These are notes that I hope we can develop.  We can kick them around a bit and see what happens.

Infrapolitical Deconstruction is not really a project, but it is probably better thought of as a commitment to the development of a critical dispositif, an apparatus for thought, in the sense of “a certain kind of thought,” an oriented thought. Such a development requires, 1), the furthering of the idea, 2), a process of conceptual formation, 3), a genealogy, 4), an archive. All of this is work in progress, and it will take years of labor to carry it out. In terms of 3 and 4, we also need to consider what we have called Infrapolítica 1 and Infrapolítica 2. For instance, if there is a genealogical line (postHegelianism, Nietzsche, the Marx of Capital, Heidegger, Derrida) that is common to both, it is clear that Schmitt or Althusser or Martínez Marzoa are more useful for Infrapolítica 2, whereas Levinas or Agamben may be more relevant for Infrapolítica 1. In fact, Levinas himself claims that position for his thought, clearly. Cioran is also, in a vastly different sense, more useful for Infrapolítica 1, and so are, say, Bolaño or Marías. Lacan for Infrapolítica 1.  Malabou´s books on Hegel and Heidegger could be useful for both.  I suspect both García Calvo and Sánchez Ferlosio will be more useful for Infrapolítica 1 as well. All of the classifications above are precarious and revisable, it is clear that there are no distinct lines.  Regardless of that provisional distinction, however, we agree, more or less, or have understood, that Infrapolitical Deconstruction starts in the wake of the catastrophe of political modernity, and thinks from its ruins. It moves on two registers:  a critique of politics, and an attempt to develop “existential” grounds for it: both historical and anthropological.  It questions, as radically as possible, the residue of the modern age in contemporary thought, and needs a commensurate engagement with nihilism as such. It assumes the priority of the political over the economic (for instance, it assumes that capitalism is the consequence of a political development, and not the other way around), and it assumes that the ground for thought today is a history of broken hegemonies that we have no interest in reconstituting or finding a return for.

Following up on the comments on Martínez Marzoa below, but also on the discussion of nihilism brought up by Guillermo, I just ran into a quotation (from an essay by Adam Sitze I have my hands on but cannot yet share) that might be useful.   What is at stake is the nihilism, or the developing nihilism, in political modernity starting from Hobbes, say.  For Schmitt the imperial complexio oppositorum had kept things in check throughout the Middle Ages, but the necessary renunciation of the body of Christ as morphogenetic power for the res publica creates a brutally unhappy consciousness.  Now I quote: “The impersonal laws of the State can only produce political form and exercise morphogenetic power in an ungrounded manner, by presupposing the complete separation of Power from the Good.  Indeed, the strength of impersonal law (its principled insistence on the formal equality of all persons before the law) is predicated on a displacement of the morphogenetic power of the complex (a hierarchy centered upon the Person of Christ).  In the absence of a felicitous use of morphogenetic power, the State finds that law alone is insufficient for accomplishing the aims it inherits from the complex, and discovers itself to be in need of supplements for its impersonal law (which is to say, the neutralization of conflict through dispositifs of discipline, govern mentality, and security, but also, if necessary, through the use of military and, later, police forces) at the service of repeated sovereign decisions that reproduce a semblance of the unity and integrity of Roman Catholic visibility and publicity by setting aside the impersonality of law (with its insistence on formal equality) in order to fabricate a public enemy, whose schema can then serve as the point of reference for the formation of the unity and integrity of a newly secular public.  In short, the State achieves the aims bequeathed to it by the complex to the extent that it now includes exclusion.”  The latter is a precarious solution that nevertheless held more or less effectively through the times of the nation-state.  Which is now full of holes at every level.   The deep self-undermining of the political was itself the political though modernity, and it still is, but now without the possibility of a return.

(From “Problemas del Leviatán, in Distancias.)

The importance of this piece, to me, is that it gives us the Hobbesian grounds for the constitution of the modern civitas.   Which infrapolitics no longer recognizes as the final constitution of the political.  If we read it in relation to other texts in Marzoa’s work, Hobbes appears as a founding text for modernity, which means as the specific instantiation of modern nihilism.   But this already means—the constitution of the civitas is premised on an absolute abandonment of the social bond.   There is no bond because nothing is binding. There is only the passionate desire to enjoy a time of peace, which only works if it is universal, that is, if it is assumed by one, and the other, and the next, and the other.   There is only a common interest premised on the absence of any bond.  Moving past this state of affairs is not a matter of reestablishing the bond–the bond, “natural” as it may be, is always already under historical erasure.

