Sometimes it is possible to grasp absolutely basic intuitions that unleash a way of thinking, a life of thought. I do believe that we only have one idea in us (because when we relate to one thing we relate to all things), and that some of us choose to make it our business to play with it (it is a bitter play, some times) through the end of our life. Except that, for the most part, we don’t know what the idea is, and we die before we find out. That is just the way it is, it may be rather pathetic, but the important thing, after all, is the fierce fight, the seeking. Sometimes, perhaps by chance, or dubious luck, the idea is expressed–recognizing it as such is another matter. I think what follows is Heidegger’s fundamental experience. I wonder whether we, today, can even understand it: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings–and not nothing. . . . The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before [the being of] beings as such” (“What is Metaphysics?,” in Pathmarks, 90.) I think this quote accounts for all of Heidegger’s thought, including all the stupidities in it. My question here is whether a similar experience can account for infrapolitics—whether infrapolitics is also contained in an experience of anxiety, political anxiety in this case, that produces a withdrawal of, and from, politics (the Heideggerian “wholly repelling gesture,” 90), and interrogates its other side, its nihilating side.   And wants to explicitate what it might be.   And dwell on it. Because it must. No other choice.

The final “Note” that is added to the 1967 edition of the essay in Pathmarks (Wegmarken) (Cambridge UP, 1998; translated by John Sallis) says that in the phrase “the truth of essence” (from which the essence of truth would arise), “remaining still within metaphysical presentation, Beying is thought as the difference that holds sway between Being and beings” (153).   But truth, as fundamental trait of Being, is lichtendes Bergen, or a sheltering that clears.   Heidegger then says that this is the first “saying of a turning” (Sage einer Kehre) within the history of Beying. Beying is concealing withdrawal, or aletheia (154).

The claim Heidegger introduces is that the presentation of Beying as withdrawing concealment, which also means, as errancy, “accomplishes a change in the questioning that belongs to the overcoming of metaphysics” (154).   This means that “every kind of anthropology and all subjectivity of the human being as subject” is left behind and that “the truth of Being” is “sought as the ground of a transformed historical position” (154).   It is a large claim. It is also the claim that the ontico-ontological difference, that is, Seyn, must give way to errancy.   And that errancy is already postmetaphysical thought.  No matter what one thinks of the Heideggerian jargon as such, it is perhaps clear that Heidegger assigns a great deal of importance to this particular manifestation of it.   It needs to be thought out.

So this note is an attempt to grasp the notion of errancy in the essay. Preliminary and inexpert, as it were. And for discussion.  I should say that I intend this as a contribution to a dialogue with Arturo Leyte, with whom I started discussing “On the Essence of Truth” ten days ago, in Gondomar. If, as we in this group have discussed in the past, the destruction of Hegelianism is the destruction of any historical myth, and of mythical history, or history as myth, the infrapolitical insistence on un-mythic politics that we call posthegemony appeals to an errant democracy, that is, to a political space liberated from metaphor.   Errancy might just be the early Heideggerian attempt (only three years after Being and Time) to move tenuously away from a politics of Being, from the overwhelming metaphorization of Being as oblivion—all the more remarkable to the extent that, only a few years later, Heidegger would enter quintaessentially mythical antisemitic and Nazi paths.  It is arguable that Heidegger came to think of a truer than true national-socialism as the only legitimate politics of Being commensurate with the sway of technological calculation in modern times.   Such a move would not be authorized, would rather be preempted by the position taken in this 1930 essay.

There is an openness of comportment, a freedom proper to Dasein that first grants the possibility of truth as letting beings be. This happens in an active sense (that is, not as letting be in the sense of leaving alone). Letting beings be means engaging with beings by and in letting them be, in the form of a withdrawing engagement.   Comportment is therefore a relation with the open region where things, beings, may be let be. The ancient name of that open region is, Heidegger says, ta alethea, the unconcealed.

Dasein’s withdrawing engagement is ek-sistent, it exposes.   Once articulated in language, as the explicit question of philosophy, the question about Being as the unconcealment of beings as such as a whole means the birth of Western history, the beginning of historical time. It is not, however, that Dasein possesses freedom, or history; it is rather that freedom, as ek-sistence, possesses the human being, and holds history.   But this also means that historical human beings can choose, “in letting beings be, also not letting beings be” (146). This untruth is no more a property of the human subject than truth is. Untruth also derives from freedom, from unconcealment, that is, from truth as such.   And it is so “because letting-be always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them” (148).   The attunement, the specific mood of every comportment towards beings, “conceals beings as a whole” (148). “Letting-be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing. In the ek-sistent freedom of Da-sein a concealing of beings as a whole comes to pass” (148).

Concealment is untruth. To the extent that every disclosedness happens, it happens from out of concealment. Untruth is “older than letting be itself” (148).   Heidegger calls this “the mystery” (148).   This mystery is the fact that concealment is what is first concealed, hence that truth happens first of all as untruth.   This untruth, as “the originary non-essence of truth,” points to “the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being” (149).

Forgetting sets in, as a factical determination of Dasein.   Through forgetting of the untruth of concealment “the mystery leaves historical human beings in the sphere of what is readily available to them, leaves them to their own resources” (149). “The inordinate forgetfulness of humanity persists in securing itself by means of what is readily available and always accessible. This persistence has its unwitting support in that bearing by which Dasein not only ek-sists, but also in-sists, that is, holds fast to what is offered by beings, as if they were open of and in themselves” (150). “Insistent existence” is the name of a life in which the forgotten essence of truth-untruth holds sway.

Erring is the characterization of the life of insistence existence—the German irren refers of course both to errancy and error.   But it doesn’t just happen, it is not optional or accidental.  It belongs in the “inner constitution of the Da-sein” (150).   “The concealing of concealed beings as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy” (150).

