Me alegra seguir el ejemplo de Gerardo Muñoz y escribir unas palabras de reconocimiento al importante libro de José Luis Villacañas sobre populismo.   Como Gerardo ya ha hecho (ver más abajo en el blog) un análisis temático del libro, eso me permite a mí aprovecharme de su trabajo y concentrarme sólo en algunos puntos especiales.   Debo decir de entrada, para preparar mi propia reflexión, que, a pesar de que la elegancia intelectual y personal de José Luis le lleva en las primeras páginas a resaltar la complejidad práctico-teórica del populismo, y así su dignidad intelectual, como opción política para el presente, su ensayo es, a mi juicio, una demolición sistemática y total del fenómeno, sin concesiones de ninguna clase. Cada uno tiene sus preferencias personales, pero hay que notar que es difícil, tras la lectura, sustraerse a la idea de que el populismo es política para idiotas.   Y todavía más difícil encontrar formas de articular un desacuerdo con tan severo dictamen.

Villacañas escribe su libro en un momento especialmente grave de la política española, cruzada, como él mismo expone, por un desgaste de carácter fundamental en tres niveles—crisis económica, crisis institucional y crisis de representación política—que amenaza con convertirse en crisis orgánica (“Un paso en falso, solo uno, y desde luego los éxitos históricos de la España contemporánea pueden verse comprometidos” [122]). No hace falta ser un lince para entender que el libro no se postula sólo como un acto académico ni meramente reflexivo, sino que tiene una intencionalidad política de primer orden, y quizá dominante. Pero el libro lo escribe no un cascarrabias del 78 sino alguien que ha apoyado en los últimos tiempos frecuente, grande y entusiastamente la posible renovación política española representada por Podemos.   Muchos se rascarán el cácumen con perplejidad: ¿cómo este hombre se permite tan fieros denuestos contra el populismo si sus simpatías políticas están con el partido de Pablo Iglesias?   ¿No es cierto acaso que la mayor parte de los defensores académicos de la línea política de Podemos lo hacen precisamente desde el populismo, desde posiciones pro-populistas, desde posiciones que apoyan sin renuencia alguna a los máximos teóricos del populismo, en el mejor de los casos a los buenos, como Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe, y a su escuela, y en otros casos también a los mediocres, que son los tantos citados y recitados en los artículos que uno va leyendo sobre la llamada “latinoamericanización” de la Europa del Sur (¡pero no es eso!), las decolonialidades pendientes en España (tampoco), los poderes duales, y las virtudes infinitas del comunitarismo universal, para no hablar de los identitarismos endémicos que son como el cola-cao de la joven izquierda descerebrada (y descerebrada históricamente, no vayan a pensar que este es un insulto caprichoso y trivial, por razones que Villacañas expone y analiza persuasivamente en su libro)?

Pero, cabalmente, esa es la intencionalidad política real de su libro: a favor de una renovación radical de la política española, a favor de una sucesión política efectiva, y sin embargo en guardia contra lo que en esa renovación y sucesión puede convertirse en catastrófico, puesto que no hay garantía de que no vaya a ser así. Hay que leer, por ejemplo, con cuidado el siguiente párrafo: “Las demandas de las mareas sociales en defensa de la educación, de la sanidad, de las mujeres, de los homosexuales, de los ecologistas, de los dependientes, de los desahuciados, de los afectados por la hepatitis, todas eran demandas sectoriales. No fueron equivalenciales. Tenían detrás colectivos de profesionales, intereses parciales, no reclamos populistas. Es verdad que había un denominador común: los unía un gobierno que se empeñaba en una agenda torpe e inviable, que desconocía la realidad social de un país que deseaba ofrecer a minorías instaladas en estilos e ideas muy atrasadas respecto a las clases medias españolas. Pero todas esas demandas no forjaron un reclamo populista. Todavía estaban guiadas por una aspiración moderna de dotarse de instituciones eficaces, públicas, funcionales, solidarias. Se veía todo el esquema neoliberal más bien como una regresión que conectaba con los profundos estados carenciales de las instituciones predemocráticas españolas” (118).