If Leviathan phenomenologically generates, that is, if it discovers the civil space, this means that the civil is not derivable: it does not come from something else. It is in fact ab-solute, in the sense that it breaks away from all binds, all bonds. Marzoa uses the term “laicidad” to mention civil belonging—not lay as independent from religious bonds, but lay as independent from any communal belonging.   In that sense it is a space of rupture, first of all rupture from the immediate, since immediately we don’t come up against the citizen, rather against the kid, the mother, the priest, the boss, the officer, or the neighbor.

Marzoa proposes a definition of power that has to do with the ability to become independent from the thing—power is being able to do this or that with the thing, x or its opposite. The being of the thing, faced with this notion of power, is sheer serviceability, disposability.

So power is a form of knowledge, or power/knowledge. It relates to the thing as one calculates strategies. Power/knowledge does not determine ends, only how to get to them. As Hobbes said, reason is at the service of the passions. This is Thesis 1.

But passions are singular, not universally shared. So there are no ends that are universally shared. This is Thesis 2.

That elicits a common interest. We all have an investment in being able to make calculations and develop strategies, which means we have to be able to “count on” a ground that will enable us.   This is the Hobbesian “time of peace.” We need the time of peace, during which we can count on things, and we do not inhabit radical precariousness. This is Thesis 3.

Our common interest is therefore that it is guaranteed that there be guarantees, that is, that something be made stable enough so that, if we fulfill some conditions, x will happen.   This is Thesis 4.

A guarantee can only be produced by an overwhelming force—a material and materially overwhelming force, incommensurable with any other force. This is Thesis 5.

In connection with those Theses, Hobbes will name his “laws of nature:” the first is that we must seek the time of peace. The second is that we limit ourselves to willing whatever is compatible with the general willing.   Of course these two laws are only binding provided that everyone else follows them too, otherwise they are not mandatory. That is, they are only binding if we have the overwhelming force described in Thesis 5.

The constitution of a stable overwhelming force, the sovereign, is the result of a pact that never takes place but has always already taken place. It is always already a pact between one, and the other, and the next, and the other—it is not a pact based on communities or natural bonds, but always a pact between natural persons.   It binds everyone.   All natural persons, auctores, delegate into one artificial person, actor. This actor is the civitas.   The civitas is sovereign, or the sovereign is civitas.

We can’t attempt against the sovereign. Whoever does it, does it in the name of civil war, the dissolution of the time of peace. And civil war is, always and in every case, the result of an appeal to some intrinsic legitimacy that the pact has always already excluded.   The pact is always ab-solute, in other words, it is not dependent on anything, it is not derivable.  The pact has no appeal. It has no outside other than war.

This does not elicit a religious problem.   The pact regarding the civitas is not a pact against God or a pact with God, but the system of obligations it creates is given to us iure divino, gratia Dei, since Jesus, resurrected, has only left with us his absence and his promise.   If anything is to have divine character, it is the civil, “consisting precisely in the absence of any specific manifestation of the divine, because such an absence is what God himself wants” (130).   My Kingdom is Not of This World means that there is no Kingdom until after the end of time, and no Church can coactively impose anything on civil power.   Religion has become a constitutive absence.

 Civil society, or the modern State, couldn’t care less about “intrinsic legitimacy.”    Behavior is not to be judged, or valued, although it can be enforced coactively.   Civil society enforces only one consensus: that there should be no consensus.   There is only one kind of general agreement which is the conditio sine qua non:  “to create and maintain conditions so that one can live not having to agree on anything or to commune with anything” (“Estado y legitimidad,” 88). 

 This seems unreal, Marzoa anticipates.  No State has ever done that.   But one needs to think, again, by finding a point of contrast: say, State against the Church, or the State against any “natural” community.   The function of the State, in Modernity, is to establish “a sphere within which consensus and communion be dissolved and cease being binding” (89).   At that point, when the State maximally reduces resistance to itself, there may come a point when it is seized by a panic attack—and a rush to “seek reconciliation and synthesis with all the other things” (89).   We are not there yet.  Or perhaps we are.  

 So, that sphere is constituted by the renunciation of any valorization—nothing is binding, except the fact that nothing is binding.  That means, nothing is really mine, everything is alienable.   Everyting is exchangeable for something else, including myself.  I am myself alienable, because I am in principle equivalent to anybody else.  This is the principle of general equivalence, which sets every thing as a commodity, since everything has the value of exchange value.   This is the tendential law of civil society: if not everything is exchangeable, then there is no principle of general equivalence.  The principle of general equivalence is overwhelming and dissolves the binding character of every thing.  There are commodities only if everything is a commodity.   (Nothing is exchangeable in principle for anything else if something is not exchangeable for anything else.)

 This of course draws a non-physical objectivity that we could or should call structure.  That structure is civil society: the system of things as commodities.  It simply exists.   Whenever it goes beyond existing into thinking or saying, then it becomes the State, right, or the laws. 