There is only one thing to be done, which is key to any possible political projection, and for me a crucial thought for the very possibility of both infrapolitical reflection and posthegemonic democracy, which means, of democratic invention today: “By leading them astray, errancy dominates human beings through and through. But, as leading astray, errancy at the same time contributes to a possibility that humans are capable of drawing up from their ek-sistence—the possibility that, by experiencing errancy itself and by not mistaking the mystery of Da-sein, they not let themselves be led astray” (151).   “Experiencing errancy itself,” that is, as errancy, against every mythical projection, in the nakedness of traumatic awakening—this is the passage to the act in posthegemonic democracy and infrapolitical awareness: the political act that alone decides on the difference. Heidegger—this Heidegger of the 1930 essay—will call it “freedom” (151).

An experience of errancy is infrapolitical—it happens below the threshold. But, as experience, it is sustained into political life, as withdrawing engagement, as letting beings be.  Awakening from errancy must be sustained, as errancy: as the demotic errancy of the one whose only qualification is to know no one qualifies as a subject of/to truth.

(Notes for lecture at University of Saint Andrews, Scotland, November 6, 2009)

[From Life’s Vertigo:]

1. Against Subjectivation.  The thinker Esposito invokes as the first radical proponent of a philosophy of the impersonal is of course Simone Weil, whose work in the 1930’s already rose against the personalist ideology that many segments of the European liberal (and Catholic) intelligentsia were proposing as an alternative to fascism. For Weil the person depends on the collective and right depends on might. From this perspective, for Weil both the category of the person and the notion of rights are complementary factors in what Esposito calls an “immunitary drift” whose end is the protection of privilege against the excluded. Weil looks at the notion of person from the perspective of what it excludes, even as she also looks at rights from the perspective of what they steal. In other words, right is designed to protect the person against the non-person, which is always the non-person that has been defined as such from the very perspective of the right: this is the immunitarian drift.   There can be no “universal right” of the person, since right is the mark of a communitarian privilege which is always had against the community’s outside. The category of the person is for Weil, accordingly, a category of subordination and separation that must be fought through a radical appeal to the impersonal. “What is sacred, far from being the person, is that which, in a human being, is impersonal. All that is impersonal in the human is sacred, and only that” (Weil quoted by Esposito, Terza 124).

The passage to the impersonal: this is Weil’s political demand. It is a passage beyond the I and the we, and therefore a passage into the third person, into the nameless or anonymous. The radically republican question is indeed of a pronominal nature. Is political justice, and also political freedom, to be accomplished through the constitution of a we, or through the passage to the impersonal they? If my freedom is the freedom of all, is all to be encompassed by a first person plural or by a third person plural? Is political freedom a question of community or is political freedom a question of the multitude?  Or neither?

Right around the time that Weil was dealing with these ideas she spent a few months in civil-war Aragon, close to the front. Had she been able to look beyond the trenches, into the other or anti-Republican side, she might have seen a few women with Y’s patched onto their blue shirts. They would have been members of the Sección femenina, the Spanish Falangist organization for women, created and developed by Pilar Primo de Rivera. In Paul Preston’s words:

The symbol of the Sección Femenina was the letter Y, and its principal decoration was a medal forged in the form of a Y, in gold, silver, or red enamel according to the degree of heroism or sacrifice being rewarded. The Y was the first letter of the name of Isabel of Castille, as written in the fifteenth century, and also the first letter of the word yugo (yoke) which was part of the Falangist emblem of the yoke and arrows. With specific connotations of a glorious imperial past and more generalized ones of servitude, as well as of unity, it was a significant choice of symbol. (Preston 129)

So you are a woman, but have subjectivized yourself as a person in an affirmation of love to the Falange. Your choice for the Falange is your personal freedom, but that freedom is, first of all, imperial freedom, as it commits you to a path of domination of others, the non-Falangists; secondarily, it is also imperial freedom to the extent that you sign up for your own domination, for your own servitude.   You choose a collectivity that will not take its eyes away from you. As a member of the Sección Femenina, it was your duty to serve the man, the men of the Fatherland, those fascists that you loved. Is Pilar Primo de Rivera and, with her, all the colleagues who thought up the Y symbol to sum up the free presence of Spanish women in the National Movement giving us the conditions of possibility of all political subjectivation? How does one become a person, politically speaking?

The community of the we is always the Y on your shoulder. The passage to the impersonal is the refusal of the Y. The uncanny choice for the freedom of all, for the freedom of the third person plural, is a choice to be made outside and even against political subjectivation. It is adrift, as it refuses every orientation beyond itself, beyond its own gesture. It embodies no calculation, no teleology, no program. It is rare—rarer than the emergence of the subject itself, which happens every time there is a free choice for community. It stands outside every moralism (as it never seeks personal advantage). It is time to retun the impersonal to the heart of the political. Everywhere we hear definitions of politics that presuppose political subjectivation as the goal. There is no doubt that political subjectivation is ongoing in every political process. But political subjectivation is in every case a function of the history of domination. The passage to the impersonal is the attempt to produce politics as the countercommunitarian history of the neuter.

——-

[Comment on following quotations from On Human Personality—select.]

So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else. 54

the impersonal and the anonymous 55

Two errors: the idolatry of collectivity, and the deceit of personality. Germany and France. 56

the human being can only escape from the collective by raising himself above the personal and entering into the impersonal. The moment he does this, there is something in him, a small portion of his soul, upon which nothing of the collective can get a hold. 57

Every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is charged with a responsibility towards all human beings; to safeguard, not their persons, but whatever frail potentialities are hidden within them for passing over to the impersonal. 57-58

Forceful critique of rights in 60-61.

Writing in the middle of the Second World War, and writing against Personalism, understood as the most that liberal democracy can provide (against nazism and sovietism, against americanism, etc.)

Against, therefore, the notion of Human Rights, or of the Rights of the Person, staples of liberal democracy.

There is something sacred in every man, but it is not the person. 50

Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, Why am I being hurt?, then there is certainly injustice. 52.

The cry is for the most part silent, inarticulate. Being able to hear it and act on it is the task of democracy. Nothing else. Usually what goes under the task of democracy is directly contrary to it. A politics of privilege, based upon the person, upon the subject, etc.

