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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few months ago either a journalist from The Guardian or somebody posing as one sent me a questionnaire saying that my responses would be published as part of some special issue or Sunday story on race in the US. I was surprised because I have not published anything of any substance thematizing race, other than a few blog entries, although most of them are in a blog accessible only to working group members. It was also a bit strange, I thought, that the journalist contacted me from a personal, not an institutional email address. In any case, I replied, and nothing happened. I recently wrote to ask whether I was free to publish my responses in this blog, since I want to use them for a course I am teaching this semester. I learned that the email address had been terminated. So I can no longer be sure the questionnaire was genuine and not some kind of weird-shit trap meant to trick me into some hit list. Whatever the case may be, here are my responses. I claim no particular excellence for them: i just want to use them for my class.

Interview with Mr. X, allegedly from The Guardian UK 

What inspired you or generated your interest in African American Literature?

Since your question seems to be historical, about the origins of my interest, I suppose I should mention Chester Himes and his Harlem novels, which I read as a teenager.  They fascinated me.  That was probably my first contact with African American literature.  I have of course read many African American authors over the years.  More recently, and more specifically, my interest has to do with understanding the differences and the potential similiarities between the African American experience and the Latinx experience in the US 20^th century.  I do not mean to say I approach African American literature nowadays from any kind of anthropological interest.  My interest is theoretical and it has to do with figuring out how to live, how to lead your own existence, in conditions of social subalternity or subalternization.  In general, of course, but also specifically: how to do that in a country I know well, since I have lived in it most of my life. 

Can we apply postcolonial theory (say, Frantz Fanon’s and Du Bois’s postcolonial concepts) to African American literature about discrimination and racism? 

It is not that we can or could, it is that we must and should.  Du Bois and Fanon are crucial theorists of Black experience, and their writings are still fundamentally productive today.  Take Du Bois’ statements about the color line as the problem of the 20^thcentury.  For decades that idea flew in the face of the left’s insistence on the absolute priority of class and economic interests.  Fanon took it up again in the 1950s, still against the grain.  But I think the historical process has made it clear by now that class and economic interests will not drown the problem of the color line.  Racism, even in ostensibly attenuated and more or less secret form, will not be solved by changes in the economic structure.  The contemporary insistence on systemic racism must be understood in that context: equality is not just a matter of economic development in the form of trickle-down economics.  Systemic racism is a reality that must be confronted directly and politically, not just economically.  I think Du Bois and Fanon were lucid enough not just to say it, but also to make that insight the very foundation of their work.  That is why they are influential today, perhaps, in a sense, more than ever. 

According to Du Bois, how does segregation produce double-consciousness?

The point of double consciousness in Du Bois’ theorization does not indicate, to my mind, any Black particularism.  It is an experience common to anybody who is seen by hegemonic society in terms that are incompatible with that person’s own self-understanding as a worthy person.  Say, you are a perfectly respectable member of the professional class in 16^th century Spain, and you are accused of being a Judaizer and a marrano out of the blue, because your grandfather was Jewish and your wife still has the house cleaned and the sheets changed every Friday as opposed to some other day.  You will go to your grave as a marrano regardless of whether you are a Judaizer or not.  Once you are identified as a marrano, you are in trouble for keeps.  Society sees you not just as inferior but as an undesirable, somebody who is not deserving of honor and must be kept at a distance if not thrown into a dungeon somewhere.  But you yourself are the same person you have always been, except that now you also have to see yourself through the eyes of your so-called community to make sense of what is happening to you and to keep from going mad.  Du Bois identified that structure, named it, and we should all be grateful to him for that.  The structure, such is the contention, is particularly present in Black life, because the color line means that Blacks do not even have to be accused of some imaginary crime: they are the “crime” themselves for hegemonic society.    Obviously the only sane way of living with it, far from the internalization of social bias, is to place yourself as an outsider to hegemony and to find ways to deal with it.  Not always easy.  In the meantime, segregation, in one form or another, and there are of course many forms, is your destiny. 

How can we combat racism to ensure that all members of American society experience equal representation and access to fundamental rights?