 And the State, right, or the laws have no choice, since they have given up on any valuation of intrinsic legitimacy, and can only seek to enforce coactive power, but to let every one do as they will or would, which does not mean there are no norms, since it is every one, not some yes but not others, that must be able to do as they wish, that is, I must be able to do as I wish provided everyone is able to proceed likewise.   This is a mere logical conclusion from the principle that says that the State moves into no evaluation of intrinsic legitimacy.   The State, right, the laws, are formal protection of the right of every one to do as they wish, provided that right stays in place for every one. 

 Only the common substance, with money as its manifestation as patent means of exchange (but money is only the common substance, the structure of civil society as such), makes it possible.   And money measures and regulates time as exchange.   Money is the general exploitation of time.   And the condition of my own general exchangeability.   [The condition, therefore, of my mobility, also of my freedom.  Which is everyone else’s.   Civil society is the end of masters and slaves, it is the end of history, according to a certain understanding.] 

 And all of this is the warranty of the State’s legitimacy as well as the warranty of any critique of the State.  I can only critique the State in the name of the system of liberties that the State itself institutes—there is no outside, as there are no binding ties that can constitute such an outside.    I can invent them, I can appeal to them, I can claim communities or naturalness—which means I am having a panic attack and seek a reconciliation and synthesis with that which is not given to me. 

 But then?  Marzoa ends with the following words:  “nihility must by all means avoid self-recognition, must constantly fabricate instances from which to benefit, and that is because precisely the recognition of nihility would be the only non-nihilistic [thing, or possibility]” (100).

If so, then the full assumption of nihilism, the full assumption of total distance and total separation, the full assumption of unboundedness—but is that not infrapolitics?   As the hyperbolic condition of democracy? 

Some of us are about to engage in a systematic rereading of the work of Galician philosopher Felipe Martínez Marzoa over the next several months.   The comments that follow are preliminary, just a first take based on the following readings: “Estado y legitimidad” and “Estado y polis,” from Manuel Cruz ed., Los filósofos y la política, Mexico: FCE, 1999; “Problemas del Leviatán,” from FMM, Distancias, Madrid: Abada, 2011 (and some other pages in that book), and FMM, El concepto de lo civil, Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2008.   Our interest is to explore the relevance of Martínez Marzoa’s thought to the project under discussion in this blog—of course the very fact that we are reading him presupposes (our belief in) that relevance, and we must see where it might take us.

Let me start with a casual remark Marzoa makes in the introduction to Concepto. He says: “el proyecto en su propia consistencia como tal no entiende de ubicaciones específicas del tipo de lo que sería por una parte ‘filosofía política’ o quizá ‘filosofía del derecho’ o algún título emparentado y, por otra parte, otras ‘filosofías’” (5). What is not said in that understated remark is of course that his project does not want to be disciplinarily localized because its very import has to do with a massive delocalization of the totality of contemporary knowledge under the shadow of nihilism.   It is not just politics or right, science and philosophy, art and language—it is all of them that today can be thought only as effects of a massive structure, a “non-physical objectivity” that Marzoa names nihilism, obviously in the wake of Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular.   What is interesting with Marzoa is that he connects the nihilistic structure to Marx´ mature work, that is, to Das Kapital.   One of the obvious results of it is that capitalism comes to be seen as a specifically nihilistic structuration of life. Exploitation, for instance, therefore must be understood in the context of nihilism, and not the other way around. Production must be understood in the horizon of nihilism, and not the other way around. (I recently posted two reviews, one concerning Schmitt and another one concerning Althusser—they are placeholders. Both Schmitt and Althusser, and with the latter Marxism as such, are genealogically relevant for the infrapolitical project, and both must be placed under erasure in order to release their secret form—this is not Marzoa’s vocabulary, but I think it is consistent with what he aims to do.   Interestingly, his highest philosophical referent is Kant, of whose thought Distancias says, in the final page: “the One-All [that is the continuo ilimitado of the age of nihilism] must still deploy some of its internal possibilities, which is something it can only do by ‘overcoming’ (that is, by not understanding, but it is a ‘not-understanding’ different from the trivial one) a certain obstacle: the obstacle is Kant.”   I’ll say a bit more about this in a later entry.))

“Something can only be recognized by losing it” (Distancias 139). This is perhaps the most succinct characterization of Marzoa’s method.   A historical insight into something already means the vanishing of that something into history.   Thought does not appropriate, thought can only glimpse a withdrawal, it is the glimpse into a withdrawal. The various forms of the glimpse into vanishing time are structured into the constitutive glimpse of the present, also as vanishing, also in withdrawal. Once you thematize something, that something has already gone—which logically also means, we live in the unthematizable.   Thought is the attempt to dwell in historical time by thematizing the structure of its disappearance.   Now, retroactively, as some kind of enigmatic side-effect, the persistent investigation into the vanishing structures of historical time can throw partial insight into the unthematizable present, which is thereby necessarily also a partial insight into the future (the future of thought can only be the thematization of the structure of the unthematizable present.)   This is the gift of distance, a word that has pride of place in Marzoa’s work, and to which we cannot hope to do full justice here. But distance is, I believe, commensurate to the task of thought—no distance without thought, no thought without distance.

