The Precariousness of the Critical Worker

For several centuries now the West has lived under the illusion that critique was a human right, that it was alright to exercise it, that it was the very foundation of the life of the mind. But the present clusterfuck may be bringing that illusion to an end. “This university will not protect you:” that has become an insistent mantra that we hear from administrators supposed to be in the know. If you screw it up, you are done. And it is on you. It was bad enough to be subjected to the rigors of cancel culture from the left, which turned all of us into members of a negative community, understood as a community from which you did not want to be excluded even if you thought that inclusion was inane. Now the stakes have gone up and the risk of condemnation to social death has skyrocketed. Critique is now subversive, and it can always be condemned as terrorist. I am not sure how those same administrators understand the task of teaching nowadays, but I tend to believe that teaching and publicity and propaganda serving the interests of the status quo have now become the same thing, at least tendentially. If you step out of that box, you run the risk that some student will complain to a state senator that you are disagreeing with the religion of a number of them, and then you are done for.

Jean Vioulac’s La logique totalitaire includes a footnote in pages 494-95 that deserves a comment. Vioulac quotes a fellow named Laurence Parisot, the spokesman from some corporate association, saying: “life, health, love are precarious, why would work escape that very law?” Indeed. Post-tenure review was bad enough. Now the very possibility of ever being hired, particularly if you were born elsewhere, is questionable. Vioulac defines terror in that footnote as “the exercise of the power of the Universal over the particular—a power that wants to abolish particularity.” It is only a partial definition, surely, but it suffices to make us realize that any form of critical singularity makes us automatic suspects insofar as we become inadequate to the Universal. And the suspect is eminently precarious and must spend her or his life in a precarious condition. Critics have become losers and losers are doomed to depression: “depression is the subjective experience proper to an individual who does not judge itself in relation to the law, in terms of a fault, but in relation to the norm, in terms of insufficiency. If political terror gives the individual the status of a suspect, threatens her or him with execution, and dissolves the very interiority of the subject through the fear of death, economic terror gives the individual a status of precarity, threatens her or him constantly with exclusion and dissolves the interiority of the subject through depression—an insidious and diffuse form of terror, a low-intensity terror nevertheless, whose efficacity hangs on norms disseminated through the entire social body.” But what are the norms? We cannot make them explicit. Precariousness rises because we can no longer be sure about what it is that we can or cannot say in our classrooms. Religion will not help. And university discourse, long viewed as a form of conformity, as a form of non-thought despite its pretensions, has all of a sudden also failed us. “This university will not protect you,” do not forget it.

A Helicopter Attack: Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory. Postwar French Thought to the Present (New York: Verso, 2024)

(I have hesitated to post this position paper here for several weeks, but at the end I decided I have a certain obligation to do it. It is, after all, my reading of Fredric Jameson’s last book, and I figure I owe it to him. Fred was a friend for many years, during a still formative period in my life, until our friendship vanished—painfully for me. But he was no shrinking violet and I think he would appreciate my speaking my mind, even if he would not much have liked what I have to say. Maybe nothing happens for no reason (not the same as saying that everything happens for a reason), so the disagreement here may explain more regarding certain inconsistencies in my life than it would be apparent to the casual reader.)

Fredric Jameson died last Fall, which was the time when we were trying to launch the Critical Theory Collective here at Texas A&M. Just a few days or weeks before his death, Verso sent out announcements that they were about to publish Jameson’s book on “the years of theory.” The book was going to be a transcription of a seminar Jameson taught through Zoom, from his country home in Connecticut, to Duke students at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Jameson was already 90 years old at the time. It was a good idea for Verso to make that gesture, as an homage to Jameson, and it seemed a good idea for us, as we were trying to launch our own initiative, to ask people to read and think about what turned out to be Jameson’s posthumous work. Also as an homage to him. Jameson was, after all, one of the most distinguished figures in the humanities during the heyday of critical theory in the United States, a man of great intelligence and critical talent, and the author of important books and essays—let me just mention his book on postmodernism, extremely influential, very widely read. And so many influential articles, of which I will mention his 1986 essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” published in Social Text, which had a number of us busy for years trying to find counterexamples to his main thesis.