El uso dominante del imperfecto en la cita, sin duda escogido e intencionado, comunica implícitamente el temor de que ya no sea así, de que las demandas sectoriales del 15-M hayan evolucionado hoy, en manos del partido que se autodenomina su consecuencia política crucial, y de su máximo líder, hacia demandas equivalenciales características de un populismo en construcción, dedicado a la formación hegemónica y dedicado a la toma del poder por la vía más rápida posible.   Si, como dice Bécquer Seguín en “Podemos and Its Critics” (Radical Philosophy 193 [2015]), Podemos es hoy un partido cuyo horizonte ideológico está repartido entre un neo-gramscianismo y un neo-leninismo, pero ambos vaciados de su sentido marxista y renovados en el sentido de una retorización dominantemente populista, la preocupación transparente en Villacañas es la de reforzar, dentro de tal partido, las tendencias abiertamente ni neo-gramscianas ni neo-leninistas.   La opción favorecida por Villacañas es en realidad una opción presente en Podemos, en alguno de sus máximos dirigentes, y es todavía incierta su materialización efectiva: el republicanismo democrático, él mismo de vieja raigambre y que incluye desde luego a Karl Marx si no precisamente al marxismo histórico entre sus defensores.

Me permito un ejemplo entre tantos que, en su ambigüedad, justifica la alarma y la crítica. En el artículo publicado ayer por Pablo Iglesias en El País, que conviene entender como un esfuerzo mediático por deshacer cierta torpeza retórica cometida en el faux pas de su primera propuesta de un gobierno de coalición a Pedro Sánchez, “El gobierno del cambio” (26 de enero, 2016), dice Iglesias: “Sabemos . . . que la mejor vacuna contra la traición, las filtraciones falsas y el doble juego es hacer a los ciudadanos testigos de lo que se dice y se hace. Por eso hemos invitado a Sánchez a un diálogo público y abierto a la ciudadanía, sin perjuicio de las reuniones que deban tenerse. En las reuniones se fija el texto de los acuerdos que después deben hacerse públicos, pero en los diálogos públicos se contrastan propuestas y argumentos.” Así que las conversaciones políticas ya no son, según Iglesias, conversaciones, sino que asumen más bien la forma de gritos en el mercado, y esos gritos son los que salvan al lenguaje de caer arteramente bajo la traición y el doble juego. No creo que haya que darle a estas frases un papel demasiado ejemplar, en la misma medida en que son frases defensivas, pero tampoco hay que desoírlas: la espectacularización de la política, y del lenguaje político, es un rasgo tan ampliamente populista como abiertamente antirrepublicano.   Estamos, en principio, servidos.  “Nadie está en condiciones de saber cuáles serán los frutos de las políticas educativas, culturales, familiares y económicas que se han impulsado en los cuarenta primeros años de nuestra práctica democrática española ni los retos que podrá encarar la sociedad que el régimen democrático nacional-liberal español ha configurado. Pero ya es una mala señal que no tengamos garantía alguna de que un correcto republicanismo cívico pueda ganar la partida al cortocircuito de alianzas que el neoliberalismo teje con el populismo” (114). ¿Cómo es esto último?

Como el liberalismo, el populismo no reconoce contenidos vinculantes y es por lo tanto abiertamente contracomunitario. El populismo ha asumido desde ya su punto de partida nihilista, o nihílico en la palabra de Felipe Martínez Marzoa. El populismo no parte de contenidos sustanciales ni afirma la esencialidad de ningún pueblo.   El populismo, más bien, se esfuerza permanentemente por construir un pueblo, por construir una noción de comunidad, y por rechazar por lo tanto la herencia nihílica a favor de su conjuración afectiva.   Así, desde una situación de partida que comparte con el liberalismo, el populismo se ofrece como su precisa o imprecisa alternativa. El libro se concentra en definir apretadamente los rasgos fundamentales de la posición populista desde su mejor formulación teórica, que es la elaborada por Ernesto Laclau en La razón populista. Los rasgos mínimos que detecta Villacañas, y que permiten por lo tanto una definición inicialmente apropiada de populismo, pueden resumirse en la siguiente cita: “el pueblo es una comunidad construida mediante una operación hegemónica basada en el conflicto, que diferencia en el seno de una unidad nacional o estatal entre amigos/enemigos como salida a la anomia política y fundación de un nuevo orden” (22). Los rasgos fundamentales son pues no sólo los definidos por Yannis Stavrakakis y su grupo de Salónica: la creación de un antagonismo y la invocación tendencialmente inclusiva de un “nosotros;” sino que en Villacañas incluyen un tercer rasgo, a saber, la intención de construcción comunitaria en recurso hegemónico fundacional: “esto significa que el populismo trata de transformar la sociedad de masas en comunidad políticamente operativa. Su problema es cómo hacerlo” (36).