Affliction is by its nature inarticulate. 65

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. 51

If politics were taken seriously, finding a remedy for this would be one of its more urgent problems. 64

[This is, simply, I think, an absolutely important, novel understanding of the function of democracy, against the liberal paradigm.]

Thought revolts from contemplating affliction. 65

[This is the problem. So a politics to remedy affliction is always already a politics of the impossible. Problem of political theology. Problem of the supernatural.]

There is no fear of its being impossible. 66

In all the crucial problems of human existence the only choice is between supernatural good on the one hand and evil on the other. 66

Subaltern politics. 67

Genius against talent. Two screens: the screen of talent, and the screen of the collective. 68

Neither a personality nor a party is ever responsive either to truth or to affliction. 68

References to Plato’s cave and also to Descartes’s capacity for the infinite, and Levinas. 69.

The only way into truth is through one’s own annhilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation. 70

Only then does one understand affliction. By letting oneself be shattered by it. Affliction as a way to freedom. 70

To be aware of this [the possibility of total loss] in the depth of one’s sould is to experience non-being. It is the state of extreme and total humiliation which is also the condition for passing over into truth. It is a death of the soul. 70-71.

Difficulties of listening to affliction, 71.

Need for grace, 71

Spirit of justice and spirit of truth are one. 72

Connection with beauty 72

Dangerous words, out of a providential arrangement. 76-77

there is no guarantee for democracy, or for the protection of the person against the collectivity, without a disposition of public life relating it to the higher good which is impersonal and unrelated to any political form. 77

Justice, truth and beauty are the image in our world of this impersonal and divine order of the universe. 78

[And then perhaps end with more from “Life’s Vertigo”–select, summarize]

Countercommunity

The significance of Benveniste´s essay on the third person is crucial, to the extent that Benveniste, in Esposito’s interpretation, has given us the grammatical conditions of possibility for the development of a sustained thought of the non-subject as the (logically) only possible thought of alterity: “Notwithstanding all the rhetoric about the other’s excess, in the confrontation between two terms, [alterity] can be conceivable only and always in relationship to the I—its other side and its shadow” (Esposito, Terza 129). If the I, confronting it, depersonalizes the you, it only does so to the extent that it awaits its own depersonalization in the reversal of the positions: the you always responds. The third person breaks away from the relationship between a “subjective person” and a “non-subjective person” by creating the possibility of a non-person: “The ‘third person’ is not a person; it is rather the verbal form that has the function of expressing the non-person” (Benveniste, quoted by Esposito, Terza 131). The third person, beyond the I and the you, always refers to the absence of the subject, even if it can simultaneously refer to potential subjects. It is constitutively impersonal, and it is because of it that it can have a plural: “Only the ‘third person,’ as non-person, admits a true plural” (Benveniste, quoted by Esposito, Terza 132).

It is from this position that a reading of Levinas opens up, not as a thinker of the third person, but rather as the thinker who could not bring himself to the exposition of his own radicality. We are used to thinking of the Levinasian face-to-face as the epitome of Levinas’s philosophical or antiphilosophical position. What Esposito’s reading brings out, accurately, is the fundamental impossibility of the second-person suture in Levinasian thought—something that Levinas himself recognized, of course, and at the same time left undeveloped.   Esposito says that the question of the third person is for Levinas both “the theoretical vortex and the point of internal crisis” of his thought (146).   But, far from neutralizing it into the I-you encounter, Levinas recognizes the very originarity of the face as the trace of a field of signification that breaks every binary relationship: “the beyond from which the face comes is the third person” (Levinas quoted by Esposito, Terza 146). The beyond, which for Levinas means beyond being, also therefore means beyond transcendence, or beside transcendence. But this is the key problem. In the recognition of the third person as the beyond of the face Levinas’s thought opens itself to an unthinkability whose key position at the limit of twentieth-century thought makes it all the more urgent for us.

It is the problem, not of the impersonal, but of the impersonal’s political import: the point or limit at which politics should no longer be thought of as contained in a dialogical structure is also the point at which politics abandons its all-too-human face in favor of a dimension able to affect, beyond and beside the third person and their infinite plurality, what Blanchot came to call the neuter for lack of a better term. Just like language “is spoken where a community between the terms of the relationship is missing” (Levinas quoted by Esposito, Terza 147), a countercommunitarian politics is a politics no longer structured in terms of friendship or enmity, no longer structured in terms of the interhuman relation.   Biopolitics finds its limit in the fallen dialogics of the subject/object relationship: it is the tendential application of technique to life (it is hence a technopolitics, but not the only possible one), for the purposes of an administration of life where life occupies the place of the object.   Biopolitical practice, always modelled on the person’s dispositif, is a practice of the master subject over against an object that constitutes it, and that by constituting it occupies the position of internal interlocutor. If the purpose of biopolitics is to make life, both organic and animal, sing to the tune of the subject, then it should be clear that no positive or affirmative biopolitics—all biopolitics is affirmative, even the Nazi kind: thanatopolitics is never but the dark side of an essential affirmation—will suffice (and this is something that Esposito may not be willing to concede). A radical politics of the third person, hence beyond or beside the person, hence anti-biopolitical, finds its point of departure in Levinas’s problem, his theoretical vortex and his point of crisis, which we can here only gloss following Esposito’s indications. If the other is to command radical priority, there can be no common ground between the I and the you—the face comes up from a region of radical separation, or the you would become just another aspect of the I. The other is not just a fold in a communitarian continuum, but the signal mark of an essential lack of community, and therefore the opening of and to a radical disymmetry. If the subject suffers expropriation in Levinasian thought, it is because the demand of the other presses upon it from a region incommensurate to community.   The experience of the you, when the you is not to be handled according to everyday linguistic convention but comes to us in the form of the face, radically, is then precisely at the same time the experience of that which can never be reduced to a you: an experience of the “third person,” or of what Levinas calls “illeity.”   Sensing the beyond of the face of the other is at the same time encountering the third person. But the third person recedes, and only seems to come in the form of its absence. It marks, in the first Levinas, a negative experience that might be referred to God as the Unreachable. But Levinas will later say: “Proximity is troubled and becomes a problem with the entry of the third” (Levinas quoted by Esposito, Terza 149).   The third is a problem: recession breaks proximity, and proximity can no longer suffice.   What is often ignored by Levinas’s critics is that troubled proximity, and not the ethical relation, is the site of politics, which means that politics is the region that opens up in and through the very impossibility of community, in the rupture of the immediate ethical relation.   It is through the very tension between proximity and its rupture (which is also at the very same time the rapture of proximity), or through the resistance to that tension (as the subject remains hostage to the other), that justice appears as the horizon of the political in the wake of the failure of the ethical relation to constitute itself as closed or unique horizon.   This is what organizes the political as an insurmountable contradiction between the infinite ethical responsibility for the unique other, which introduces a radical limitation in the universality of law, and the equally infinite demand for justice, which is a limitation of ethical responsibility.   Politics is for Levinas, to start with, this unstable field of relation created in virtue of the theoretical vortex that makes justice, as a demand that originates in the troubles of proximity, and ethics, as a demand imposed by the face of the other, equally unconditional. Esposito calls it a conflict between “partiality and equality,” which, he says, reverses “the language of the person . . . into the form of the impersonal” (152). The entry of the impersonal remains a problem because, with it, the subject is liquidated: not even as a hostage can it remain the source of agency. And this is something about which Levinas left but few indications.

