a renewed concept of “the impersonal,” which today sustains his project.

The grounds for such moves are explicitly treated in L’origine—a book that opens by announcing that Arendt and Weil each think the shadow within the other’s light, the silence within the other’s voice, the void within the other’s fullness. A thought of “life” is already prefaced here when we understand that political action fulfills for Arendt a function similar to what the notion of labor fulfills for Weil—and how both thinkers, who paradoxically think of what the other negates, do it for the sake of establishing “a rapport with the world” that would not let itself be reduced to the immediate facticity of “bare life.”

In the process, we learn, for instance, that while Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism is based on the positing of its radical opposition to a political life, for Weil 20^th century totalitarianism stems from the same logic as political modernity. It is therefore no longer a matter of rescuing the origins of politics from themselves, and thus rescuing politics and the possibility of a political life, but rather of understanding that there will be no political life that is not at the same time the unworking of politics and its abyssal confrontation with its impolitical underside. In other words, and this is already Esposito’s parti pris, Modernity is not sick because it has betrayed its origins, rather it is sick because it has brought out its antinomical foundations in full force. So—what is there to do?

The succession of chapters studies the relationship between the two major thinkers of the 20^th century on the basis of a thematic constellation—truth, beginnings, war, third spaces, nothingness, force, the common, empire, topology, and love. This is not just any thematic constellation. It means to point out how, in the Western tradition of realist political thought, the conflict between power and interests has always resulted in the suppression, on the side of power, of conflict itself, as major violence and major political violence. If Arendt and Weil are indeed major thinkers, it is because both of them, in different and even complexly different ways that were paradoxically, even chiasmatically, related, were able to replace a thought of conflict at the site of its symbolic mediation or suppression, thus liberating the terrain for a fresh, genealogical look at political ontology.

If politics is after all always already a thought of the real, then the real is what comes through the Auseinandersetzung of the two thinkers. Esposito will say that true passion, through the most extreme effort of thought, always results not only in a passion for the real, but in a loving passion as well: in other words, the passion of thought is only a loving passion of the real, as Alain Badiou will claim himself in quite a different key. But, if so, that means that thought is not and can never be an attempt at the suppression of conflict. Thought does not just fight—it is the fight itself. This is the impolitical reflection of political thought, the radicalization of the realist tradition, and finally the possibility of a new beginning for (im)political thought, away from the aporias of modernity and of its classicist internalizations. That political thought turns impolitical for Esposito is another way of saying that Esposito moves on the basis of a fundamental ontology of war. For him, as for Heraclitus, perhaps Nietzsche, perhaps Heidegger, perhaps Derrida, war marks what a previous tradition would have called “the unity of being,” which has implications.

The development of those implications is of course what Esposito has been trying to accomplish with his work. L’origine della politica constitutes a privileged vantage point into it, not only through its masterful conceptual analysis and through its insights into the two key thinkers it studies and critiques, but also because, as it makes explicit the stakes of the impolitical approach, it also ruins so many of the foundations of modern political thought and prepares the way for its fundamental renewal.

Tiempo universitario y deseo. Por Alberto Moreiras

Supongo que no estamos preparados para reconocer que nuestra situación como profesores universitarios en las humanidades es el resultado de un fracaso íntimo de carácter inmemorial—estaríamos donde estamos porque nunca supimos cómo hacer otra cosa. Supongo, por lo tanto, que todavía alienta en nosotros una noción positiva de la vida intelectual, que en algún momento pudo ser llamada vocación, y que para nosotros nunca estuvo vinculada a la adquisición de saberes técnicos sino a su contrario estricto—a una especulación libre vinculada a las posibilidades de una lengua. Pero ese deseo, que es un deseo de libertad, acaba profesionalizándose, y a partir de ese momento se convierte en un problema: o bien el deseo mantenido contra viento y marea pervive y sobrevive como fuente siempre secreta de alegría, o bien el deseo se desvanece y queda enterrado y olvidado entre las miserias de una vida secuestrada por la mera ocupación sólo aparentemente productiva. Sin duda hay épocas y generaciones en las que la sobrevivencia del deseo se hace más plausible, mientras que hay otras en las que la supuesta presión de profesionalización, según criterios que pertenecen siempre al Gran Otro y que por lo tanto no pueden menos que ser vividos como opresivos, prevalece. Estamos en el medio de una época de la segunda clase.