But sometimes it feels as if there is a fundamental distance Marzoa’s work thematizes, and that is the distance from community.   Community is, although not straightforwardly, projected into the origin.   This may be fundamentally unfair, but I will ask the question, tentatively in any case, any way: is history so far the story of a passage from community into nihilism?   Even if the answer were to be yes, it doesn’t of course mean community is the future too. Marzoa is no Hegelian.   But it does mean there is the shadow of an undiluted non-nihilistic origin that is associated with the thought of community. And this matters, even if it only matters because it unsettles us.   What could community be? By definition, we can only glimpse community through the many mediations of our nihilistic worldview, from which community has withdrawn fundamentally.   So my question is, what is the import of the fundamental withdrawal and dissolution of community for our thematization of modern and contemporary nihilism?

In “Estado y polis” Marzoa says: “Civil society is therefore the negation of any community, and, correspondingly, right and the State are the question of how it is possible never to have to commune with anybody on anything” (103).   But Marzoa says, in order to understand what that means, we must find a point of contrast, a comparison, and that point of contrast would be community: “Let us attempt to think . . . a situation where there obtains a certain community; this means, a situation where there would obtain some type of binding thing or content and where, conversely, the statute of commodity, or of civil society, right, and the State, would not obtain” (103).     For that he goes to Herodotus’s History, where he underlines Cyrus’ words on the Greek polis: “I have no fear of men for whom it is character that the center of their cities is constituted by an empty space to which they go to attempt to deceive each other under oath” (quoted in 105). Deceiving each other is buying and selling in the agora, which is the empty space.

The empty space is necessarily the space of a distance, a spatium, a hole in the community. Making that hole patent—this is what Cyrus’ remark, as quoted by Herodotus, does–, that distance, is insolence. But it is a momentous insolence, because it makes something relevant that has always alredy existed, it thematizes the ground on which one treads, the ground that had gone without saying.   And the reflection is: “either the community does not make itself relevant as such in any way, remains opaque to itself, but then in some way we can say that community does not exist, does not take place, because it does not make itself manifest . . . or else the community does not see itself bound to conform to its own opacity, and the binds, that is, the distance, the counterpositions, always already presupposed, are forced to be said, they make themselves relevant, and then the community certainly takes place, it certainly obtains, but it remains to be seen wether then and for that very reason what happens is that the community explodes” (106).

So, we can only thematize something at the moment of its dissolution, at the moment of its vanishing.   And this self-thematization, Marzoa says, is the polis as such. At that very moment.

In any case, this exercise concerning the vanishing community, the community as vanishing, allows us to understand that civil society, the civil society of modernity, can no longer be understood accordingly: that civil society is no polis.   Modern civil society, that is, civil society, since there is no non-modern civil society, cannot be understood through the thematization of an empty space in the middle. Rather, civil society is the thematization of an overpowering empty space understood as an unlimited continuum, where distance prevails absolutely, where no thing and no content is binding, where everything is exchangeable, where the thing has become, overwhelmingly, that is, totally, commodity. If community could be presupposed for the polis, and distance needed to make itself patent, in civil society what is presupposed is distance, that is, the non-binding character of every thing and every content.   And what must make itself patent is nihilism.

Marzoa insists therefore that there is a certain secondariness of civil society or the State, which is an integral part of civil society.   A certain secondariness: negation. Civil society is the absence, the abstention, the renunciation (111) of some other thing that has been lost, that has vanished into time.   Can we call this, as Marx does, the “democratic republic”?

There is also a belatedness of the very concept of democracy in the Greek polis.   The first struggle was not for democracy, whatever that may have meant for the Greeks in terms of demos or krátos.   The first struggle was for isonomía. Isonomía does not refer to a kind of polis, rather it is constitutive of the polis as such, it is the event itself of the polis.   Isonomía does not name authority, it rather names “something anterior and conditioning of all authority,” the very ground of authority.   Demokratia, however, is the belated naming of that ground, in favor of the demos, and this passage, from isonomía to demokratia, is already the decline and withdrawal of the polis as such—it says too much, it unbalances things into a situation where a conflict between isonomía and democratía was bound to prevail.   And it did. Socrates exemplifies it. Modern democracy finds a solution to that problem by dictating the necessary universality of the reach of the system of liberties, that is, the utter emptying out and degrounding of any binding, the absolute absence of community. Democracy in modernity is nihilistic democracy.   In the same way demokratia, by prevailing, brought about the historical end of the polis, in the same way, by prevailing the empty universality of nihilistic, civil democracy must open the way to something else. But first it needs to come into its own.