Esposito claims that it was Blanchot who made it his business to develop the Levinasian point of crisis into the insight of the neuter, “against the hostility, or at least the incomprehension, of the entire philosophical tradition” (156-57).   Blanchot mentions a “relationship of the third kind” which is precisely the disaster of every dialectics, of every dialogics, as the relationship that interrupts reciprocity and that therefore opens the non-relationship. The neuter is a non-personal alterity for which Blanchot rejects the name of “impersonal” as still insufficient (since “impersonal” is grammatically still dependend on a notion of person). Blanchot is looking for a break of the semantic field that will not allow it to reconfigure itself around the usual categories: being and nothing, presence and absence, internal and external.   The third kind is the kind that enters no kind: and the neuter a word too much, which Esposito will link to the Levinasian notion of the il y a as it was developed in De l’evasion and De l’existence a l’existant. But for Blanchot the neuter is not primarily a site of existential horror; as the inevitable and destined site of existence, it is rather the “extreme possibility” of thought (159). What would be its political manifestation? A politics of the neuter is a politics of the third person in the sense already specified: an impersonal politics of the singular plural, a countercommunitarian politics of the they. Esposito’s contention is that only Foucault and Deleuze were able to advance Blanchot’s project. This is something that Giorgio Agamben has also sustained. As explained above, for Agamben the active category in the program for a philosophy of the future is the category of “life.” Esposito connects the development of the category of life in the later thought of Foucault and Deleuze to a basic Nietzscheanism in both thinkers—to their emphasis on the notion of “force,” which will be linked to an irreducible and untamable outside that is, however, and in virtue of its radical univocity, also our most intimate inside. “What is it that we are—beyond or before our persons—without ever taking possession of? What crosses and works us to the point of turning itself inside out if not life itself?” (168). Power, also constituted by life, and to the extent that it turns itself against the human, never has enough with the person as subject of rights, but must go beyond the person and its end, beyond death therefore, towards the capture of life itself. Life captures itself as power, but at the same time life exceeds itself as force beyond power. This is for Esposito the very possibility of an “affirmative biopolitics” (170) that he identifies with a new possibility of community, beyond the person, “singular and impersonal” (171).   “Life itself . . . constitutes the term on which the totality of the theory of the impersonal seems to be summed up and projected towards a still undetermined configuration, but because of that loaded with unexpressed potentiality” (179). A politics of the neuter is expressed in Esposito through his notion of a politics of impersonal life, even a biopolitics of impersonal life, that must lead, through the tapping of its unexpressed potentiality, not just beyond “the entire conceptual apparatus of modern political philosophy” (179), but towards a new community, impersonal and singular: a community of beatitude which is, finally, the beatitude of the animal, the goal of the Deleuzian “animal belonging” that receives full recognition in the last pages of Esposito’s book.   While fully endorsing Esposito’s deconstructive analysis of the person’s dispositif, I have already expressed my objection in the form of a reserve regarding the possibility of an “affirmative” biopolitics that would finally render the metaphysical separation between homo and persona, which also means, between person and animal, null.   Agamben’s The Open unquestioningly shares many of Esposito’s insights and advances the argument towards a more nuanced understanding of the political task at least at the theoretical level.

[Conclude]

En el artículo sobre Posthegemonía, o más allá del principio del placer se revisa el proceso de constitución política desde el proceso de identificación con el yo ideal propuesto por Freud cuando analiza la psicología de grupos. Con esto se refiere a que en el proceso de constitución política intervienen, desde su comienzo, catexis libidinales. Estas catexis permiten la formación del grupo y la posibilidad de seguir a un líder. La posthegemonía, por su parte, consiste en la interrupción de las catexis libidinales y la ruptura con la articulación hegemónica (que en los ejemplos de Don Quijote y Hamlet aparece como tragedia). Esta interrupción en el proceso de ligazón libidinal permite vislumbrar cierto límite entre política y teoría de la hegemonía. “El proyecto posthegemónico se sitúa en el límite de la invención de lo político, y busca lo político no como continuación o intensificación de la demanda hegemónica, sino como una práctica alternativa de imaginación posible.” (12-13) Desde esta perspectiva, la posthegemonía sirve para teorizar la idea de que, aunque en la constitución política intervienen procesos libidinales, la política va más allá de estos procesos. La propuesta de la posthegemonía permite analizar la política más allá del sujeto político. La práctica posthegemónica se constituye entonces como “un proceso sin sujeto ni fin” (14)

Ahora bien, en la constitución de la política existe la compulsión a la repetición de la que hablaba Freud. Esta compulsión consiste en tener la posibilidad de resarcir la situación vivida durante el trauma original, lo cual implica una pulsión de muerte. Esta compulsión es nombrada como compulsión al destino cuando es acuñada en términos sociales.