¡Tantas cosas que hacer! Eso se oye por doquier, y a veces es todo lo que se oye. Uno está muy ocupado en la universidad. Uno está tan ocupado, entre enseñanza (pero ¿qué enseñanza?), papeleos, emails, servicio de resultados siempre dudosos o más que dudosos, estudio y escritura—pero ¿qué escritura?—que justamente no hay tiempo ya para el juego del deseo, que queda diferido sine die—pero un deseo que se abandona es necesariamente un deseo que abandona. El abandono del deseo es vida dañada.

¿No es hora ya de abandonar el abandono del deseo, impuesto por un mandato de profesionalización opresivo? ¿No es esa la primera necesidad de politización real en la universidad para todos nosotros? Hemos permitido que la presión social, hostil en su naturaleza misma, enemiga resentida de toda libertad posible, entre en nuestro cálculo de manera exhaustiva. Hemos internalizado valores que no son los nuestros ni pueden serlo: productividad, fama, apariencia de ocupación infinita, proteísmo ridículo del que se esfuerza sólo para poder llenar líneas de curriculum y casillas de la evaluación anual. No hay ya felicidad posible, ni tampoco satisfacción. Sólo queda el goce oscuro del esclavo universitario, que sueña con no serlo a través de la frenética actividad que lo esclaviza, y en la que ilusamente ha puesto toda su esperanza de placer.

Cada uno sabrá cómo lucha con sus propios demonios. Esta breve reflexión, motivada por cierta desoladora experiencia (del otro) que no puedo hacer pública, sólo quiere preguntarse si es posible imaginar—o si es ya demasiado tarde para imaginar—algo así como unas reglas básicas de conducta profesional que permitan salvaguardar la vocación de deseo, contra su sacrificio. Que permitan, por lo tanto, salvar el tiempo de nuestra vida, y no jugar a su pérdida infinita justamente allí donde creemos que nuestra apuesta dará mejores resultados.

Yo propondría sólo cuatro para empezar:

No escribas más que lo que no tengas más remedio que escribir.
No enseñes más que lo que no tengas más remedio que enseñar.
No sirvas más de lo estrictamente necesario.
Cambia tu vida de forma que tu tiempo coincida con tu deseo, y sostén siempre que esa es tu verdadera misión universitaria y tu única forma de responder al vínculo social en el que se sostiene.

Two Reasons for Marranismo. By Alberto Moreiras

“Is he still not afraid? He has already been hunted down to be put to death for doing this, and he ran away; yet here he is again burying the dead!” (Tobit 7. 3-7)

So what is it? Are we proposing to engage in a revisitation of the experience of converso Jews from the 14^th through the 18^th century or so in Spain and its imperial possessions, and of some of its ramifications? What is the worth of the term today? What can it do?

I am not going to offer a full answer to those questions (I would not be able to do it), only a partial one, in an attempt to clarify, first of all to myself, my own interest. I am interested in marranismo for two main reasons, I suppose: one of them is biographical in an extended sense, the other one is speculative.

As to the biographical in an extended sense, I am referring of course to my situation as an expatriate (Galician) Spaniard. I do not think and have never thought of myself as an “exile” in any dramatic sense, I did not leave Spain for any kind of political reasons or in a forceful manner. I left because that seemed a good idea at the time. That happened in 1981. I have no complaints, but it has become quite obvious to me over the years that, for no doubt structural reasons, my life, such as it is, is to a certain intimate extent characterized by an experience of double exclusion that I assimilate to marrano history in a strong sense. It is therefore only natural, I think, that I would want to thematize the secular marrano experience—that particular kind of historical experience that turned an uncountable number of my compatriots into strangers in their own land or in any other land. So, this is what I would call a concrete universal for me—out of an experience of expatriation and structural double exclusion, which could be universalizable among all of those who share it, I make it concrete by assuming a certain legacy as my own, not in the name of identity, not in the name of community, but in the more (or perhaps less; yes, definitely less) spectral sense of claiming as my own the ghosts of those whose bodies are buried nowhere visible, in no grave of their own.

As to the speculative reason, I would like to think that the marrano register remits to a certain kind of intellectual experience of the world, or, what comes to the same, a certain kind of worldly experience of intellectuality that has more to do with survival (and sur-vival) than it has with being traditional or revolutionary, conservative or progressive, organic or inorganic, specific or general, engaged or uncommitted, and so forth. Take Gramsci’s distinction between traditional (say, priests, university professors) and organic intellectual. Where does a marrano stand without forcing his or her own hand? Marranismo preempts organicity or turns it into betrayal. (And what I recently read in a novel by Héctor Aguilar Camín may be true: all “real” problems end up being problems of loyalty and betrayal.) But marranismo equally preempts any kind of traditionality. It is barred from both. So I want to thematize, in my own life, and in my own work, a marrano existence, I want to reflect on marrano intellectuality, and I want to claim that it is irreducible to any kind of more conventional understanding of intellectuality as it may have been defined in the last couple of centuries. It is of course quite reluctant to think of itself as in any way biopolitical—biopolitics, as the administration of life, whether from above or from below, is the enemy of a marrano experience who only has for itself the possibility—only the possibility—of a non-administrative relationship to death. But it is also reluctant to think of itself as “political:” it has no choice, it is always already a political existence, like all existences are, but its focus is not on politics. It is on what is always already before, and therefore always already after, politics. It claims, therefore, an infrapolitical politization and only that.