In the title for this entry I used the expression “the unthematizable haunting.”   I want to let the ambiguity of the word haunting resonate, all the way marking one of its meanings as abode or guarida or madriguera or first and most basic inhabitation, which happens to be the reconstructible first usage of ethos in the Homeric text as we said below in one of the comments to Jorge’s recent entry.   Presumably, if we are to make infrapolitics appear in the context of the discussion of Martínez Marzoa’s thought, it will be somewhere around the consideration of whatever remains unthematizable in our nihilistic history.

He dudado si colgar esta nota como comentario a la nota previa de Jorge Alvarez Yágüez, pero al final he decidido en contra de esa posibilidad por razones que tienen que ver con el carácter propositivo de lo que sigue.   Jorge nos ofrece una magnífica contribución a lo que voy a llamar infrapolítica 2, y aquí me interesa distinguir de la infrapolítica 2 lo que llamo infrapolítica 1.   Por mi parte sanciono positivamente lo que ha dicho Jorge, que creo que recoge de una manera admirablemente sucinta—no completa, pero eso no estaba en juego—la dimensión patente y activa de la práctica infrapolítica como programa.

Digamos que infrapolítica 2 pone el énfasis en –política, mientras infrapolítica 1 pone el énfasis en infra-. (El blog no admite subrayados, me temo, pero sería más fácil imaginar la palabra con el prefijo subrayado o con el sustantivo subrayado.)   Y pienso que ambos énfasis responden, precisamente, y no por casualidad, a dos conceptos diferentes de la palabra ética. El segundo es el concepto al que, en la modernidad, dio carta de naturaleza Kant, aunque tiene viejas raíces precristianas y cristianas, naturalmente, y con respecto del cual Jorge nos dice que puede resaltar o exigir un tipo de comportamiento “absoluto y categórico . . , volcado hacia dentro, hacia la propia interioridad y perfección . . . pueden no importarle las consecuencias . . . solo puede actuar por convicción.”   La palabra griega ethikos recoge eso aunque sólo parcialmente, en la medida en que deriva de un sentido de ethos que refiere, ya en Hesíodo y Herodoto, a la disposición o carácter del ser humano concreto.   Es discutible, quizás indecidible para nosotros, que el fragmento de Heráclito ethos daimon recoja también de forma dominante esa acepción.   Walter Benjamin, por ejemplo, haciéndose eco de muy larga tradición, traduce el ethos daimon como carácter es destino. Hace muchos años yo propuse una traducción diversa, en inglés, canny is uncanny, homely is unhomely, en español, lo familiar es lo infamiliar, o lo habitual es lo siniestro. En fin, esa traducción alternativa se fijaba en la primera acepción de ethos que resalta, por ejemplo, el léxico de Liddell-Scott, citando a Homero y Heródoto, según la cual el ethos es “an accustomed place,” y en plural “the haunts or abodes of animals.”   El ethos es la casa antes de la casa, el habitamiento en su sentido más desnudo y por lo tanto más definitivo.   Y para mí ese sería el sentido de ética con el que tiene relación dominante lo que llamo infrapolítica 1.  Dada, sin embargo, la fuerte prevalencia en nuestra cultura de la otra noción de ética, yo insistiría en que conviene entender que la ética se relaciona con infrapolítica 2 mucho más que con infrapolítica 1. O incluso, que infrapolítica 1 no tiene relación particular alguna con la ética en el sentido aristotélico (que no es originalmente aristotélico, claro, sino que en Aristóteles ya es derivado, por ejemplo, de Sócrates, cuya oposición a los sofistas, por ejemplo, puede entenderse como oposición ética en ese sentido, luego cristiano, y luego kantiano.)

Por cierto podríamos discutir aquí las misterioras páginas del final de la Carta sobre el humanismo en las que Heidegger habla de ética, y remite al ethos daimon heraclíteo, en un sentido que yo creo que remite más a infrapolítica 1 que a infrapolítica 2. Pero eso queda para otro día, aunque me interesa marcarlo.