I believe we can, but we have to work hard first.  To my mind, it is not simply a matter of denouncing racism in any form.  We also have to produce a different conceptualization of the social, and of democratic life.  The 20^th century produced solutions that are today insufficient—they probably were false solutions to start with.  I think the most important thing to say is that a hegemonic articulation of the social always and in every case will produce its own subalternity.  Subalternity, in this case racial, perhaps also cultural, will not be eliminated through any hegemonic articulation of the social: it will simply produce different forms of it, according to whatever ideology becomes dominant.  The dominant ideology of the last, say, forty years is multiculturalism in one form or another, which amounts to the pretension that everybody has a place in democratic society under good democratic rule—we can move towards an inclusionist paradigm, where every group will have proper representation and will establish alliances with all the other groups and so forth.  The flaw here, and it has proven to be fatal, is that subaltern representation within hegemonic society, although surely better than no representation at all, is still and can only be subaltern representation, and it will reproduce endemic conditions, perhaps in altered form, rather than solve them.    We need to think of democracy beyond the constraints of multiculturalism and beyond any merely inclusionist model.  Inclusion into hegemonic space is a bit like the foxes allowing the chicken into their corral—pardon me for a no doubt excessive analogy.  It won’t do.  We need to do away with the idea of the corral.  In Spanish we say, sometimes, “nadie es más que nadie.”  This means, first of all, that in democracy no group has any special legitimacy.  Only on the basis of a radical conceptualization of posthegemonic democracy, to my mind, could we find the ways to move towards a tendentially exhaustive elimination of racial subalternity.   Yes, it is easier said than done.  Education becomes fundamentally important here.  We need to retain the elements of social justice we have elaborated over generations and substitute better ones for the ones that have proved ineffective.  This is a condition of the democracy of the future.  If, that is, we seek true egalitarian symbolization.  

 What makes African American writers (say, Mildred Taylor) focus on children in their stories and making them resist the racism they are exposed to? 

I think the tradition of story-telling, such as it has come down to us from oral history, from mothers to children, from grandfathers to children, can be reproduced, to a certain extent, in books for children better than they can in the contemporary novel.   Taylor is of course important in that sense—although as you may know I am no expert.  But there is a sense of history in traditional story telling that those who are not exposed to it may never understand or experience.  Story-telling, in the traditional way, tells us about an immemorial past where, perhaps paradoxically, true memory resides.  And true memory is always the memory of uprightness, and integrity, and decency, even if the drift of any particular story might seem to be the opposite and concentrate on the outcasts or the losers or the vanquished.  At the end, however, goodness prevails.  I suppose we still want our children to learn that, at the very least to be exposed to that thought.

Applying Fanon’s postcolonial theory will help in dismantling the mainstream’s culture of domination, injustice and racial discrimination (say African American). Please explain

Fanon was of course a complex thinker and a study of his life can provide many insights on the cosmopolitan experience of a Black politically-committed intellectual in the mid 20^th century.  But I would think the main lesson of Fanon’s life for today is his experience of how race and racial injustice, which involves discrimination also at the everyday level, informs the political struggle for justice of those who are this side of the color line.  It is a political struggle whose motivation lies in experientally- and existentially-felt discrimination, which he was able to distinguish from any whimsical or potentially paranoid notions of personal victimization and from any sense of willed personal entitlement and to put in the light of world structures that needed to be altered.   There was no room in Fanon for what we could call petit-bourgeois narcissism. This is what is crucial about Fanon—his life was not only informed by an anti-colonial commitment but his anti-colonial commitment was itself a direct result of his lucid working out of personal and singular experiences as a black man living and working in non-black hegemonic spaces.  In other words, his struggle was not only political but also existential, and his existential struggle was not focused on personal, individual desire for progress, but on deeply felt notions of justice and fairness.  I think a return to serious reflection on existential predicaments is a condition of political life in our present.  We could invert the old 1968 maxim “the personal is political” into the notion that the political is always and should always be personal, singular, specific, and lived, beyond or before any commitments to collective life and as their very condition.  It is a matter of coming down from the politically abstract, which always leaves ample room for catastrophe, to the concrete determinations of your own life, which then need to be projected into the collective as a condition of universal equality.  This is the way democracy becomes a democracy of every one, a democracy of the last human.     

What does Spivak mean by racial subalternity’ and subaltern identity?

Gayatri Spivak’s early notion of subalternity, which could be summed up in a famous sentence I have never stopped thinking about, namely, that the subaltern is the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic, something like that, has proved to be not simply better than most definitions but absolutely crucial for the future.  It is a bottomless sentence that could be connected to many of the most important developments in modern political thought, and always in a radicalizing and revisionist manner.  It means, first of all, that the subaltern is the constitutive outside of any hegemonic articulation.  A consequence is that any aspect of subaltern life that lets itself be caught in hegemony will only reproduce its own subalternity.   History is narrativized into logic, that is, it becomes historiography, always at the cost of a certain expropriation.   And we need to break away, always and in every case, from any hegemonic notion of subalternity, always expropriating, in order to release subalternity into its own, without which there is no real hope of redress, no hope for equality and justice.   Subalternity should not be instrumentalized in the name of a “good enough” liberal historiography.  It should be the focus of any thinking committed to true egalitarian symbolization.  This is why I started responding to your questions rejecting an anthropological approach and appealing to what we could call a “theory” of singular existence.   Let me finish by saying that Spivak’s definition very much includes the color line in its scope, but is not directly about the color line or indeed about the social death caused by slavery and post-slavery through history.  This is the reason why a struggle against systemic racism has many dimensions and should not be exclusively focused on Black experience.  Black study is essential to understand and determine, but differentially, and never in order to homogenize, which is another word for hegemonize, the structures of subaltern life—they include Latinx life in the US, immigrant life, Native American life, and so many other life experiences—that doom our liberal democracies to be always insufficiently democratic.   As I have said before, there is a lot of work to do, for everyone concerned with equality.  