The crossing between the biographical and the speculative—a marrano life—seems to me worth exploring, as there would be nothing better to do. For some of us.

Notes on “Différance” and the Ontological Difference. By Alberto Moreiras

Notes on “différance” and the ontological difference.

Following up on some discussions in the last few months I was led to reread “La différance” (Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, 1972, 1-29, but the text was a conference first given and then published in 1968) looking for the nuances and discrepancies, or the nuances in the discrepancies, Derrida establishes between his (non)concept, (non)word, “différance,” and the Heideggerian conceptualization of the ontico-ontological difference between Being and Time (1927) and The Fragment of Anaximander (1946). I will simply jot down a few comments for discussion. (I have to be selective in my quotes and references, otherwise I would risk reproducing within quotation marks the entirety of such a rich and carefully written essay.)

What is the nature of the differend, if there is a differend? Can we say that Derrida rejects the thought of the ontico-ontological difference? Or does he merely continue it, taking it elsewhere? Is there a differend in the sense of polemos, in the sense Derrida himself takes back to Heraclitus’ “diapherein”? Or is it something other than that, itself inscribed in the différance of différance? And what is at stake? (For him or for me? For me, frankly, what is at stake is my interest in basing infrapolitics on some version—but neither the first one nor the last one: rather their progression in the path of thought, not only Heidegger’s, and whatever may come after it—of what was originally named the ontico-ontological difference; secundarily, my interest in supposing, like Derrida himself did, that “différance” unequivocally affirms a plurality of discourses not organized as a kingdom, that is, not organized as hierarchically dependent on the rule of any discursive king; in the third place, my interest in rejecting a certain notion of biopolitics and biopolitical reflection as the only or dominant “philosophy of the future,” in Giorgio Agamben’s phrase.)

In connection with an elucidation of the role of the ontico-ontological difference in Derrida’s 1968 essay, several things ought to be taken into account. The first is the one given in the only footnote to the text, which comes towards its end (27-28), and was obviously added during the preparation for the republication of the essay as the first chapter in Marges de la philosophie. There Derrida presents the essay as an introduction to the totality of the essays in the volume, as its “’élaboration préliminaire,” where what is intended is to deploy the notion of “texte général” not only against its metaphysical sequestering in the different disciplines (Derrida mentions political economy, psychoanalysis, semiolinguistics, rhetoric), but also against its metaphysical sequestering in general or fundamental ontology. The idea is then to undo any claim of a monarchic or sub-monarchic priority for thought, of any kind of a hierarchical regioning of discourses. Given the well-known Heideggerian insistence on the priority of philosophical thought, in his style, to any regional scientific production, the anti- or non-Heideggerian approach in this respect is explicit. (And shared by me: infrapolitical reflection is not merely or even primarily philosophical reflection.)

The second has to do with a certain genealogical determination of thought, hence a provenance of thought against the background of Hegelianism. Derrida establishes a line from Nietzsche and Freud and Levinas to Heidegger, with an important reference to Bataille as well, and with a special mention, but perhaps not in the same line, of Saussure. But the more extensive genealogical analysis is dedicated to Heidegger. Indeed, against the Hegelian background, Heidegger’s thought hangs heavy on Derrida’s vacillations concerning the notion of a philosophical epoch—there seems to be an epoch of thought, which those four or five thinkers punctuate or form (he says at one point that the names are themselves symptoms of a time), but at the same time Derrida will not allow that epoch of thought to be considered part of the Heideggerian history of being—so that the epoch of thought, written as “epoch,” will not be itself a part of the history of being: some other unmentioned horizon might determine it “historically,” but this is left ultimately unclarified in the essay. (The main statement is: “la différance . . . m’a paru stratégiquement le plus propre à penser . . . le plus irréductible de notre ‘epoque’” [7]. And he even says, echoing remarks from the seminar given in 1964 on Heidegger and the question of history and being, that différance constitutes a thematics historically situated to the very extent that it could and should be replaced “un jour,” becoming part of another tropological chain. At first Derrida says he parts, “strategically,” from our time and place, from a certain “’nous,’” although he warns the reader at the same time that it is only “différance” that marks who and where “we” are, therefore the epoch does not enframe différance; it is différance that enframes the epoch and any possibility of epochal time. Later in the essay, already confronting Heidegger explicitly, Derrida remarks that “epoch” always already belongs to the history of being, and is therefore, in its very notion, contaminated or captured by that thought. This is the point where he says that différance is “plus ‘vieille’” than the history of being, claiming a precedence that destroys history and sinks itself into the immemorial. “Epochality,” like history, can be used strategically, then, but always under erasure. I find this unsatisfying—there is no overwhelming reason why “history” must in every case be thought onto-theologically, particularly if “différance” makes a claim to exception for itself.)