So here we are now, having read the book. I have to say, without pleasure, that reading it exhausted me, even though I am old enough that I can honestly say I have read most of the authors he mentions in his book, so I could contextualize his words. I can only imagine how exhausting the book may have been, or will be, for younger people who may not have had the time or the interest to read those authors in their past, and who are now confronted with this curious compendium of opinions based on the presentation of keywords. Jameson’s intelligence obviously shines through, in the choice of themes (keywords), as does his amazing command of the relevant literature. But, perhaps because of the choice of style for the seminar presentations, many times the text looks hurried, capricious, and ideologically overdetermined. Frankly, with all due respect, as I was laboriously reading the book the helicopter attack in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now kept coming to mind—you know, the scene that ends with the Coronel saying that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Because the apparent eclecticism in the presentation cannot hide, cannot dissemble, a critical strategy with which I have no alternative but to take issue.

Jameson gives us indeed a helicopter ride through or above French theory. Does he himself provide us with theory, with philosophy, with the sense of a future for rigorous thought in the humanities? (I don’t know why I say “rigorous thought in the humanities,” as I have rarely seen rigorous thought, the way I mean it, outside the humanities field). But—does he? Is there thought in that book? There is certainly learning—he has read and thought about the authors he discusses, which is something that takes a lifetime. But is what he tells us something that leads to thought, or does he lead us straight into a killing field, a sort of psychotic night of the world where thought should probably be renounced for the sake of survival in favor of some unspecified practice having to do with politics? Politics, or the claim of political praxis, becomes then Jameson’s ideological proposal, which is surprising for those of us who have heard him say many times that Marxism is not a politics.

Let me briefly go into the last lecture in the book. The “Envoi,” subtitled “Theory after De-Marxification,” gives us some clues about Jameson’s underlying purpose, which I think needs to be brought out and highlighted because we may want to disagree with it, in a context in which only that disagreement can be productive for the future, and the present, of thought. In the Envoi Jameson tells us that “we can at least see that these movements, these moments, whether in philosophical history or cultural history, don’t last” (436). They certainly don’t last if they are presented as opinions around keywords, which turns those movements, those moments, into the Hegelian night of black cows. I am not sure this was not done on purpose. Jameson contends that the movement he has been studying begins with the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943 and ends in the 1980s or 1990s, with the death of some of the last major representative figures, say, Althusser, or Foucault, or Deleuze. There is a certain dismissal in place, perhaps nihilistic in nature: “you can see with somebody like Deleuze that it is an encyclopedic endeavor that swallows everything up, after which there is no more room. Are there Deleuzians? It would seem so—everybody is talking about Deleuze—but I don’t really think so, because there is not a single doctrine. There have been Derrideans. Are there any more? Maybe now in France, but not in those days” (436). The last phrase is certainly a non-sequitur, to the extent we are talking about whether Derrideanism is still producing thought after the “there is no room” thing. But Jameson’s answer is implied: no. Nothing will surface.

Never mind. Jameson goes back to his old Althusserian mantra: “class struggle in theory.” Thought is class struggle at a theoretical level. For Althusser class struggle in theory amounted to the dismantling of idealisms from the point of view of materialism. Jameson is generous enough to say that Derrida also engaged in class struggle in theory, in his case having to do with the undoing of metaphysics. Jameson talks about that as a “quasi-political aim” (437). But here is the punch line: “they all have as their end the search for the hidden god term which turns things into idealisms that have to be unmasked, even if they can’t be destroyed” (437). What is the point, then? There is no point. “Theory was a kind of ideologically powered search for these elements in a text which had attempted to do away with its own center” (437). But reification will come back and bite those searches in the ass. So, the conclusion: “Theory was supposed to destroy the disciplines, not only philosophy but also aesthetics as a discipline, history as a discipline, ethics, of course, and even political science as a discipline. And now all of those have come back in one way or another, in the revival of ethical philosophy, aesthetic philosophy, film theory, narratology; all these things mark the institutionalization of what used to be theory and thereby the return to some kind of establishment, which certainly allows the production of all kinds of rich stuff, but the one thing it can’t do is call for anything really new” (438-39). So, Jameson kills theory. Is that surprising? Theory is for the birds, a quaint and hopeless effort. Every time somebody comes up with something, reification sets in and petrifies it. It is not worth it. We have wasted our time.