What are the differences between structural, institutional and systemic racism?

To your list of terms we could add “societal racism,” which is a phrase one also hears now and again.  I think that, while there may be technical precisions to be made and there is of course a philological history of the invention and use of those phrases, and I do not mean to minimize their importance, they all come down to the same claim in my opinion.  The claim is that racism is not just a matter of individual behavior but that it extends to the wider society—to its institutions, hence to its structure–through hegemonic ideology or even through hegemonic practices.  It is a feature of hegemony that it projects—successfully, since otherwise hegemony would not be hegemony–both its positions and its presuppositions to the general field of engagement.   It could be argued that hegemonic positions in contemporary liberal societies are not racist, but the contested area is that of presuppositions, that is, of largely unconscious practices.   The claim that contemporary hegemony in the US, for instance, has elements of structural racism can be radicalized into the claim that contemporary hegemony is purely and simply racist; hence that the issue of police violence against blacks or Latinxs, when it happens, for instance, is not just a function of individual police officers but rather a symptom of a general state of affairs.  This debate is a matter of politics, but politics with a bite, since the negotiation between different claims must refer to the real: is there or is there not systemic, structural, institutional, societal racism in reality itself, whatever the institutional or systemic rhetoric may be, whatever individual intentions may be?   The dispute of course does not refer to the register of law and regulations but of everyday life wherever it takes place, but in all areas of it. 

The Endnotes to Infrapolitical Passages could by themselves be another book or lead to several.  As getting into them would make this review too long, let me just signal their importance by prefacing the following comments with two of them, corresponding to the book’s Introduction.   In the first one Williams quotes Jacques Derrida: “a passage, to be sure, and thus by definition a transitory moment, but whose transition comes, if one can say that, from the future.  It has its provenance in what, by essence, has not yet come-from (provenu), still less come about, and which therefore remains to come.  The passage of this time of the present comes from the future to go toward the past, toward the going of the gone.”  And, Williams adds, “The name of the to-come is the infrapolitical” (Williams 195). In the second, Williams says: “we are now situated not in the age of the experience of consciousness but in the civilizational expiration of each and every arché.  This is the epoch of the closure of metaphysics” (195).   

No interregnum means that the interval leads to no new principle of rule, no new nomic structuration of the earth.  The time of posthegemony, the time of postkatechontic decontainment, provides for no future regnum.  If metaphysics constitutes in its several epochs the proper hegemony in the West and of the West, the closure of metaphysics inaugurates a principial void.  If there is a promise to be extracted from it—but there is none–, it is only the promise of a time to come, in-different, unqualified.  Williams calls it the time of infrapolitics, the infrapolitical time: a time when politics has yielded to violent turmoil.  We can deny it and insist upon propping up the ruins of the past, as if nothing had happened that a few screwdrivers and a proper coat of paint could not fix.  We could say, for instance, that a new national hegemony, or a thousand new national hegemonies, can be reconstituted by and for the people.  Or we can assume it and take our chances in the resolute acceptance of an-archic time.  What would the latter mean?

Passage II attempts a response through what is still an analysis in the register of diagnosis.  It focuses on narco-accumulation, understood as a radical enactment and deployment of the ontology of the commodity form.  “On one level, narco-accumulation is just one more name for the contemporary will to power of capitalism in which capital projects itself, as always, in two directions simultaneously: 1) towards the absolutization of commodity and surplus value and, 2), toward the minimization, within the passage toward value, of the value of labor” (111).  As a pattern of force, in consequence, narco-accumulation overwhelms and destroys, and condemns the lifeworld of those touched by it to an active perishing:  “of dialectical consciousness, of the hegemonic apparatus, and of a teleology of progress capable of neutralizing violence and of converting it into a social reason, or power, other than that of the nihilist immanence and forceful extension of global techno-capital” (119).  This is the way in which the closure of metaphysics abandons its site in the philosophical text in order to become a biting, ruinous loss at the level of social and political experience: “This loss is the definitive consummation of onto-theology that haunts and traverses everything in the epoch of the end of epochality” (121). 