Así mismo, la compulsión a la repetición está ligada a la pulsión de muerte. En el caso de la posthegemonía “hay una compulsión demónica […] que condena al agente a buscar siempre su propia derrota en confrontación inerte con el destino […] la pulsión posthegemónica lucha contra toda muerte impuesta, es decir, contra la invención libidinal del otro, sujeto.” (18-19)

La compulsión a la repetición en la práctica clínica, permite al analista darse cuenta de que eso que se repite es el síntoma. Y el síntoma es la señal de que existe un problema y por eso la repetición. El síntoma, a su vez, funciona como una metáfora y por lo tanto puede ser leído.

A partir de estos términos, me parece interesante vincular la situación de México en cuanto al retorno del PRI y los eventos que se han presentado a partir de este regreso. Si el retorno al PRI funciona como la compulsión a la repetición, es decir, que hay una vuelta al evento traumático, es decir, al PRI de antes del año 2000 entonces, este es un síntoma de que el país no ha elaborado la situación traumática, que en este caso fue haber estado gobernado por este partido por alrededor de 70 años. Ahora bien, en el retorno quizás el pueblo mexicano buscaba resarcir lo que en otro tiempo no funcionaba y pensaba que dándole una segunda oportunidad al partido ya no haría lo mismo o que el pueblo estaba en otro momento y que no se lo permitiría. La situación actual no es la misma que hace cerca de 15 años, ni la gente es igual, sin embargo parece que México está dando un grito desesperado, lo cual funciona como síntoma. Pero ¿qué representa este síntoma? Quien lo sepa podría ofrecer un diagnóstico y posibles soluciones. Sin embargo, un síntoma social tiene otras implicaciones si se compara con un síntoma personal. En el caso de un paciente, éste puede decidir hacerse un análisis por su propia voluntad y, a pesar de las posibles resistencias, es posible ayudarle. En el caso de este problema social, las condiciones y sobre todo las ganancias secundarias, tanto del gobierno como del pueblo, hacen más complejo el problema y por supuesto, encontrarle una solución.

Preguntas de Alan Pauls para Alberto Moreiras sobre Raúl Ruiz, diciembre 2014.

[Mis disculpas, pero Alan me ha pedido que quite estas páginas del blog hasta que él haya publicado su libro, para el que me pidió la información que contienen.]

La novela nueva de Marías mantiene el culto: siempre hay en ellas, subterráneamente, con la excepción de las dos primeras quizá, la llamada o el cultivo de una cierta adicción mimética que tiene que ver con la presencia de estilo. Las novelas de Marías construyen y alargan estilo como forma a la vez de interrogar el mundo y de estar en el mundo, guste o no.   Es decir, no sólo muestran sino que convocan a una forma de habitamiento desde lo que yo no dudaría en llamar moralismo salvaje.   O más bien, desde una forma de moralismo salvaje, un moralismo salvaje ya convertido en estilo y que va dejando traza. Esa es la traza que cautiva o indispone al lector.

El agente de estilo es en este caso un jovencito filólogo, o más bien licenciado en filología, que piensa desde el presente en acontecimientos ocurridos alrededor de 1980, en plena transición posfranquista.   En aquel año Juan de Vere (cuyo apellido no lo revela como descendiente del conde de Oxford que algunos pensaron pudo haber sido Shakespeare, sino que es sólo traza de algún abuelo con pretensiones que cambió el original Vera a De Vere, por capricho) actúa como secretario o ayudante de Eduardo Muriel, un director de cine capaz e inteligente y culto pero atrapado en las estructuras precarias de la industria cinematográfica del momento y así constantemente frustrado en sus intentos de gloria.   Al pasar mucho tiempo en casa de Muriel, Juan no puede evitar mezclarse con la historia de la familia y familiarizarse con los amigos de esta. Así, por un lado, recibe de Muriel un extraño y comprometedor encargo, que es que haga una investigación discreta sobre algo que, de confirmarse, sería gravemente perturbador de la amistad entre Muriel y el Doctor Van Vechten—este último un médico de cierta edad y reconocido prestigio en el Madrid de los largos años de Franco.   Por otro, no puede dejar de notar el maltrato que Muriel le da a su mujer, Beatriz Noguera, a la que parece querer, pero a la que insulta y menoscaba y ningunea de forma regular y constante.   La aparente contradicción entre la preocupación de Muriel sobre un presunto asunto de abuso de mujeres en el oscuro pasado del Doctor Van Vechten y su conducta cotidiana—es él el que, para cualquier observador, comete abuso cotidianamente con su mujer—dispara el conflicto central de la narración.

Sin revelar asuntos de la trama que puedan estropear por adelantado la experiencia de lectura de la novela puedo quizá decir que ese conflicto central se plantea como un conflicto entre lo público y lo privado, o más bien entre lo político y lo íntimo.   Haya hecho el doctor lo que haya hecho, pertenece al ámbito de su vida como médico de éxito en la posguerra, a su actividad médica y política en la medida en que el doctor se ocupaba de atender a hijos de los represaliados por el franquismo (el doctor es pediatra) fuera de los cauces institucionales.   Mientras que Muriel, que es descrito varias veces como un hombre recto y justo, parece escenificar en su relación con su mujer un sordo resentimiento castigador cuyo origen es secreto y estrictamente privado, que parece referirse al orden de lo imperdonable, pero que por otra parte desgarra y destruye a Beatriz, cuya relación con Muriel es de fidelidad absoluta y también de absoluta abyección.

El tema que unifica ambas historias es el de la lealtad y la traición.   ¿Es la traición lo imperdonable?   Si ser un hombre recto y justo significa no traicionar nunca, ¿qué hemos de concluir de un hombre recto y justo que, al sentirse traicionado, no perdona ya, y en su voluntad de venganza recurre a una traición perpetua, sorda y cotidiana?   Si ser leal se hace por amor, ¿qué ocurre cuando es el amor mismo el que recurre a la traición para poder consolidarse, para poder garantizar lealtad perpetua, para establecer condiciones duraderas de fidelidad real y no fantasmática?   ¿Es la lealtad lo imperdonable? O quizás no haya nunca ni lealtad ni traición, sino una indiferenciación radical entre ambas que no por ello absuelve de nada.