It would be alright if Jameson’s conclusion were a mere matter of the pessimism of old age. Aristotle in his Rhetoric claims that old age has its own kind of passion, and in this case, in this particular book, we find a sad passion—sad for us, who see how an important theorist of past generations gives up on the very task of theory by relativizing its results to a nothingness, a mirage, a delusion. A few years ago I had the misfortune of having to engage in an unsought-for discussion with one of Jameson’s early students, John Beverley, now retired. It is interesting that Beverley, a self-declared Marxist, reaches a conclusion that is totally parallel to Jameson’s. Beverley said, talking about theory: “At best, it can only finally point to itself, with the self-satisfaction of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The first time we see this leaves us astonished; the fourth or fifth time it has become familiarized” (Beverley 15).[i] Reification. But, as opposed to what? Can historical materialism, in a Gramscian sense, provide an alternative? That is certainly what both Jameson and Beverley think, and claim. Well, it is not the old kind of Stalinist dialectical materialism, they have made concessions, no doubt in the wake of theory itself. But they are concessions that unfortunately presuppose a core dogmatic belief system, without which, they themselves insist, nihilism ensues. And I, for one, do not believe that any kind of core dogma can keep nihilism at bay—I think it is already a monumental symptom of it. “The decision is always political,” Jameson says (139). Politics, even if politics is a rare thing, as Jameson will recognize when briefly discussing Badiou and Ranciére, is everywhere, and class struggle in theory is its true name for us, not a rare thing, but an absolute and overwhelming thing, insofar as it rules all our decisions. We are always ever doing class struggle in theory, even if we do not know it.

I am enough of a Marxian to accept that latter statement fully and without reservations. That is not the problem. The problem for me comes at the level of the presuppositions. Jameson says: “If it’s constructed, you are going to say it’s not natural, and so life is meaningless. And then there’s another step one can take, certainly another kind of existential step, through which you can simply confirm that the fact of construction itself is meaningful. That’s what we do. We construct and give ourselves a metaphysic. That’s no longer nihilistic. That’s giving ourselves a meaning, and, of course, Sartrean existentialism is founded on that process” (147). Well, the totality of Jameson’s book is certainly founded on that decision, he may call it political, but I am sure Nietzsche would be turning around in his grave on the assertion that giving ourselves a meaning springs us out of the field of nihilism. The book is premised on the arbitrary assumption that Sartre is ok, but Heidegger is not—although Jameson does not bother to examine the particulars of the Heidegger-Sartre polemics in the late 1940s, making his choice less than transparent. That has implications that lead Jameson not just to his kind of helicopter reading of what at some point he calls “the bourgeois philosophers” (331), all of them at the end unable to transcend theory into practice, and therefore limited to the production of a “quasi-politics” at best (“You can’t just have a Marxist idea. There has to be a practice attached to it. If there isn’t, then you’re already in revisionism and idealism” 194), but to assertions that I find ultimately not very useful. I will end this presentation referring to only two of them, as I am running out of time.

Jameson says: “The Left is materialist, or at least it wants to be. The Right thus must be, if not idealist, then spiritualist. Why not? But, in this kind of situation, there’s always the illusion of the third way” (268). It is no doubt the third way, which is the way of thought, that, while shared by most of the thinkers of the “years of theory,” leads them irrevocably to the final production of a meaningless, reified nominalism deprived of a praxis. But of course this argument eats itself. Why should we accept that, even within class struggle in theory, there are only two ways, and everything else is an illusion? What if we countered that the true illusion is the dogmatic positing of those two neat, opposed ways, Left and Right, materialism and idealism?

And Jameson says: “The philosopher must try to divest thought of idealism, to bring things back to materialism. So there you have a fairly clear notion of this constant process philosophy is engaged in, which is not so different from what Wittgenstein proposed: getting rid of all the false problems, all the verbiage, and going back to the things that matter, transparent or common language. It is at least analogous” (330). This return, in the name of the first way, to transparent or common language after the years of theory, to “the things that matter,” even though we are not told what they are—can it really become the figure in the carpet for future thought? Or is that pretension not the primary producer of an anxiety that could be disavowed, certainly, as it is by most of us in the age of the doldrums? I certainly hope our Critical Theory Collective focuses on every possible modulation of third-way anxiety instead of falling prey to the sad passion of common-sense transparency, with political pretensions, which has become the only name of university discourse in our present.

Wellborn, Texas, January 2025

[i] See John Beverley, “The Pittsburgh Model and Other Thoughts on the Field (Hispanism/Latinamericanism,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 74.1 (2021): 7-16. See also Alberto Moreiras, “On the Recommendation of Social Death,” https://infraphilosophy.com/2021/12/11/on-the-recommendation-of-social-death/

Can Decoloniality and Infrapolitics Live Together? A Paper Presented at the Decoloniality, Infrapolitics & the Anthropocene Workshop, Texas A&M, November 7, 2024.