And the third one, in my opinion, has to do with the fact that Derrida, while taking explicit exception to Heidegger, to a certain extent and after recognizing Heidegger’s thought as unavoidable, orients his notion of différance on the very path of the ontico-ontological difference, insofar as one can choose to read this particular essay at least as a mere correction to the Heideggerian text. Looking into the correction might then elicit the question, and a possible answer, as to the status of it—does the correction imply a fundamental break away from Heidegger, or is the correction more in the order of a breaching, a Bahnung, a facilitation of the way? I think the latter is the case.

Différance: “On ne peut l’entendre et nous verrons en quoi elle passe aussi l’ordre de l’entendement” (4). This surpassing the understanding probably makes reference to a certain impossibility for the understanding to master the labor of différance. To the extent mastering equals naming—or the naming is always already an (alleged) mastering–this remark is not casual, as it already contains, in cypher, what will ultimately emerge as the main criticism regarding Heidegger. The radical opening of différance to its own unnaming—this is why différance can neither be a concept nor a word—makes it ready to claim an endless and ceaseless surpassing: “La différance est non seulement irréductible à toute réappropriation ontologique ou théologique—onto-théologique—mais, ouvrant mëme l’espace dans lequel l’onto-théologie—la philosophie—produit son systéme et son histoire, elle la comprend, l’inscrit et l’éxcede sans retour” (6).

On Hegel Derrida says: “malgré les rapports d’affinité très profonde que la différance ainse écrite entretient avec le discours hégélien, tel qu’il doit ëtre lu, elle peut en un certain point non pas rompre avec lui, ce qui n’a aucune sorte de sens ni de chance, mais en opérer une sorte de déplacement à la fois infime et radical” (15). Is it the same minimum but radical displacement that would constitute the relationship with Heidegger? Not in my opinion. I think the displacement vis-á-vis Hegel is of a much more extensive kind, to the very same extent that Hegelianism is the epitome of the privileging of presence as self-presence, through the notions of subject and substance, and through the ultimate equivalence between the two. That this is Derrida’s fundamental target is made explicit by the fact that, always according to him, the thinkers that interest him—Nietzsche, Freud, Levinas, up to Heidegger—would have attempted to destroy it as well, and always following a thinking of diapherein against every possibility of consciousness’ “certitude assurée de soi” (18).

In any case, the differences between that particular, “epochal” constellation of thinkers and Hegelianism open up, up and through Derrida’s mention of Bataille. They remain obscure, certainly, but it is through such a darkness that tentative steps are taken in order to initiate a reinscription of the very project of philosophy, “sous l’espèce privilegiée du hégélianisme” (21). It is interesting to quote Derrida on “la plus grande obscurité,” since its designation as such ought to be enough to let us understand that something like the proper “epochal” project of philosophy is presented there. If so, then it is a matter of importance to elucidate the answers given to it by the chain of thinkers Derrida is referencing, up to Heidegger and then Derrida himself. I will limit myself to pointing out in this context that not only are the following sentences as good a description of the task of deconstruction as any other we have, but also, more cryptically perhaps, that they also fit Heidegger’s work like a glove—if perhaps a different glove: “Comment penser á la fois la différance comme détour économique que, dans l’élément du mëme, vise toujours à retrouver le plaisir où la presence différée par calcul (conscient ou inconscient) et d’autre part la différance comme rapport à la presence impossible, comme dépense sans réserve, comme perte irréparable de la présence, usure irréversible de l´énergie, voire comme pulsion de mort et rapport au tout-autre interrompant en apparence toute économie” (20).

There is a redescription of that reinscription, we could say, in more familiar terms. It is simple enough: “delimiting the ontology of presence” (cf. 22). Here is where the confrontation with Heidegger becomes focused. If différance, or deconstruction more generally, interrogates and solicits “the determination of being as presence” (22), Derrida notes that it is not possible to avoid “l’incontournable meditation heideggerienne” on the ontico-ontological difference. Furthermore, that it is not possible to give “a simple response” to the question as to the difference between différance and the Heideggerian prompting.

