Contribution to Conversation on Heidegger’s Zürich Seminar. Vigo, July 2026

I thank Pete Ferreira and Lee Braver for the opportunity to participate in this conversation, and of course Daniel Fidel Ferrer for providing the translation. It corresponds to a conversation in Zurich on November 6, 1951, with a number of Swiss academics and critics. We know little else. There are internal indications to previous conversations on Hölderlin, presumably to a lecture Heidegger had delivered in Darmstadt in August of the same year, that is, only three months earlier, titled “Building Dwelling Thinking,” but almost certainly to another lecture, “Poetically Man Dwells,” first delivered in October at Bühlerhöhe.

I will use the time initially allotted to me by referring to what is only one of the strands in the text—a very rich text, needless to say, where everything is interrelated in subtle ways. But I need to get into it in some partial way. And since it just so happens that I was a participant at a meeting in Granada earlier this month (organized by Gerardo Muñoz and Daniel García López and entitled “Desecularización y teología”) where the issue of an “other beginning” in the Heideggerian sense was discussed, I will take it from there. The reason is that people directly and indirectly connected to Giorgio Agamben were present at the meeting, and that only two days after the end of the meeting Agamben published a short blog note attacking (is that too strong a word?) the very notion of an “other beginning” as naïve. In any case, this is a vexed and vexing issue where sometimes opinions are rather preposterously rushed and uninformed. It almost works, sometimes, as if people reacted only to the phrase, now turned into a mere ideologeme without depth. Presumably because they come at it from alternative cheap ideologemes. So the gigantomachia concerning the other beginning becomes what old Aesop designed as the occasion for the production of a tiny mouse: parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Of course I have no idea whether Agamben was even remotely referring to the Granada discussions. Never mind: with all due respect, I think what he says in that note is rather misleading. Let me quote him first and then proceed to elaborate on why it is misconceived on the basis of Heidegger’s text. Agamben titles his note “A Way Out,” and he says: “Often, in the diffuse awareness that we are witnessing the end of a culture, the need—or hope—for a new beginning arises, meaning that after the collapse of a long tradition, a new and more vibrant one will eventually come into being. Against this naive expectation, it is necessary to remember that what we need is not a new beginning, but a way out” (Agamben, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-una-via-di-uscita). But the problem is: how can you find a way out without cutting a path for it, and how is that new path not in some strong sense necessarily a new beginning? Whether it lasts or not, whether it is solid or silly, whether it can provide the very ground for a passage or not. Agamben goes on: “After the collapse of Western history, the last thing we want is a new historical era; rather, we want to put an end to eras altogether, to get out once and for all and not just start over. Out towards where? We can’t say, but that’s a good thing.” Is it? You can’t get out of anywhere if you do not have some idea of what the outside might offer, whether such an idea is correct or stupid.

I will now focus on the sections of the Zürich seminar conversation where Heidegger says something relevant concerning this issue. The seminar starts emphatically on the notion of learning how to read, which is consistent with remarks made in the black notebooks. It is necessary to learn how to read because, Heidegger says, “one cannot think without thinking historically” (4). This already throws a clue: thinking means thinking historically, which necessarily means that there is no other beginning to be understood as tabula rasa. Any notion of an other beginning is still, Heidegger says, a form of philology: “Once this has been recognized can one affirm philology. And insofar as this is so, I too practice philology” (4).

We have read insufficiently, even blindly. We do not yet know how to read. And “destruction” has ensued (5). “We shall not emerge from this situation by constructing yet another theology behind it, but rather through eventually attaining a new fundamental relation to that which is. What is at issue is entering into a new relation to Being” (6). There is no new theology in the other beginning, because the other beginning is only a “turn,” not a proclamation “in the manner of a prophet” (6). “Preparing the turn” is “the unspoken sense of my entire thinking” (6), Heidegger says, not idle words. But preparing the turn, please note, is itself a function of learning how to read. How to read historically. And when one learns how to read, one learns to read what has been thought, namely, by also unconcealing what is unthought in the thought. “I see in the fact that what I call the ontological difference, or simply ‘the difference,’ has remained unthought—not a failure on the part of humanity, but rather . . . indeed . . . simply the event that here something had not yet become manifest, and that accordingly something has been reserved for the human being insofar as the human being stands in relation to Being (eksists)” (8). The other beginning, in the Heideggerian usage that Agamben cannot but be very familiar with, is simply a re-inception of the beginning of thinking in historical humanity on the basis of a remembrance of the unthought, a remembrance of what was and has remained unthought in the thought. One can of course naively reject this, but one should refrain from calling it naïve.