All I want with this paper is to initiate a straightforward, hopefully upright conversation. In all modesty and without pretensions, if such a thing is possible. Obviously I will start from my own situation, from my own place, but in full knowledge of the fact that nobody owns a place, and that any place is always already not just provisional but subject to radical displacement. A place is only ever a place of wandering and errancy. I think it was Nietzsche who said in Ecce Homo that we can never advance beyond our own skin, that we can only ever make explicit what we already have inside us. This is an old theme of philosophy, perhaps going back at least to Plato’s Meno: yes, you already know everything, everything is always already in you, it is just a matter of bringing it out, of making it explicit, of letting it come out of silence, but the status of that “everything” is of course bound by and to a certain nothingness or a certain disavowal: the disavowal that makes us think that there is nothing in the other, that we are always ever the guardians of truth, which is therefore to be understood as our own truth. But then what about other truths, the truths of others? I am not sure the powerful understanding of truth as unconcealment, truth as bringing things out of concealment, is commensurate with what I am trying to say. There is also the truth that comes from exposure, which is an experiential truth obtained in errancy, where what is learned is not the secret of the other, or even the secret of oneself, but rather something else, and in the first place the very place of the secret. This experience of the secret is not to be resolved in digging it up or finding it out, it is not a matter of unconcealing the secret, not even a matter of having the secret revealed. It is only a matter of respecting it. This is perhaps the fundamental insight of what we have been calling infrapolitics, and there I will start.

As you all know, this gathering was convoked under the idea, not yet the promise, of a certain living together in the end-times, if you prefer the near- or quasi-end-times that we have come to name the Anthropocene as the new global dominant or universal predicament. Can decolonials and infrapoliticals, if you will pardon the unforgivable reduction of this naming, ever live together now? As opposed, perhaps, to dying together? Such would be the most vulgar or inauthentic formulation of the question that gathers us. Are there irreconcilable differences that could only be subjected to a postapocalyptic final judgment by a third party, an illeity, never a neutral one? Unless of course the final judgment were to be the apocalypse itself. Another vulgar or inauthentic question might emerge from the first one: is this an issue that affects only decolonials and infrapoliticals? Or is the difference between the two itself only symptomatic of a wider state of affairs that affects contemporary thought, or what goes under that name in the global academy and beyond? Well, both decoloniality and infrapolitics come to us through academic filiation, both modalities of thought are children of the university, even if they are rebellious, or seemingly rebellious, children. Decoloniality of course claims that what it does goes against the grain of the structural Eurocentrism of the university, of its very idea, and infrapolitics claims that what it does or attempts to do is precisely exodic because it is the response to a call that comes from some absolute outside, which would be in the first place the outside of the university.

But I don’t want to be too grandiose, there might be time for that later. Let me for the moment restrict myself to the destiny of thought today, or of academic thought, caught up as I see it between the twin imperatives of technical reproduction and the avoidance of terminal nihilism. I call them twin imperatives because technical reproduction and the avoidance of terminal nihilism may be one and the same thing, maybe those twins are monozygotic and not dizygotic. At least in the misguided but nevertheless dominant understanding of them. In any case, it remains a fact that decoloniality might adopt as its thing the avoidance of terminal nihilism, and infrapolitics as well, but the key question is: are either decoloniality or infrapolitics subject to the imperative of technical reproduction? Do we do what we do because there is a program in place, a university program after all, that we have been called or elected to develop? Can we in fact affirm a subtraction from the program, to such an extent that we could posit either decoloniality or infrapolitics as free decisions of thought?

But the program, any program, is always already a form of maieutics, the framework for maieutics. You know that maieutics comes from the Greek word for midwifery. The maieutic teacher helps students bring forth the understanding that is already latent in their mind. In our case, the university would be the midwife, it teaches us the same way we teach our students: what it teaches is for us to make explicit what is already latent, seeded in our minds as university children. In an essay on Emmanuel Levinas Jacques Derrida explains that Levinas, for one, opposed all maieutics. He says:

This master never separated his teaching from a strange and difficult thought of teaching—a magisterial teaching in the figure of welcoming, a welcoming where ethics interrupts the philosophical tradition of giving birth and foils the ruse of the master who feigns to efface himself behind the figure of the midwife. For the study of which we are speaking cannot be reduced to a maieutics, which would reveal to me only what I am already capable of. (17)

But maieutics teaches nothing, because it does not expose me to any otherness. Maieutics is always more of the same, yes, in the form of power/knowledge, which reaffirms the property of what is proper under the form of some essentiality. But what if we were to renounce maieutics for the sake of exposure to what exceeds and has always exceeded our capacity of return to the self, to the proper self or to the property of the self? One could indeed say that this renunciation of maieutics is the very opening of decoloniality: that decoloniality is, in its full rigor and in the fulfilment of its promise, a radical opening to the other, an endorsement of a messianicity that awaits, without waiting, for the arrival of the other. Perhaps, although the problems, we all know, start there.