Son preguntas que quizá la filosofía pueda resolver cortando por lo sano, estableciendo éticas normativas con respecto de las cuales puedan establecerse condiciones de consistencia o inconsistencia en el comportamiento, y así capacidad de juicio, de aprecio o condena con respecto de cualquier actitud personal o incluso colectiva.   Si la actitud enjuiciable es colectiva, entonces la filosofía entra en su dimensión política—y la novela de Marías se hace cargo de la problemática en el contexto de la transición posfranquista en sus reflexiones sobre memoria y olvido, sobre verdad y mentira.

Pero a Marías—este es su estilo—no le interesa hacerse cargo resolutorio de esos problemas, que quedan siempre infinitamente complicados, especulados siempre en resoluciones contrarias, deconstruidos, disueltos en tensión dramática y abandonados al azar de su temporalidad en cada caso.   Quizás sea esta la función literaria, pero se trata en todo caso de una función literaria ejercitada desde un moralismo salvaje o ethos infrapolítico.   Las novelas de Marías raramente podrían considerarse novelas políticas, pero son siempre novelas morales, excepto que su desquiciamiento de cualquier receta de conducta posible no permite ser entendido como una renuncia a la moral, sino como intensificación moralista extrema (y así antifilosófica). Esta última acaba siendo la resolución en cada caso infrapolítica de todas las novelas de Marías, remitidas a una narración desnarrativizada a favor de la temporalidad individual, de la vida personal, que puede ser más o menos trágica, más o menos catastrófica, más o menos interesante, más o menos desgarrada, más o menos entregada al goce (sin que el goce admita definiciones pedestres en este caso), pero que se sitúa, también en cada caso, fuera de la enjuiciabilidad, más allá del control ético desde posiciones filosófico-politicas estables. Allá cada quien, en un contexto en el que ese “allá” no queda ninguneado ni relativizado ni borrado en su indiferenciación, sino que se convierte en todo lo importante, en lo decisivo, en la marca de una vida, y así en lo sagrado de cada una de ellas.   Y también de los que mueren.

No hay justicia “desinteresada y personal,” y así no hay justicia. Sólo hay prácticas de resentimiento o perdón, en sí infinitamente complejas, cada una de ellas con graves implicaciones, y con respecto de las cuales sólo cabe decir, con el título de la novela que es también su leitmotif shakespeariano, “así empieza lo malo y lo peor queda atrás.”   El moralismo extremo de Marías se concreta en un imperativo categórico de características estrictamente salvajes: “Haz lo que te vaya a causar menos tormento, aquello con lo que más puedas vivir.”   El precio de obrar así pertenece a lo trágico, al residuo de lo trágico en cada una de nuestras vidas.

Ayer, en el seminario, cuando Thomas preguntó si era posible practicar pena de muerte sin ejecutarla, y si esa práctica habría de quedar sometida al mismo intento de deconstrucción que vemos en el seminario de Derrida, que empieza refiriéndose a la deconstrucción de la pena de muerte como decisión fundamental que apuntala todo el sistema jurídico en situación teológico-política y termina hablando de la remota posibilidad de una deconstrucción de la muerte misma, se nos quedó en el tintero o en el gaznate la referencia a lo que es más común, aunque nunca sea trivial, por ende a lo que constituye la normalidad infrapolítica más extendida en nuestras vidas y en las vidas de todos, que son las prácticas de mortificación o consignación a la muerte que se producen cuando una persona más o menos poderosa, quizá sólo por su influencia directa en un grupo, o un grupo de personas, deciden librarse de alguien–socialmente, lo cual es lo suficientemente literal sin llegar al borramiento explícito del cuerpo del otro.   No hay jurisprudencia al respecto, o apenas la hay, ciertamente no en Estados Unidos, aunque en Europa me dicen que empieza a haberla—se trata del viejo fenómeno del bullying o mobbing.   Todo mobbing (el bullying es tremendo, y puede ser muy destructivo, pero, al limitarse parcialmente a una persona y no contaminar la totalidad del espacio social de alguien, no necesariamente acarrea la destrucción psíquica profunda que causa el mobbing) es consignación a la muerte, y los que se complacen en ello son asesinos simbólicos, y los que no lo impiden ni se oponen, sabiendo que está en marcha, son cómplices materiales de un crimen que, sin embargo, sólo puede reconocerse como tal infrapolíticamente, porque en nuestro mundo está todavía por debajo del umbral de visibilidad, y no se reconoce como tal en esas cortes o tribunales o instancias cuya función, sabemos, no es la de hacer justicia sino meramente la de aplicar la ley o la regulación.

El seminario derrideano, La pena de muerte, no entra en esas consideraciones, pero yo diría que, apurando el argumento, también la consignación a la muerte simbólica, la mortificación social, constituye un “ejemplo perfecto” para el ius talionis reinterpretado por Kant o Hegel, si hubiera ius, cuando no lo hay. Pero algo me dice que, en su radicalidad salvaje, el ius talionis no siempre fue ius, y fue precedido durante siglos o milenios por prácticas sin jurisprudencia estable.   Se trata entonces de saber cómo portarse con respecto de prácticas infrapolíticas, es decir, que toman lugar por debajo del umbral de visibilidad que hemos definido, quizá con cierto apresuramiento, como siempre en cada caso umbral onto-teológico, con características asesinas o potencialmente asesinas o secretamente asesinas. Es desde el umbral onto-teológico, es decir, desde una cómoda instalación en él, que cualquiera se permite proceder a la destrucción social del otro, por tanto, del uno.