La voluntad de creación comunitaria, en recurso hegemónico por lo demás, significa que el populismo se articula como movilización permanente. “Es un proceso en movimiento,” dice Villacañas. El populismo es movilización, y en cuanto movilización es también movilización post-crisis: una vez arruinadas las bases operativas de algún sistema social, el populismo se instala en el vacío, como respuesta a él, y moviliza lo social a favor de una invención retórica: Villacañas cita a Laclau, “La construcción política del pueblo es esencialmente catacrética” (43), se instala en el lugar de un vacío. “Se trata de crear instituciones nuevas mediante un poder constituyente nuevo” (64).   Para ello, el populismo necesita de otra función estructural que es para Villacañas sine qua non: la función del líder carismático, soporte afectivo de los procesos de identificación libidinal sin los cuales no podría consolidarse construcción retórica alguna. El líder es el representante sustancial, es decir, la encarnación simbólica de las demandas equivalenciales. Pero es un líder peculiar, pues su función consiste sólo en representar, y no en cumplir, tales demandas.   Villacañas es rotundo: “El líder populista no atiende demandas insatisfechas, lo que Weber llamaba ‘intereses materiales de las masas.’   Eso haría del líder populista un constructor institucional, lo que llevaría a una disolución de la formación populista” (73-74).   Con ello, el fin político del populismo lo predispone (o lo apresta) a una movilización permanente, incesante, ajena a cualquier normalización. Y esta es en el fondo la condena a mi parecer más dañina de la efectividad política del populismo en Villacañas: “lo decisivo es que el populismo asume como principal objetivo el mantener las condiciones de posibilidad de las que brotó” (79); “En lugar de usar el poder para superar la crisis y recomponer la atención a demandas parciales, usa el poder para perpetuar la crisis institucional, generando en la formación del pueblo el muro de contención del desorden que él mismo ayuda a mantener” (83).   Pero esto significa que la desmovilización populista es necesariamente traición, y así en rigor que no puede darse la desmovilización populista. El populismo es un movimiento que no aspira a su cumplimiento, o más bien un movimiento cuyo cumplimiento es su misma permanencia efectiva como movimiento.   Y es esto lo que lo hace política para idiotas (agitados).

No necesariamente de idiotas, claro, sino para idiotas. El papel del líder—por lo tanto, también de aquellos que amparan al líder en cuanto líder, la intelligentsia del partido que es en todo populismo soberana–es entender demasiado bien que no hay ya diferenciación institucional posible, que no hay por lo tanto complejidades sectoriales que abastecer. El papel del líder es buscar, en todo momento, la reducción y simplificación de la política a mecanismos de identificación imaginaria, que sostengan el deseo comunitario: “Todo lo que el populismo dice de la trama equivalencial tiene como supuesto el abandono de la tarea de singularización que suponemos prometida por la existencia de la inteligencia en nosotros” (94). ¿Cómo habríamos llegado a tal cosa, y llamarlo renovación?   Villacañas dedica algunas de sus mejores páginas a explicitar por qué el populismo es consecuencia directa de la devastación orgánica a la que el neoliberalismo somete lo social: “Cuanto más triunfe el neoliberalismo como régimen social, más probabilidades tiene el populismo de triunfar como régimen político” (99).   Si ambos son espejos mutuos, el populismo se convierte en una amenaza perpetua, de carácter siempre reactivo, a la sociedad neoliberal que facilita su alza.