What are we to do with the arrival of the other, provided that it is the other who comes, and not the inverted figure of ourselves in a concave mirror? Concesso non dato: it is not so easy to abandon maieutics, it is not so easy to abandon the program. The decolonial researcher, going in all good faith towards an encounter with the other, meets only himself in an inverted form—another way of saying, certainly, that the risk of decolonization is an insidious return of coloniality, now disavowed. I want to be particularly careful now when I say, trembling, that if the goal presiding over a possible arrival of the other, if the teleology of the arrival of the other in messianic decoloniality is restitution, partial or full, there is always the damning possibility of a wayward restitution, of a restitution that would only restitute the goal of the researcher, colonizing as such even if we call it liberation or emancipation. Of course it can and should be said that the very possibility of a wayward or thwarted restitution is to be affirmed not denied; that without establishing wayward restitution as a condition of possibility for proper restitution there could be no restitution whatsoever. Things can always go wrong, which is the very ground for thinking that things could also go well. If they go well, what, then? What would have been accomplished? True restitution? That would amount to saying that, at the end of the decolonial endeavor, the decolonized subject would have been re-established in its proper place, some purity of archaic identity would be ready to be assumed. I do not think it is useful for me to point out that this notion of true restitution is fraught with all kinds of problems, beyond the obvious ones of anachronicity and de-spatialization, but let me suggest that true restitution is also the absolute dream of the master of Western metaphysics, as indicated by one of its founding words, namely, the old Parmenides fragment that tells us that thinking and being are the same: in true restitution the identity of thinking and being would have been accomplished, through the midwifery of the decolonial academic—a thought that introduces the specter of full metaphysical recolonization in the midst of the decolonial enterprise.

But this can be countered. It would seem to be enough to say that decolonization can never be accomplished, that it remains an infinite task, that it is only a regulatory idea or ideal: the decolonial researcher retains the position of a teaching midwife, in a perverse or perverted manner: what it teaches is not the full equation of thinking and being for the colonial subject but rather only ever the impossible obstacles that stand in the way of such an equation; and that the teaching of the impossible obstacles interrupts or perverts midwifery by opening it up to a fundamental and fundamentally critical activity, which is in the first place an activity of self-critique—the decolonial researcher critiques herself through the very focus on the infinite destruction of Western and imperialist presuppositions. The decolonial researcher knows that she risks infinitely her own inverted return in a concave mirror, a distorted speculative image, and her brand of maieutics is precisely the destruction, endless, ceaseless, of her own presuppositions, in order to open the way for the unconditional arrival of the other. That way the decolonial researcher exposes herself, and what she teaches, and learns, beyond maieutics, is respect for the secret of the other. It is a work of hospitality. Decoloniality, under this guise, is infinite and unconditional hospitality. This is the way in which decoloniality could perhaps avoid the charge of engaging in merely technical reproduction of university discourse—after all, since the Enlightenment, liberation and emancipation have been the explicit goals of university discourse–, with one caveat: not if infinite decolonization thinks of itself as only ever approaching, without ever finally reaching, the conditions of possibility for full restitution. There can be no restitution without a reengagement of maieutic metaphysics, in the same way that there can be no equality of thinking and being except in death. The ideal of restitution must be drastically abandoned, also because it remains an ideal—a teleological or providential projection that is very much part and parcel of the archaic origins of the West but sustained until today, which is the epoch of a new global dominant that ruins in advance all theodicy.