Y aquí hay que invocar una vez más el curioso quiasmo que descubríamos ayer, según el cual el estilo infrapolítico se ejerce siempre en cada caso desde un moralismo salvaje, sin fundamentación otra que la del cuidado de sí, pero está en posición de buscar imponerle condiciones estrictas a la política en cuanto tal, y así al derecho: desde la desfundamentación radical busca fundamentar, desde el desprincipio busca sostener principios.   Y es claro que no hay otro principio democrático, o principio demótico, que el que impone en cada caso prevenir la mortificación del otro, que es el uno.   Pero el estilo infrapolítico, precisamente al ser infrapolítico, vive en la impotencia.   No puede contemplar más que la impunidad atroz del que está del otro lado del umbral.   No puede intervenirla, excepto en muy raros casos, y siempre cuidando de no ser descubierto, de no ser atrapado por los vigías de la luz blanca de la heliopolítica.   Quizás esta sea la temática de Tu rostro mañana, de Javier Marías.   Pensar la impotencia infrapolítica es la motivación al sentido político.   Quizá no haya otra verdadera—en cuanto motivación de la política, en cuanto razón para dar el paso hacia la política, es ciertamente la más noble, la menos mercenaria o la menos falsa.

Entering into the last weeks of the seminar I feel it is time to move towards some careful determinations that will, on the other hand, never have been careful enough.   The last three works we will read are Nahum Chandler’s X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought, Javier Marías’ Los enamoramientos, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.   Those works were first thought of not just as examples, even exemplary examples, of infrapolitical deconstruction in place. They were also thought of as works that would help push the theoretical line, that is, that would advance it.   Take Chandler’s first chapter, on the notion of “exorbitance.”   I think we would be perfectly justified in claiming that exorbitance is an infrapolitical notion, to the very same extent that it posits the existence of fundamental problems that are and remain below a certain threshold of visibility in terms of the ethicopolitical relation; that, in fact, remain, as problems, below the threshold, and can only be brought partially, through writing, or naming, into the threshold—and this is what makes them problems.   The naming process solicits and destabilizes—in virtue of the postulation of exorbitance, once named, nothing in the ideological ethicopolitical relation, that is, within the assumed orbit, remains the same.

Perhaps infrapolitics simply names what remains or has remained below the threshold.   We could say that visibility should be taken in a large sense, and that it incorporates audibility—whatever is audible is also necessarily visible, and viceversa.   For Hegel sight and hearing were the two “theoretical senses.”   Touch, smell, whatever belongs in the haptic is infrapolitical (and smell is a haptic sense, because we only smell what we touch).   At some point Chandler talks about “the African-American inhabitation of what is usually called music” and says that we must “simultaneously appropriate and disabuse the heading of composer by refusing the supposed finality of its assumed contemporary distinction from performer” (56).   This leads him into posing, vis-à-vis what he names “the problem of the Negro,” the possibility of “another kind of inhabitation of the problem of thought as such in our time” (56).   It is clear that he is talking about a haptic inhabitation of thought that we may call infrapolitical.

Which brings up a problem that has been plaguing us over the last several weeks: what is, then, and finally, the political sense of infrapolitics?   Does it have one? I would prefer to think of it by reversing the question, and rather asking about the infrapolitical sense of politics.   One can imagine an otherwise perfectly reasonable, or relatively reasonable, political position that is however premised on stinking infrapolitics. In fact, they are everywhere, and they are even the norm in our societies—particularly as, more and more, they move into a state of affairs where politics is nothing but a superstructural component of what we saw, a few days ago, Esposito calling an economic theology that runs our lives.   So the political sense of infrapolitics is to create the conditions for the political demand regarding appropriate, that is, democratic infrapolitics—posthegemony is that attempt at incorporating infrapolitical demands as a condition of every acceptable politics.   It imposes conditions of possibility on democratic politics.   It is the thematization of conditions of possibility for democratic politics. It is much more than that, but it is that also.   And it is more than that because infrapolitics does not exhaust itself in its political demand—it is first of all the dream of “another kind of inhabitation of the problem of thought in our time.”

Another kind?   From what? The preliminary response to the what concerns the threshold of visibility that we have been calling onto-theology, and its different avatars and moments in the history of being.   Which is far from having stopped after Heidegger named it.

Is literature, or a certain kind of literary writing, predominantly haptic?   Literature is not the space of infrapolitics, but it is a space where infrapolitics can be thematized.   The hypothesis is of course that such is the case for certain segments of world literature—from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to Baroque moralists to Paul Celan to Marías and Bolaño.

In fact, could we not say that, as haptic, as a resolute installation below the (onto-theological) threshold of visibility, whatever is infrapolitical reflection engages always and in every case with a form of savage moralism that cannot be contained by any ethics, because it represents the haptic underside of any ethics?

In any case, I think Chandler, Marías, Bolaño certainly move in that direction.

In “Ex Lex” (Oxford Literary Review 35.2 [2013]: 143-63), Geoffrey Bennington mentions the transcendental status of the death penalty—the death penalty, for Jacques Derrida, would have become for some the transcendental condition of all law, which means that the abolition of the death penalty, as Donoso Cortés and Kant thought, is “the very elimination of all criminal law” (144).   This is what Bennington says Derrida thinks is “the real site of the philosophical discussion” (144). By referring to the “transcendental” status of the death penalty, Bennington, glossing Derrida, means that the death penalty is at the same time internal to the system of law, that is, that it is one punishment among others for those who break the law, and also external, that is, that it functions as “a foundation, a condition of possibility, an origin, an example outside the series, hyperbolic, something more and other than a penalty” (Derrida quoted by Bennington, 145).

If so, then it means that the death penalty “tends to depart from the sphere of the law, to become separate from it, to become something outside the law, a law outside the law, an outlaw law, a lex that is ex lex” (145).   Of course Derrida is of two minds about these transcendental objects. He often talks about “transcendental contraband,” an operation that consists in smuggling a transcendental term into an otherwise positive series of conditions (as it might happen with historicisms in general, where the notion of history itself acts as transcendental contraband).   But Derrida also uses the term in a sense sometimes redefined as “the quasitranscendental,” in order to complicate ambiguities in the philosophical realm and to launch deconstructive procedures.   It is in this second sense that Derrida considers that the death penalty is a quasitranscendental (whose difference from transcendental contraband is not a difference of opposition, rather a differance), and that enables him to initiate a “deconstruction of the conceptual scaffolding of criminal law in general” (146).