There would be a necessity to pass through the Heideggerian meditation. If différance could be said to constitute “a more violent” approach than the thought of the ontico-ontological difference, in other words, if there is to be a critical difference between différance and the Heideggerian theme, “ce n’est ni se dispenser du passage par la verité de l’ëtre ni d’aucune façon en ‘critiquer,’ en ‘contester,’ en méconnaïtre l’incessant necessité” (23).

Derrida turns then to Heidegger’s 1946 essay on Anaximander. His leading question is whether it would still be necessary to understand the Heideggerian propositions in that essay, which include the highlighted notions of “early trace” (die frühe Spur) and usage (Brauch), as necessarily oriented towards the Wesen des Seins, or essence of being—that is, whether the Heideggerian vocabulary, engaged with truth, essence, being, and presencing, does not ultimately aim at preserving a certain kingdom (“Non seulement il n’y a pas de royaume de la différance mais celle-ci fomente la subversion de tout royaume” [22]), namely the kingdom of metaphysics. Derrida puts it somewhat awkwardly: “Pour nous, la différance reste un nom métaphysique et tous les noms qu’elle reçoit dans notre langue sont encore, en tant que noms, métaphysiques. En particulier quand ils disent la détermination de la différance en différence de la présence au present (Anwesen/Anwesend), mais surtout, et dejá, de la façon la plus générale, quand ils disent la détermination de la différance en différence de l´ëtre á l’etant” (28).

Différance has no name, Derrida says, but a perpetual dislocation in differing substitutions. There is no name, and the name cannot be retrieved. “Il n´y aura pas de nom unique, füt-il le nom de l’ëtre” (29).

This is the site of the disagreement: according to Derrida, at least in Der Spruch des Anaximander, Heidegger sustains a metaphysical engagement through his attempt to search for “a proper word and a unique name” (29). Différance, however, gives up on the name and lives in dissemination. “Telle est la question: l’alliance de la parole et de l’ëtre dans le mot unique, dans le nom en fin propre” (29). Ultimately, Derrida claims that the difference between the Heideggerian difference and his own différance is a matter of joy against nostalgic hope, in a context in which we should simply affirm hope and reject nostalgia.

It is indeed, or not, an “infime et radical” displacement. For me, a displacement within a continuum that may enrich the epochal thought of the ontological difference by underlining some of its more promising features. But it does not announce a break: only a breach that infrapolitical reflection can use, for instance, by recognizing that the Freudian thought of the death drive is not limited by its always already ontic rank (as Heidegger himself might have argued or did argue) and can thus not enter but rather entirely bypass the ontological kingdom. As itself nothing but the site of a non-administrative relationship with death, infrapolitics unashamedly links Heidegger’s existential analytics with Derrida’s determination of the greatest obscurity as the interruption of every economy.

Maquinación. Ex Universitate. Por Alberto Moreiras.

Maquinación. Ex Universitate. (Position Paper for University of Minnesota Workshop on Socio-Historical Approaches, In Honor of Nick Spadaccini, November 2015.)

Maquinación: Renuncio a explicar el título por falta de tiempo. Pero, para anticipar lo no dicho, en la medida en que hoy ya todo es tendencialmente, con tendencia creciente, maquinación en nuestra realidad profesional, no merece la pena intentar contramaquinación alguna—no hay espacio. Lo único posible es por lo tanto, para no maquinar tontamente, como Wile E. Coyote, hacer éxodo de la maquinación.

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. Me gustaría que lo que sigue se oyera como transcodificable al campo intelectual del hispanismo o latinoamericanismo. 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 . . . ‘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 . . . 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.” “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). La “armonía del conjunto:” antes llamada campo profesional, hispanismo o latinoamericanismo, por ejemplo, o incluso, humanidades.