Infrapolitics, on the other hand, entertains no business with restitution. It has always known that there is no adequation of thinking and being, and that thinking and being can only meet at the moment of the impossible possibility of death, by which time it is too late. Infrapolitics opens itself to the arrival of the other in the absolute recognition and respect for the secret of the other as such—a secret that infrapolitics does not want to unconceal, does not want to reveal. Infrapolitics is a practice of the silent secret, which is therefore essentially outside every maieutics, outside every ventriloquist articulation of the voice of the other. Infrapolitics lets the secret be, or dwell, outside any temptation of ventriloquism, including self-ventriloquism, an impossible trope, I know. But there is also a bad infrapolitics, just as there is a bad decoloniality. If bad decoloniality is the decolonial practice that aims at the restitution of the full identity of the other, which is a disavowed endeavor of interested recolonization, then bad infrapolitics is the infrapolitical practice of imposing its renunciation of restitution on political or juridical affairs. Infrapolitics is not a politics, it is only the condition of possibility for any politics worthy of the name of democracy. But infrapolitics can exceed itself into politics in the attempt to dictate restrictions for political or juridical affairs. If infrapolitics thinks of a state of affairs situated beyond power and impotence, then infrapolitics must restrain itself from projecting itself into power, which might in fact result into further impotence. Bad infrapolitics results from a crossing of the line that separates absolutely existence from politics, thus contaminating both terminally, and accessing the impracticable and interminable night where all the cows are black. We may indeed call it the night of the Anthropocene. Which is not to say that politics are forbidden to infrapolitics: politics are wide open, but always ever under another name that remains to be decided or invented.

Around the same years in which the very notion of the Anthropocene came to obscure light, Elizabeth Roudinesco interviewed Jacques Derrida on the subject of psychoanalysis. At the beginning of the conversation Derrida makes reference to the fact that, at present, that is, in that very moment, the secret of psychoanalysis “calls . . . for another ethics, another right, another politics. In short, another law (a law of the other, of course, another heteronomy)” (168). The same could be said about the secret of infrapolitics. Derrida refers to Freudian analysis, in spite of its problems and metaphysical or ontotheological hangups, as liberating a force that “always involves the reaffirmation of a reason ‘without alibi,’ whether theological or metaphysical” (172). No theological or humanist alibi: I am not sure that could be said of the decolonial option, but such could be my hope, the hope that would make it possible, from my neck of the woods, to consider the possibility of “living together.” I want to close this paper by quoting and glossing a couple of paragraphs from that interview that I find particularly pertinent for our discussion at this meeting. Derrida says:

Globalization is Europeanization. And yet, Europe is withdrawing; it is being fissured and transformed. What is exported, in a European language, immediately sees itself called into question again in the name of what was potentially at work in this European legacy itself, in the name of a possible auto-hetero-deconstruction. Or even, I would say, of autoimmunity. (178)

Notice how the withdrawal of the European legacy is understood as a thwarted maieutics: what is potentially in the legacy operates the deconstruction of the legacy. A fidelity to the legacy implies the betrayal of the legacy no doubt for the sake of another ethics, another right, another politics. But nothing is guaranteed in the process. Derrida continues:

The non-European ‘cultural zones’ . . . while developing a powerful and indisputable contestation of Eurocentrism, are in the process of letting themselves be Europeanized far beyond the imperialist or colonialist forms we know. We are therefore witnessing, we are participating in—whether we like it or not—this double movement: globalization of Europeanness and contestation of Eurocentrism. (178)

It is a double solicitation where I think both decoloniality and infrapolitics are drastically implicated, perhaps even in opposed sides from the point of view of some of their basic assumptions, but there is a peculiarity to this: those opposed sides are aiming for the same thing, which is a free decision for thought. Looking for it, looking for its very possibility in the dark night of the Anthropocene is indeed the avoidance of nihilism and the contestation of merely technical reproduction of university discourse. The stakes are very high, and they are the stakes of a necessary revolution, for which we can only engage in a sort of non-passive wait. We cannot influence machination, it would be naïve to think we can. So—let us at least not cooperate with it. As another French thinker, Jean Vioulac, puts it, citing Epicurus on lathe biosas kai me politeuesthai (live hidden and don’t play politics), in the understanding that today’s politics is machination itself, “the thinker must not have the naiveté . . . to believe himself capable of in any way influencing the sovereign power of machination. His only responsibility is to think, and the thinker’s solitude is the abstention that gives him the distance and the freedom to think: that is, to think the event that defines our epoch, to try to unconceal what in it is capable of warking off the threat, and to wait for it” (65).

Isn’t that non-passive wait the common trait to both infrapolitics and decoloniality in their best figures? If so, we can indeed live together, or at least survive, or at least look for the possibility of survival, in necessary separation, since the very arrival of the other presupposes it.

Alberto Moreiras

Wellborn, Texas, October 2024

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

transl. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

— and Elizabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue. Jeff Fort transl.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.

Vioulac, Jean. Apocalypse of Truth. Heideggerian Meditations. Matthew Peterson Transl.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2021.