La esperanza de que el republicanismo democrático se imponga en España contra la tentación populista—ya algo más que tentación en Cataluña—no queda enunciada más que como esperanza en este libro.   No es este un libro optimista, aunque los que conocen la labor periodística de Villacañas no habrán dejado de percibir un optimismo real en sus artículos. Aquí, sin embargo, la denuncia del populismo, como posibilidad no ya implícita en el curso de los tiempos, sino semiconsumada o en ciernes de hacerlo (no hay que pensar sólo en el todavía indeciso Podemos, sino en tantos otros de los fenómenos criptopopulistas que se desatan todos los días en las periferias y márgenes de la política real en casi todos los ámbitos de la contestación política en España) encuentra su colofón en la siguiente frase: “Si bien la crisis española no es todavía orgánica, podría serlo. Y el populismo tiene puesta su mirada en este horizonte” (119). El populismo emerge en este libro como una maldición contingente, pero se trata de una contingencia frente a la que no es dado hacer mucho en el corto plazo.   Sólo esperar que no se cumpla del todo, o, en todo caso, y esa puede ser la tarea política real de la generación presente, luchar por su desmovilización efectiva.   Me pregunto si el republicanismo en España no capitalizará su verdadera promesa en el “día después” de alguna pesadilla populista generalizada de la que quizá sea ya demasiado tarde para librarse.

“Only a wrenching of thinking allows one to pass from the “time” that is concerned with epochal thinking to originary time, which is Ereignis—to agonistic, polemical freeings. So, it is not as an a priori that temporal discordance fissures the referential positings around which epochs have built their hegemonic concordances” (Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies 598)

Preliminary Remarks for “No Peace Beyond the Line. On Infrapolitical An-archy: The Work of Reiner Schürmann.” A Workshop. January 11-12 2016, Texas A&M.

For a little less than two years now we have been pursuing or unfolding or developing or whatever it is one does with these things a research or thinking project based on our professional histories and orientations as mostly Latinamericanist or Hispanist literary and cultural scholars but not limited to them. The project revolves for the moment around two master terms, namely, “infrapolitics” and “posthegemony.”   Those are terms that come from a reflection dating back to the late 1990’s and early 2000’s in our professional field, but which were neglected after 2003 or so for reasons that there would be no need to explain at the moment but that have to do with a certain collapse of the spirit for collective work, which became pervasive at least in the sector of the professional field interested in theoretical work beyond merely so-called political commitment.

We named the project in its new instantiation Infrapolitical Deconstruction, where by “deconstruction” we ought to understand not just Derrideanism but also the Heideggerian deconstruction (Abbau) of the history of thought in the West, whose practice and continuation have come to characterize the so-called Heideggerian left. Infrapolitics names a space of thought and existence that subtends political life while not being alien to it, or, if you want, subtends social life while not being reducible to it.   Posthegemony, the absent third term, refers—politically, insofar as it is an explicitly political term—to the Machiavellian dictum according to which “the rich like to dominate, the poor do not like to be dominated,” and takes a position against both sides of the Machiavellian phrase (posthegemony is not only a refusal of domination—it is also a recognition that domination happens in myriad ways and that political conflict is primary and unavoidable.)

We named the resulting group the Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective. We conduct most of our activity through the web, in social networks, with occasional meetings such as this one, sometimes taking advantage of large professional gatherings such as LASA or ACLA, sometimes simply using whatever resources are available to us in the diminished scenario of the contemporary university.   The group also meets with others, for instance through the Seminario Crítico Político Transnacional summer meetings in Spain.   We were initially small, about fifteen people or so. Over the last year and a half, a little more, the group grew to a membership of about ninety, but the core of it is still small and will conceivably continue to remain small. Some of the core members are here today, and I greatly appreciate that and thank them for it. This is an important event in the little history of our group, and let me take this moment as an opportunity to thank all the participants and also the Hispanic Studies Department at Texas A&M and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research for sponsoring the meeting.