Leyendo esto hace unos días, y habiendo empezado a pensar qué convendría decir en esta reunión, en mis diez minutos, y habiéndome dado cuenta hace unos meses de todo lo que personalmente he llegado a odiar los testimonios, las confesiones, y los intentos por dar cuenta de la propia vida, se me ocurrió sin embargo que el día 25 de diciembre de 1986 yo estaba a punto de conocer por primera vez a Nick Spadaccini, en la reunión de MLA de Nueva York de ese año. No llegué en aquel momento a tener una oferta de trabajo de Minnesota, creo, o eso fue lo que se me dijo en aquel momento, porque me apresuré demasiado a aceptar una oferta de Wisconsin. Pero caí, por lo tanto, lo suficientemente cerca de Nick y del departamento de español de Minneapolis para tener una relación bastante intensa con ellos en los siguientes cinco años, desde 1987 a 1992, cuando me fui al sur y dejé de asistir a las magníficas reuniones del Midwest Modern Language Association, que fueron para mí no sólo formativas sino también momentos de intenso placer y diversión entre amigos. Nick se acordará de aquello, también Jenaro, también, por supuesto, Teresa. No sé si Nick y Jenaro saben que para entonces ya todo el mundo en MMLA estaba muy impresionado con lo que parecía una cultura institucional, en Minneapolis, mucho más cosmopolita y sofisticada de la que parecía haber en lugares como Madison o Milwaukee, Saint Louis o Iowa City. Nick y Jenaro y sus amigos—Wlad Godzich, por ejemplo, también Tom y Verena Conley—creo que inventaron el término de “turboprof:” viajes continuos, posiciones en varias universidades, y contactos con, digamos, la esfera internacional más alta del trabajo en humanidades en general nos daban a los demás la esperanza de que no teníamos que continuar hundidos en la mediocridad intelectual o la mezquindad política que suele acompañarla, lo que era, como todavía es hoy, más bien dominante en nuestro campo de estudios.

Dominante pero, aprendimos de ellos, no consustancial a él, había otra manera de vivirlo, y parece una tontería, pero creo que la gente de mi generación, los que entonces éramos jóvenes assistant professors o estudiantes, puede testificar, maldita palabra, de lo importante que fue para nosotros simplemente saber que esa posibilidad existía y podía implementarse, si no colectivamente, al menos quizá a nivel personal. Y este fue su ejemplo. Las cosas cambiaron para mí cuando me fui al sur, sin duda para mejor, porque la universidad que me contrató por entonces tenía también ese espíritu que yo conocía de Minneapolis o de la gente de Minneapolis. Madison, en cambio, no lo tenía, y recuerdo una mañana de domingo en febrero, febrero de 1991, cuando Teresa me mandó a paseo con el perro, y me llevé al perro al lago, y había nieve, y hielo, y niebla infinita, y el perro dio un tirón a su cadena y se escapó adentrándose en el lago, persiguiendo alguna liebre o zorro o vaya usted a saber. Fue entonces cuando pensé, y me vino como una epifanía en el Lago Mendota, rodeado por un blancor lechoso y frío, por un universo sin promesa, como un fragmento desnarrativizante o interruptor de la narrativa como los que menciona Benet, una especie de non-plus-ultra del pensamiento, o así vivido, que no merecía la pena vivir la propia vida queriendo otra, y estuve a punto de abandonar la profesión, hablarlo con Teresa, meter a nuestros hijos en un avión o un barco o lo que fuera, y al perro, y volvernos a España a ver qué pasaba.

Pero al poco tiempo apareció la oportunidad de regreso al sur, y supongo que olvidé mi propia intuición más bien fulgurante pero desde luego poderosa. En el sur lo importante—importante porque era o se hizo posible, por razones coyunturales, pero coyunturales quizá en un sentido fuerte, histórico—fue normalizar la capacidad de nuestros estudiantes, y la nuestra misma, para equipararla a la capacidad discursiva de otros estudiantes y colegas en otros ámbitos de las humanidades. Era por supuesto la era de la teoría, del triunfo del postestructuralismo, y la sensación de ghetto profesional en el hispanismo, endémica como todos sabemos, podía intensificarse o disminuirse, y esa alternativa pareció, en aquel momento, depender de nuestro trabajo, de la configuración misma de nuestro trabajo, no hablo de escritura o investigación, sino de nuestro trabajo institucional. ¿Iban los años noventa a ser una época de normalización discursiva para el hispanismo en el contexto interdisciplinario general? ¿O iban a constituir otra década perdida a partir de los mecanismos habituales de inercia departamental y mera atención a la autorreproducción colegiada, tendencias consueditunarias en nuestra lengua, o en el campo profesional relacionado con nuestra lengua? En la institución en la que yo estaba, rica en recursos, generosa con ellos (no es la misma cosa), y lo suficientemente abierta y flexible a nivel de estructuras como para que tanto estudiantes como colegas estuvieran siempre expuestos a la comparación, a la competencia, hacerse cargo del problema, tomar esa responsabilidad, parecía necesario y urgente.