Y pienso que, aunque cada quien ha de tener sus preferencias, su estilo (y esa palabra, estilo, para mí ya de entrada está más relacionada con infrapolitica 1 que con infrapolítica 2), no es posible pensar propiamente infrapolítica 2 sin retrotraerla a la incomodidad fundamental de infrapolítica 1, que es lo que motiva todos los trastornos de comprensión de lo que se está proponiendo.   Infrapolítica 1, para decirlo quizá demasiado burdamente, está siempre de antemano más allá del bien y del mal, y es refractaria en cuanto tal no sólo a toda política sino también a toda ética (salvo a la ética que entiende el ethos como madriguera o habitamiento desnudo).   Cómo pensar esa dimensión, quizá en una frontera no particularmente accesible en cuanto frontera del lenguaje, quizá en una frontera no particularmente accesible de lo humano, y así en cuanto tal remitiendo también a lo animal, ese es, yo pienso, el problema fundamental o la tarea fundamental de este proyecto, el lugar donde la ontología se junta con lo refractario a la ontología, el lugar de un “de otro modo” o incluso de un “epekeina” (más allá) que también hemos de pensar en relación con la temática de la historia del ser, es decir, de la historia en cuanto ser, aunque estoy con Jorge en que, si esa es la tarea de pensamiento fundamental, en realidad no puede distinguirse de su intento (del intento de Jorge) por asociarla decisivamente con la infrapolítica 2 que él propone.

I will eventually get to the question of the frame in Latin American Studies and in my own work, but first let me attempt to say something regarding the critique that we have not been able to thematize exploitation.

Sauri and Di Stefano (see below) say:  “while infrapolitics offers a compelling means for a critique of domination that foregrounds the failure of every hegemonic articulation . . . by taking into account the excluded nonsubject, how might it lead to a transformation of a mode of production defined, above all, by exploitation?”   Well, that is the one-million dollar question, as they say–which unfortunately can only have a trivial answer.  It amounts to asking, for instance, how it would be possible for feminism, or for the civil rights movement, to put an end to capitalism.  They continue: “How might we map the movement from the infrapolitical to politics itself.”

So, just to clear up a possible initial misunderstanding, the infrapolitical is always already in a relation to politics.  That`s why they call it infrapolitics.  Now, if we combine this latter question with the first, as we presumably are meant to do, the real question is not about mapping the movement from the infrapolitical to politics, but rather about mapping the movement from the infrapolitical to a revolution that would signal the end of exploitation.   And, again, this is a question that can only have a trivial answer, as not even Marxism has an answer on its own terms (“how can we map the movement from Marxism to the end of exploitation?”  “Well, it is for history to decide, it will only happen where there are mature global conditions, political voluntarism will not work, there cannot be socialism in one country, and so forth.”)

But perhaps, in the spirit of free discussion, just to continue to develop the idea, we could say that, if infrapolitics in general allows (if it is the name for the form of thought that can only allow) for reflection on the non-political underside of any political irruption, then not only is infrapolitics the very condition of any thematization of exploitation (as well as of exclusion), but it is also the condition of their reduction and tendential elimination (just as it can also be the condition of their intensification).

If politics is in every case, and necessarily, an enactment of the sacrificial structuration of history, as María Zambrano liked to say, then infrapolitics is the dimension of life where the end of sacrifice can be experienced liminally, potentially.  To that precise extent infrapolitics is the hyperbolic condition of democracy.  No democracy without infrapolitics, no infrapolitics without democracy!

I think infrapolitics has no problem with producing and, in fact, actively welcomes every critique of exploitation, every critique of exclusion.  Its task is, furthermore, not to stop there, but also to examine the conditions of such critiques in order to radicalize them towards non-sacrificial structurations of political life.   Which, on the other hand, we know will never obtain.   This is, as far as I can see, the necessarily aporetic dimension of  the relation infrapolitics-politics.

Over the last several days, in other forums, there has been talk about something like a tradition of infrapolitical thought.  This is important on several counts, and we are only just beginning to discuss it.   But it is also important not to push too hard, not to invent a gallery of characters forced into the dubious position of predecessors or founding fathers.  We are not into developing a doctrine here, only into tracing a style.

Part of the discussion had to do with the issue of logics, and whether binary logics can ever hold as infrapolitical.   And perhaps the obvious thing to say here, the point to be made, is that infrapolitics is neither an attempt to institute a new polarity (infrapolitics vs. heliopoliitcs) nor an attempt to claim some tertiary logical space beyond binarisms.  In Erin Graff Zivin’s formulation: “what if marranismo, illiteracy, posthegemony, infrapolitics were to be thought *not* as concepts that oppose or critique Inquisitional logic, literacy, hegemony, politics, but rather as principles of anarchy always already at work *within* these concepts, and as such inseparable from them?”

I might want to use an expression alternative to “principles of anarchy,” to elude the ambiguity there, and talk about “an-archic displacements,” for instance, but otherwise I think Zivin’s formulation holds.

Another way to think about it, perhaps the same way after a number of historical mediations, is to say that, once Hegelian dialectics announce the advent of Absolute Knowledge, there is no longer a way of opposing masters and slaves, natural life and historical life, self-relation and spirit.   Mauro Senatore said:  “there is no concept left [no archic principle] to transit into,” so that the slave is not looking to become a master, and the naked life no longer aspires to historical existence.