Reiner Schürmann was a German Dominican priest born in 1941 in Amsterdam, during the occupation, who decided to hang his monkish attire and think and teach philosophy in the US (most of the time at the New School for Social Research in New York) until he died, prematurely and all too early, of AIDS, in 1993, at fifty two years of age.   During his lifetime he published, in addition to a number of essays in journals, two important books, translated into English as Wandering Joy. Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy (1972, translation 2001), and Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (1982, translation 1987).   Although those books were certainly discussed through the 1980’s (my own dissertation, written in 1986-87, deals with Schürmann’s book on Heidegger), it is probably fair to say that Schürmann’s greatness as a thinker was definitively established with the posthumous publication of Broken Hegemonies (1996, translation 2003), although it took a few years for this very difficult masterwork to make it into relative public awareness—one can conceivably say the issue is still in progress, so this workshop is also a contribution to it.   Schürmann’s work is, generally speaking, an “Auseinanderdersetzung” with Heidegger, whom Schürmann considered to be the most decisive thinker of the 20^th century.   He combines his own brand of Heideggerian deconstruction of the history of Western thought and a certain sustained take on politics and political life after the exhaustion of the political categories of modernity, where Schürmann joins from his own original perspective other thinkers that are also of interest to us, such as Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, María Zambrano, Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Nancy, Massimo Cacciari, Giorgio Agamben, Carlo Galli, and Roberto Esposito among others.   We thought that thematizing his work, forcing us all to establish a direct relationship with it, would help us establish bridges between the German, French, Italian, and North American moments of reflection and proceed on our own course, connected of course to the Spanish archive, through a sustained critical meditation on historical metaphysics, which we hold essential for our own endeavors regarding both infrapolitics and posthegemony.   But, since Schürmann’s “retrospective” Heideggerianism bridges Continental traditions of thought and North American reflection at the height of the theory moment in the US universities in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I suppose the question is fair as to what it is that should take a group of mostly Latinamericanist literary scholars by academic adscription to have chosen to focus on Schürmann’s work. The reason of course is honorable: some of us think he can help us think through both what is instituting and new and also what is ancient and continuous in both posthegemony and infrapolitics.   We are under no illusions that we are saying or would like to say the same things Schürmann did say, but we think it is imperative for us to take his thought on board.   In that sense, Schürmann is one more powerful element of our archive, and we learn from him.

There is of course by now a solid tradition of both Heideggerianism and Derrideanism in the United States going back in the first case perhaps to William J. Richardson’s classic work, Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought (1974), and in the second case to the aftermath of the 1966 Johns Hopkins Conference where Derrida presented his essay on “The Ends of Man.”   I think it is safe and proper to say that most of us are friendly towards but at the same time quite alien to those communities of thought, whose fundamental questions are not necessarily ours, and which have offered us no interlocution so far.   We are celebrating this workshop in English, to a certain extent against our better instincts, and aim to publish results in English as well, as a way of intervening in those discussions, no matter how modestly. That is not because we aim to intervene in some other discussions, so that we cannot be bothered with the North American one. Actually, what is at stake here is something else, probably a bit unusual, a bit weird perhaps, looking at it from the outside and from a perspective that ignores the real dynamics of life in the US university, perhaps even unclassifiable: we want to wake up from our own dogmatic slumber and to push thought to whatever extremes we can muster given our resources, in all modesty but also with a certain confidence and a certain resoluteness which we will no longer give up.   We aim to be as free and uncompromising in our attempt at reflection as possible, and we will not allow the professional field, the pressures, said and unsaid, from the civil servants of the institution, the endemic hostility to unpredetermined thought that structurally pervades the disciplinary and unequal configuration of the contemporary university, to circumscribe our thinking and make it conform to ready-made boxes.   I can say, speaking for myself now, that I did not start my career thinking those thoughts, but I do now. In one of his essays Schürmann analyses, in a fairly devastating manner, the US philosophical establishment up to the 1980’s. We could do a similar analysis, which would have to be equally devastating, concerning the fields of theoretical reflection in the humanities in the 2000’s and the 2010’s. The object of such an analysis would necessarily be, not to prepare an exodus, rather to determine its deeper necessity for the sake of institutionally-unrestrained thought. Thinking is hard enough from internal obstacles even to whatever can be attained in terms of personal freedom.   This is the time to give up, to the extent we can, on external obstacles as well. To that precise measure we claim that the university also belongs to us.