Yo siempre supe que teníamos los días contados. Había que asumir el riesgo de muchos conflictos, departamental y extradepartamentalmente. Había que cambiar la estrategia de reclutamiento y formación de nuestros estudiantes, y eso implicaba cambiar horizontes, cambiar programas, modos de trabajo, en fin, cambios radicales de expectativa, con la consiguiente profunda alteración de lo que podemos llamar la hegemonía departamental, y desde ella la función de estudios hispánicos en la universidad misma. Todo eso, para alguien como yo, todavía un assistant professor por entonces, implicó muchas cosas, y también implicó muchos sacrificios personales, y sobre todo un enorme sacrificio de tiempo. Retrospectivamente, pero quizá siempre lo supimos, se hizo claro que nadie iba a apreciar tal cosa en la institución misma, y que incluso iba a resultar abierta y venenosamente contraproducente. Alguien tiene que ser el último de la fila en la universidad, y cuando el último se mueve de lugar eso expone a otros y los deja con el culito al aire.

(. . .)

Y ahora, y termino, es otra época. La crisis financiera de 2008 determinó un cambio en la universidad de carácter profundo, cuyas consecuencias estamos sólo empezando a notar, pero son posiblemente irreversibles. 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 ya 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, 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. 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 el hispanismo o en el latinoamericanismo, 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 maquinación en ese sentido, porque todo es maquinación. (No hay memoria cuando todo es memoria, no hay olvido cuando todo es olvido.)

En Country Path Conversations Heidegger habla de “la devastación” como, entre otras cosas, el robo de lo innecesario. Refiere a un diálogo chino sobre lo necesario y lo innecesario para la vida. Lo único necesario 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. Veremos si esa tendencia devastadora culmina en total éxito o hay reacción contra ella. En todo caso, conviene pensar desde ahí. Ese es el lugar del pensamiento hoy, incluido el pensamiento “universitario.” No querido, pero obligado.

Y lo que queda 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 administradores, que se lo deben a nuestros políticos. ¿A quién se lo deben ellos? No a la gente.

Comentario a Freedom to Fail, de Peter Trawny. Por Alberto Moreiras.

Este es un libro complicado, cuya complicación no escapa a su autor. Peter Trawny, editor de los Cuadernos negros de Heidegger, trata de explicarse o explicar por qué Heidegger autoriza su publicación póstuma a partir de temas de su pensamiento. Naturalmente se fija en el ensayo de 1930 “Sobre la esencia de la verdad,” en todo caso un ensayo capital para el heideggerianismo, y su noción de errancia. El acercamiento de Trawny es elusivo o alusivo. La errancia, que es constitutiva del acaecer de la verdad, que es por lo tanto no eludible en el claro, marca cualquier posible entendimiento del pensamiento heideggeriano en los años treinta y sucesivos. Así, si no hay verdad sin errancia, si errar, en su doble sentido, es parte de cualquier acaecimiento de verdad, errar estructura el claro, y el claro es el lugar, no de recuperación de ninguna estabilidad revelada o revelación estable, sino el lugar donde la desestabilización misma, así la sombra de cualquier revelación, puede pensarse. Trawny concluye: “los errores de Heidegger, sus aberraciones, son un momento de su filosofía.” Clarifico que lo que sigue busca seguir la estructura del libro de Trawny, pero que también incurre en riesgos interpretativos del libro, a partir de mi propia lectura de Heidegger, quizá injustificables. Debo decir, en cualquier caso, que estas notas no están interesadas en explicar el antisemitismo heideggeriano, con el que Trawny trata de lidiar diciendo que es un error o aberración de un pensamiento en libertad, y que Heidegger precisaba ser antisemita para dejar de serlo, le fue necesario atravesarlo. Yo suspendo mi opinión en esto, no quiero incurrir en exculpaciones o racionalizaciones, pues otros erramos grandemente sin servirle pretextos al genocidio. Está claro que, para Trawny, el antisemitismo es aberrante, y la cuestión es si eso convierte en aberrante todo el pensamiento heideggeriano.

“Pensar es una vida,” dice Trawny, para el pensador la vida está esencialmente explicada en la correspondencia con el sentido del ser, y en todos los trastornos derivables de esa relación. La noción de “grandeza” en el pensamiento captura tanto la posibilidad de una relación “inceptual,” esto es, en el fondo, auténtica, con el ser como, en su esencia distorsionada o in-auténtica, “el endurecimiento más extremo de algo que ya ha corrido su curso” y está por lo tanto agotado. Estos son los dos lados de la grandeza en el pensamiento, entendida por lo tanto como una grandeza que conlleva necesariamente grandes errores, aberraciones, cegueras igual que despertares, Heráclito y Nietzsche, Nietzsche y Heráclito.