It remains to be seen what else will be deconstructed through a deconstruction of the death penalty, but I could advance the thought that the metonymic association of the death penalty with sovereignty opens the possibility that we could think of the place of the sovereign as itself quasitranscendental. Is this not the way in which hegemony theory conceives of it?   For hegemony theory an element of the series occupies the position of empty signifier, which means it becomes a quasitranscendental, within the series and not of it, ex series.   The hegemonic quasitranscendental organizes the hegemonic chain of equivalences by positing itself as part of it and at the same time not a part of it.   If the death penalty hegemonizes the apparatus of criminal law, could we not say that, through a deconstruction of the death penalty, the hegemonic site of power, the leading position, will also necessarily be deconstructed?   In politics we can take the site of power as the hegemonic element of an equivalential chain, and we have hegemony, or we can take the site of power as an impossible, merely phantasmatic quasitranscendental imposture. In the latter case, we move towards posthegemonic infrapolitics.

For Kant, the death penalty, as the pure embodiment of the ius talionis (if you murder, you must die), is also the purest expression of penal law as the representative of the principle of equivalence. As such, its special place must be deemed a consequence of the fact that it founds, in virtue of being the one and only “perfect example” (Bennington, 149) of equivalential adequation, the equivalential system of criminal law.

Hegel was just as committed as Kant to the principle of the death penalty, also in virtue of its paradigmatic role in terms of founding equivalence.   For the rest of criminal law, equivalence can be posited at the level of “value,” as he says in his Philosophy of Right: “the determinate character given by the concept to punishment is just that necessary connection between crime and punishment already mentioned: crime, as the will which is null in itself, eo ipso contains its negation in itself and this negationis manifested as punishment. It is this inner identity whose reflection in external existence appears to the understanding as ‘equality.’ . . . If the intrinsic interconnection of crime and its negation, and if also the thought of value and the comparability of crime and punishment in respect of their value are not apprehended, then it may become possible to see in a punishment proper only an arbitrary connection of an evil with an unlawful action” (Hegel quoted by Bennington, 153).   Let me simply note that this is the moment in which “value” refers to the necessarily merely approximate substantiation of equivalence in any given exchange (say, beyond the exact correspondence between taking a life and giving a life, the one-eyed, toothless criminal is the parodic figure of ius talionis applied literally, that is, without the spiritualization of value as a mediator). The point of grounding, necessary to the system, its anchor, is the death penalty as perfect example.

But Bennington makes the interesting point that a “perfect example” is therefore more than an example—a perfect example moves towards transcendentalization, moves ex lex.   For Bennington, the death penalty is “a situation where the lex talionis does not even get started, as it were, because the equivalence between crime and punishment is supposedly immediate (and therefore in a sense not even an equivalence” (154).   In other words, the death sentence does not embody value, which is the acting principle in the equivalential law: it is the founding exception for all measures of value, but it is also the radical enactment of the inconmensurable. And Bennington continues: “Although I do not think that Derrida ever quite presents the matter this way in his seminars, this strange status of the death penalty (for murder) seems then to confirm Derrida’s diagnosis of its quasi-transcendental status, and the paradoxical consequences that seem to ensue (such that the death penalty is simultaneously the most and the least spiritual punishment, both savage in its immediacy and pure in what Hegel calls its ‘specific equality’ with the crime, both the originary blind spot and the quasi-teleological vanishing point of the talionic principle” (154).

This is of course why we can begin talk of a certain presence of “the abominable” at the core of rationalism, of transcendental idealism even; as Bennington puts it, the sovereign, who alone dictates the death penalty, appears as “a non-rational and non-dialectical answer to a certain impasse of rationalism itself” (156).   We should note this “non-rational and non-dialectical” answer is itself the answer for the sovereign as the hegemonic impostor in the empty site of power.   This has implications for political theory that Bennington points at without quite making explicit: glossing over the fact that the death penalty is also theorized by Kant as eminently usable in the case of high treason, such as an insurrection against the sovereign, he says “Kant is an unconditional partisan of the death penalty except when an attempt is made to apply it to the sovereign, which results in a kind of short-circuit of reason itself, a kind of ‘cannot compute’ that leads to self-destruction and the abyss. This threat to reason is so serious that it motivates Kant’s demand that the death penalty be applied to ‘any attempt’ whatsoever at attacking the sovereign, which he attempts rather desperately to assimilate to the case of murder (or at least attempted murder) by identifying it as a ‘parricide,’ this assimilation perhaps confirming the phallogocentric quality of rationalism itself” (158).   It leads us to ask about the surreptitious exceptionality of the site of power in hegemonic theory as a simple case of imaginary radical investment into the love of the father, which turns every father into a despotic impostor (imposture=the act or practice of deceiving by means of an assumed character or name).

But, if the site of power is always occupied by an impostor, if there can be no rational or measurable equivalence between the sovereign and sovereignty itself, if the sovereign is simply the enactor of the exceptional, non-rational, non-dialectical answer to the problem of murder, then “no sovereign is really sovereign” (Bennington 160).   “This means that Kant’s defense of the death penalty is also the very place to look for the principle of resistance to it: as tendentially ex lex, the philosopher outlaw shows up the ex lex status of the sovereign and also of the death penalty in the same gesture as he shows up the tendentially collapsing status of sovereignty and indeed of the transcendental position as such” (Bennington 160).

Once we understand that the quasi-transcendental status of any element in an equivalential chain is necessarily contaminated by the abomination of imposture, why should we persist in our radical investment into any kind of hegemonic formation?   Why should we continue to privilege a notion of the political as necessarily given over to the establishment of equivalential chains and hegemonic articulations?   It is more “rational,” and less unjust, to forfeit hegemony and to look infrapolitically for some other form of constitution.