The analyses that follow pursue a critical understanding of the political economy of narco-accumulation through the reading of some of the major texts that have grappled with it, from Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s Los Zetas Inc.:  Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico, but with close attention devoted to the arguments made by Rosanna Reguillo, Rita Segato, Sergio González Rodríguez, and Ioan Grillo among others.  The fundamental question here is whether the paradigm of civil war, which all of these authors elicit in various ways, is minimally adequate.  Civil war seems to be the extreme categorial limit of critical reflection, but the answer Williams offers is that it falls radically short.  Once again, even if civil war, in its liminal relation with war as such, configures a fundamental political paradigm in the history of the West, from early Greece to the present, it is a paradigm that becomes obsolescent and unproductive in narco-accumulation.  Williams references Nicole Loraux, for whom “what we understand as stasis, or civil war, in contrast to adversarial unification (polemos), is actually a Platonic misnomer for diastasis, that is, for mere separation, or perhaps for the pathological split that is prior to and underlies the formation of the common and therefore of the political community itself” (140).  Williams latches on to diastasis by defining it as “an originary, infrapolitical separating movement or momentary lapsus prior to and beneath all force” (141). 

We are approaching perhaps the core, the very vortex of what the book proposes.  That our epoch is diastatic is another way of saying that the modern concept of the political is ruined and will no longer do.  “Herein lies a terrible conundrum and an opportunity for thinking.  This double loss we refer to here as decontainment, a term that certainly carries the splits and divisions of stasis along with it but does so in the context of global post-katechontic, or post-territorial, endemic war, discloses the originary, infrapolitical separation that underlies the diastasis-polemos/stasis relation and the force it generates” (142).  And it is this situation that, finally, offers the opportunity for “addressing the very possibility of a register for thinking other than that of a dialectical or legislative political consciousness” (128). 

A naïve or blind reading of infrapolitics has tended to place it as some kind of abandonment of the political terrain, a flight into a netherworld of personal, idiotic existence.  Infrapolitics is, however, not a craven or immature resistance to politics, as if politics were somehow the natural space of real men and women.  Rather, for infrapolitics, politics is today the site of an empty and ineffectual gesticulation, at a remove, abstract and vacuous.  Politics is to be thought, then, as we can see everywhere, as the space of a paradoxical resistance to politics, massive, thoroughly ideological, and ultimately deluded: nothing, or little else but, the field of superstructural expression for the ontology of the commodity form.  So no macho assertions of politics as the real thing, no facile dismissals of infrapolitics as a weak refuge from the storm: infrapolitics is, rather, politics times two, the very politicization of the ruin of politics, which our times inherit under the sign of an urgent, if necessarily untimely, demand for thinking.  This demand for thinking—hyperpolitical and at the same time other than political, but other than political through its hyperpoliticity—comes to be specified through the close reading of three texts whose political status in the conventional sense nobody would ostensibly contest.  But Williams shows how that conventional reading must open itself to the infrapolitical dimensions of the texts lest it remains bumbling and ineffectual.  The best purpose of a review is naturally not the presentation of an argumentative summary, so I will limit myself to mentioning those texts.  They are: Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay for the film The Counselor, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 novel, and Diego Quemada Díez’ film La jaula de oro.  Through them, Williams says, it makes itself possible to read the fundamental displacement of politics towards a thinking of existence, not for the sake of a flight away from politics, but, on the contrary, for the sake of the exposure of politics to its constitutive underside, which allows—only it allows—for a deconstruction of the ontology of the commodity form that rules over politics at the time of its metaphysical ruination. 

I will conclude with a passage that makes it clear enough for those who want to read.  It is the passage that introduces the last section of the book, “The Migrant’s Hand, or the Infrapolitical Turn to Existence,” devoted to a forceful analysis of La jaula de oro:

While it is true that coercion and subjectivist force found, protect, and expand political space, it is also true that political space is never fully saturated by or fully reducible to the actions of coercion and subjectivist force.  It is in this subtle yet fundamental threshold at the heart of the permanently violent splitting that is the market-state duopoly and its nonpolitical extension of endemic conflict, or post-katechontic diastasis, that the infrapolitical can beseen to operate and to leave its indelible existential mark.  It is finally toward this existential mark that we can now turn, as the final move in the passage toward the infrapolitical.  (167)

Subtle yet fundamental, indeed.  Inconspicuous and tremendous.