Pero ¿qué regula tales posibilidades? Precisamente, no hay regulaciones, no hay regulación en este ámbito. Pensar es sólo pensar en libertad, algo que quizá sólo algún traumatismo explica. (Trawny dice que Heidegger no es un “idealista,” es decir, que para él no basta la voluntad de pensar para pensar, que no todo sale del espíritu.)

Ese pensar en libertad como único nombre posible del pensamiento, ¿qué implica? Trawny propone que, por oposición a la noción kantiana de la acción moral, que implicaría una libertad para . . . , la libertad que opera en Heidegger es una libertad de . . . Y esto puede reformularse: la libertad kantiana es libertad principial, basada en principios; la libertad heideggeriana es libertad an-árquica, libertad de todo principio, esto es, abismo de libertad, apertura a lo abierto mismo, en la que la sola obligación ata a la ausencia misma radical de toda obligación: el Dasein no tiene principios.

Lo abierto an-árquico—no hay ley moral, por lo tanto no hay filosofía ética. Los que la aducen siguen no más que sustitutos técnicos de la libertad, prótesis que favorecen la ausencia adormecedora y así esclavizadora de pensamiento. Por eso poder pensar despiertos (despiertos también para el error, pues el que está despierto está lejos de morar en la verdad) es hoy la única posible experiencia de libertad.

Por eso hay vocaciones, y luego hay vidas. El filósofo abjura de cualquier vocación, porque la libertad las excede todas. Pero esa vida en libertad sin garantías sólo puede ser contada, si de contarla se trata, mediante una narrativización necesariamente trágica. La tragedia es la “ética originaria” o parte de una ética originaria que ya no es la ética principial. Ethos está en Sófocles, no en Aristóteles.

Ejercer la libertad que la vida (filosófica, pero no hay otra vida, lo demás es sólo vocación) requiere es dejar-ser. Acción libre o pensamiento libre es dejarse estar en lo abierto y dejar que lo que es esté en lo abierto. Y en lo abierto hay errancia—lo oculto y lo desoculto, el claro en el que aparecen, nada es inequívoco, en todo hay riesgo. Esa errancia, y ese riesgo, marcan la topografía de una libertad que ahora aparece como la reformulación de la inicial pregunta por el sentido del ser. No hay sentido del ser, sino topografía de la libertad incondicional de una vida.

Pensar en y desde esa libertad significa que pensar no mantiene una relación historiográfica con el archivo. Pensar en y desde esa libertad suscita la pregunta de si la institución, y en primer lugar la institución universitaria, puede acoger pensamiento—ese pensamiento cuya posibilidad misma arroja la institución universitaria a su crisis, y que no es por lo tanto ni síntoma ni derivación de tal crisis.

La institución administra vocaciones y organiza la verdad de los conocimientos, pero la vida excede la institución porque entiende que la verdad ex-pone y no administra. En cuanto ex-posición al acaecer de una verdad contingente, topológica, siempre mezclada de errancia, “se manifiesta como despoderamiento del sujeto.” Es onto-trágica al insistir, y ex-istir, en una libertad an-árquica opuesta a la rutina de la historia, en finitud radical y radicalmente asumida. (Dice Nancy, citado por Trawny, que entender la finitud heideggeriana no como falta es “lo único que importa lograr” en la lectura.)

Pero lo terrible o siniestro en la condición onto-trágica de la libertad de una vida es que no puede ser evaluada. El criterio de evaluación, y así lo que puede distinguir verdad de error o mejor de peor, sólo puede ser desarrollado por el pensar vocacional, el pensar principial, que es siempre ya técnico y prostético, siempre ya compensatorio. La an-arquía no es benévola, y compromete. Y en primer lugar compromete esa misma vida libre, pues el que la vive es “catástrofe,” es decir, sólo el que la vive tiene la capacidad de revertirse lejos de su propio ser, abandonarse. La vida libre es catástrofe, pues la catástrofe es concurrente a la libertad misma. Pero una vida fija en la catástrofe—en el mal, por ejemplo—no es ya una vida libre, sino una vida que ha abandonado su libertad.

¿O podemos perder la catástrofe misma? La vida es hoy, tendencialmente, o desnuda y desechable, o meramente vocacional y técnica. La catástrofe no tendrá ya lugar donde no hay sino catástrofe. El difícil diálogo con Celan—nunca sabremos qué pasó allí—hace alusión a la despoematización del mundo—un mundo sin poema, sin historia, es un mundo sin catástrofe, fijo en la imposibilidad de la catástrofe, que es también, no sólo la generalización de la catástrofe, sino la imposibilidad de la vida libre y de la libertad an-árquica. A ello atiende el pensamiento no vocacional, el pensamiento no universitario.