So, is there a way to claim infrapolitical reflection prior to post-Hegelianism, or to the end-of-history radicalization of Hegelianism in French thought from the 1930’s through 1950’s?    Or is infrapolitics directly a type of reflection that finds its primal scene in that context?

I think the answer is: yes and no to both.  It all depends on the focus.  On the one hand, infrapolitics is free thought, that is, thought that connects to life as self-relation as opposed to calculative-representational thought that follows a program or seeks the development  and implementation of a truth, and that has gone on forever, since thought is thought.  On the other hand, infrapolitics has specific contexts of appearance.

French existentialism is one of the latter, which doesn’t mean every aspect of French existentialism is infrapolitical.   Melville’s filmography is infrapolitical, and Raúl Ruiz’s filmography is infrapolitical–and those are two filmmakers directly influenced by French existentialism at an early moment of their trajectories.  There are others.

But there is, for instance, an infrapolitical Benjamin, not the messianic-teleological Benjamin committed to redeemed humanity, but the Benjamin of the destructive character, whose formalization is an early depiction of infrapolitical life.

As in the previous entry, I would like to call for conversation on these issues here, as the blog can hardly be sustained without explicit interaction.

I am taking advantage of the fact that I have had early access, courtesy of Emilio and Eugenio, to a text that will be published over the next few days in nonsite. I will post the link here once it happens. I should wait to post my reaction, but I have never waited well, so I am starting something here with my apologies included. This entry treads lightly, therefore, and is meant to be only the beginning of a conversation that I hope will be long and intense.

Their essay, entitled Making It Visible. Latinamericanist Criticism, Literature, and the Question of Exploitation Today, engages with the recent work of Josefina Ludmer on “postautonomous literatures,” with John Beverley´s particular take on cultural studies up until his postsubalternismo book, with Jon Beasley-Murray´s posthegemony, and with my own work through Exhaustion of Difference but with specific mention of infrapolitics, which is a word I have been using since I did preparatory work for Linea de sombra, then dropped for a while, and I recently took up again.

The essay is good and fair, at least regarding my work, but I think in general. It is actually enormously useful. Through some very smart observations on the problem of the frame, the need for a frame, and what they consider our collective abandonment of proper reflection on the frame, they make a double argument for the specificity of aesthetic, hence also literary, autonomy, and for the need to thematize exploitation rather than exclusion in politically-intended or politically-inflected work. They link the absence of frame to the inability to think about exploitation.

So what I want to say here to start with is that I find the issue of the frame very provocative and interesting, and, while I am not entirely sure I myself omit the frame from my reflection entirely, I am more than willing to concede the criticism is quite valid. Since I am not entirely sure of its absence, that probably means I am not entirely sure of its presence either. This is something I will have to think about for a while.

But the second thing I want to say is that, in my conception of what infrapolitics could mean, exploitation is by no means absent. On the contrary, first, it starts off by thematising the politico-ethical exploitation of the entire field of practical reason at the cost of suppressing every other possibility of thought and experience, and, second, it continues by focusing upon conditions of everyday life and labor, where the Marxist-based theme of exploitation has of course pride of place. Or let me put it this way: even biographically, infrapolitics shows up in my critical reflection as a concrete reaction to the extreme Fordist-Taylorization of middle-class intellectual life as I have experienced it. Now, it is true there has been no expansion of this line, there has been no particular engagement with it in connection with infrapolitics, or not a published one yet. But it will come. My interest here is to hold open the place of exploitation as an absolutely essential resource for infrapolitical thought. I could even say: no infrapolitics without exploitation, no exploitation without infrapolitics. We have a pending discussion here on Frederic Lordon´s book Willing Slaves of Capital, which I think should include Simon Head´s Mindless. And some of us have a pending commitment to write on Tronti and Lazzarato´s work, as part of a book on Italian political philosophy,precisely along the same lines. I have also pùblished a recent essay, “We Have Good Reasons Too, and They Keep Coming: Revolutionary Drives and Democratic Desire,” where I discuss exploitation already, although, true, in a preliminary and insufficient way.

The latter is not to be defensive, or to preempt further critique. I think the critique is accurate and fair at this stage of things, and it will work as a spur to get on with it.

Beyond all of that, the third thing I wanted to say is that I find Sauri and DiStefano´s reflection on cultural studies and its effects on work produced during the last decade very fascinating and appropriate. Along the way of their critique there show up many issues, which they treat only marginally in order to keep their focus on the double issue of frame and exploitation, but which deserve further dwelling and radicalisation.

As I said, I hope this will the beginning of a long conversation. The blog can hardly subsist without interaction of that kind.