What is at stake is the preparation of a “fundamental disposition” that would oppose the fallenness of the contemporary distribution of knowledge, notably in the sciences, whose disposition is that of “an assault upon Being itself” (8). “Here there prevails a process grounded in the essence of technology, namely that within it—if one may say this in the sense of destiny—the essential destruction occurs” (8).

Warding off the essential destruction is the paramount interest of the other beginning, by revising—remembering, through reading—what has been left unthought in the thought. Heidegger calls it “recollective thinking” (8), itself a sufficiently clear indication that he is not proposing any new technical invention, any gadget or ideological rocket that would enable us to find an exit—a via di uscita— from the world in Agamben’s sense.

In Granada I mentioned, following an indication made to me by Peter Trawny, that Heidegger is the first decolonial thinker. This apparently caused some consternation. But the point is clear enough. If the history of being initiated in archaic Greece has led us to “an age in which transformations must prepare themselves, or in which initially only this enormous process of the Europeanization of the planet comes to completion” (9), the other beginning radically interrupts destructive global Europeanization through recollective thinking.

At the end of the text, responding to the penultimate question addressed to him, Heidegger says: “my private opinion is that the turning of the destiny of the human being can presumably only proceed from the very place from which this terminal condition of the contemporary planet has arisen” (13).

We are here, all of us are here. It doesn’t look good, nothing is very promising. But we should not just look to abandon things, we have to think what has been unthought in history, history as it has been. It is just a matter of learning how to read in order to prepare a turn: an other beginning.

Teaching Prohibition

Think about Nazi Germany, the purported defender of the West, allying itself with Japan and signing a nonaggression pact with Bolshevik Russia. It is an example. Another one: Think about the Trump administration, professing an end to war adventurism and engaging itself in the administration of Venezuelan Chavism or threatening to take over Greenland by whatever means necessary. The truth of the political is not political; politics lies, and there is no properly political truth. Whatever politics brings out of concealment remains mired in a superordinate concealment that can only by handled by doxa, always political. To that extent, we should always think of politics by positing a metapolitics and an infrapolitics that constantly go along with it in a rather uncanny way, unpredictable and yet always present. Both of them, metapolitics and infrapolitics, are permanent guests and witnesses to the political game but never more than secondary players, adventitious participants in it at most. Sometimes they are implicit and sometimes they become explicit. Perhaps it is only when they are made explicit that politics finds its (improper) truth. Metapolitics and infrapolitics, in different ways, unconceal the impossible truth of politics. The truth of politics is therefore always metapolitical or infrapolitical.

We are about to start the semester at my academic institution. We must do so under an injunction that has metapolitical force: we are to abstain, in our teaching, from “racial ideology,” from “gender ideology,” and from “sexual ideology.” It is an administrative injunction, and if we ignore it we will lose our jobs. The prohibition has more weight than its content: what is in fact, racial, gender, or sexual ideology? Nobody knows for sure. It is to be determined politically, from student denunciations, which are being encouraged, or by administrative opinion. But it is a prohibition that affects the witnessing that all teaching carries within it. One can be a witness to the prohibition, we must be, it has been made clear enough, and others must witness its potential transgression. But the question for me is: if my teaching is to be decided by the prohibition, which is to say tainted by it, if the prohibition stands metapolitically over every word I say, every witnessing of the teaching material I profess, can I still teach without lying? Can I offer any truth that is not always already preempted by the metapolitical injunction to abstain from any nearness to racial, gender, or sexual ideology? Yes, I can be silent on race, and gender, and sex, I normally am anyway—but will that now obligatory silence carry through into whatever I may wish, nay, have to say on, say, the medieval history of Spain? Will the metapolitical injunction bring my teaching to ruin? In the name of opposing indoctrination, they turn teaching into mere indoctrination. Metapolitics is indoctrination, at any rate its desire. But teaching is not indoctrination, whatever else it may be.

Can I oppose infrapolitical strategies to the metapolitical injunction? May I hope to reveal the improper truth of the political otherwise? That is, not by submitting to the metapolitical injunction, not by transgressing it so that I become a potential victim of denunciations and penalties, simply by retaining the thought that teaching is always a form of witnessing or it is nothing, comes to nothing. It is not easy to do. One has to think of ways. And the first question would then be: should I share this very text with my students? Should I have them witness it?

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.

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.