Again, points for discussion on Acosta’s Thresholds of Illiteracy.  Not that Bram’s proposal is illiterate, but illiteracy is his major name for a critical apparatus that unsettles and overturns many of the fundamental tropes of Latinamericanist criticism over the last fifty years or more.   If literacy/orality, as Acosta claims, is a foundational polarity, beyond the criollo/indigenous divide, and in fact giving it legibility, Acosta presents a number of highly articulate destructions of its critical deployments–on indigenismo, for instance, or on testimonio.  I will limit myself to these two for the time being.

Illiteracy marks the terrain of collapse for the critical productivity of the literacy/orality divide, and attendant tropes.  Acosta opposes Vargas Llosa’s take on José María Arguedas to Cornejo Polar’s, not in the name of some interpretive error, but in the name of the obvious impossibility for final coherence in the critics’ position.  And he opposes Miguel Barnet’s to John Beverley’s understanding and presentation of testimonio not in the name of their incoherence but rather in the name of their inability to account for a proliferation of questions that rent the productivity of their positions.  In both cases, what finally emerges and is exposed is the gap between critical positions and primary text.

An interesting slip, not more than a typo repeated, emerges in page 138, when the informant in Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón is called Ernesto, rather than Esteban, twice–Ernesto is of course the first name of the protagonist of Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos, a novel studied in the previous chapter.   Through the fusion of the two names, Ernesto-Esteban come to stand in for a Latin American life that both primary and critical texts attempt to represent and/or come to grips with.   This is not just a life, but it is a life determined by historical tensions and conflicts, a subcontinental bios, or the allegory of one whose biopolitical containment, as it emerges, it has been the historical function of Latinamericanist criticism to produce or co-produce.

And in page 141 Acosta refers to making the life speak, “making an informant speak.”   He is addressing Barnet’s testimonio theory (“a narrative structured around the encounter between a subject and the state.  After all, ‘making an informant speak’ is not a politically neutral metaphor, nor one consistent with de-subalternization; in fact, it amounts to its reproduction.”  Zivin would no doubt call this an emergence of Inquisitional logic.

Illiteracy comes to mean the failure of the subject to come into its own, to respond to its interpellation from the mouth of a criticism understood as state or para-state apparatus.   The life will not comply, as it refuses equally to serve inside the parameters of the oral authenticity or of the artificial literacy, in resistance against nuestroamericanismo as much as in resistance against any ideology of radical heterology or wild indomestication, since both of them are shown to be the two sides of the same coin.   The illiterate response would be a screen of arrest for the critical machine, except that there is no illiterate response, there is a rather a non-response, an impossibility to respond, a silence more devastating in its anarchic potentiality than any possible articulation of an alternative contestation.  Illiteracy is therefore just an effect–an effect from the real’s unguarded possibility, as Acosta will say towards the end of the testimonio chapter.

This effect is presented as a “theoretical residue” in 119.   It is a residue of undecidability, and it is a residue of critical destruction; it may be in fact, precisely not a theoretical residue, but the residue no theory can assimilate.

How, then, not to think about the structural parallel between Acosta’s fundamental stance and Zivin’s in Figurative Inquisition?  Could we not say that Zivin’s division inquisitor vs. marrano, which produces marranismo as the field of non-assimilation, as the field of the secret, is replicated in Acosta’s division literacy-orality, which produces illiteracy as its opaque precipitate?

In the same way Zivin analyzes the field of indetermination that opens up between the two figures of Inquisitor and marrano, Acosta says:  “what we have here are two foundational conceptual models of [indigenista criticism, testimonio criticism, etc.] that are ambiguously interrelated but whose interstitial space remains critically unexplored” (140).

As in Zivin, we read in Acosta’s text that the critical destruction is undertaken at the service of “a truly progressive politics” (238) within the context of “a sustained reflection on contemporary understandings of democracy, power, and resistance in Latin America” (239).

And, in Zivin, but more explicitly in Acosta, we are also told that there is an implicit appeal “to the logic of hegemony” (Acosta 240) in the critical apparatuses under question, not just on the side of the Inquisitor or on the side of literacy, but on both sides, which are mirror sides, which it would be necessary to dismantle.

Again, the question that opens up, and it is not just any question, is the question of the production or the constitution of democracy.   Don’t we know it won’t happen?  Already?   Or not as an effect of the critical machine of destruction?   Or is it a willful, hence strategic forgetting?  Or is something else at stake?

Zivin and Acosta radically question the legitimacy of all critical proposals in the tradition.  What is left is the legitimacy of illegitimacy–if nadie es más que nadie, if no critical tradition can offer itself as authoritative, then nobody has any right to impose hegemony.   From the radical absence of social authority, from the illegitimacy of social authority, democracy may arise.  Is that it?