If infrapolitical deconstruction can be wagered upon as a project with properly instituting potential—something that will require a few years to unfold and establish, if we are persistent enough–, our intention is not to do the instituting within the framework of the current disciplinary distribution of knowledge in the university. Schürmann joked that in the philosophical field of the 1980’s one could only say whatever one’s colleagues would allow him or her to say. Well, as already stated, we are not interested in letting ourselves be constrained by the good will of our well-intentioned field colleagues (“oh, whatever you write is just too difficult,” “oh, whatever you write is just so presumptuous,” “oh, whatever you write has nothing to do with our field,” “oh, whatever you write is an imitation,” “oh, whatever you write should be illegal”) in their roles, not necessarily secundary, as discourse police and upholders of the laws of language.   Even if, as a result of that fateful positioning, against the grain, we end up saying nothing and falling into silence, as many of us have already done at several points in our careers, that decision—which is not supplementary, it is not an add-on, but is rather essential to the posthegemonic and infrapolitical aspects of the project, one must do what one thinks—is both founding and irreducible, as well as the direct consequence of a state of affairs which we know is not directly challengeable, or not directly challengeable by us. So we go along to get along, but we claim an exception, and it is called Infrapolitical Deconstruction. As a wager for and an attempt at free thinking, free from as many constraints as possible, it simply claims its own space, nothing else. It wishes to infringe upon no one’s terrritory, as if it were theirs, and it makes no claims on anybody else’s desire, as if it were not always already the other’s desire. This is not necessarily easy, as we all know or must learn. There is a certain risk, there is a certain adventurous danger attached to this journey that we will not deny all the while preferring to avoid its disagreable character and consequences. We will see, as we are not blind.   But we are not in the business of properly disciplined work in the conventional sense. Which makes us all, structurally, in the university, our home, marrano thinkers: our procedure is marrano, our reception is that accorded to marranos, our thematics are marrano thematics as well. It is no wonder, then, that projects on the marrano difference and a multi-volume collection of essays on literary marranismo in the Hispanic archive are on our immediate agenda for the next few years.

What we are doing now is still preparatory, inchoate, a beginning. We are patiently establishing an archive of theoretical references, and we thought Schürmann’s work deserves to be one of them. Hence the importance of this meeting for us, perhaps a merely private or semisecret importance, a marrano importance, which at the same time takes advantage of and attempts to cover over an institutional void, a hole at the center of the contemporary university, of humanities discourse in the university, the experience of which may have become our generational (this time, it does not matter that there are several generations of scholars in the group: the time for reflection is now, not tomorrow, not yesterday) destiny as Latinamericanist thinkers working in the United States outside mainstream parameters—which today means, on the positive side, political parameters very narrowly conceived, and on the negative side not even that.

We have planned this meeting not as a final discussion of Schürmann’s work, rather as a first discussion.   All of us have been reading his work in the past few weeks or months, and I can tell you, speaking for myself, I am already missing a second reading of Broken Hegemonies, which seems to me an inexhaustible book that immediately calls for a rereading of all of its texts under study.   We will present position papers meant to propose some ideas for discussion, and it on the basis of the discussion, I imagine, that we will then go back home and start writing in earnest.   We will also take this opportunity to make a series of short interviews on infrapolitics with our outside guests, since we have them here.

Since I have counted myself out of reading my own position paper, as I did not want to take up too much time, let me finish these preliminary remarks by suggesting, through a quick succession of bullet points, what it is that Schürmann provokes and challenges us to continue to think in connection with infrapolitics and posthegemony.

1. The notion of hegemonic fantasm, to which he opposes, in the last pages of Broken Hegemonies, the notion of “posthegemonic ultimates.”
2. The notion of anarchy as a political position at the end of principial politics, which would for me stand in need of reformulation as infrapolitical anarchy.
3. The general schematics of his understanding of the relation between time and history, event and clearing.   Schürmann seems at times to move forward to the claim of a certain extrahistoricality of being, in order to avoid the accusation or the categorization of his thought as “historicist.”   But I think we should re-evaluate that, through the renunciation of the radical transcendentality of what gives.   To that extent, I would argue that infrapolitics, as infrapolitics, holds on to the priority of the existential analytic, expanded and revised, reformulated vis-à-vis the relevant sections of Heidegger’s Being and Time, but still a thought anchored in singular existence, not on the priority of radical heteronomy.
4. In his book on Eckhart, and throughout the rest of his work, Schürmann upholds the notion of an “imperative mode of thinking,” as opposed to an “indicative mode.”   What commands in thought is not a principle, rather the very need for singularization, which cannot be thought outside the parallel instance of “natality.”   The conjunction of natality and mortality cannot however avoid a certain priority of the “singularization to come,” similar to the sway of the Heideggrian No (and against the double Derridean Yes).   If infrapolitics accepts its own status as a thought of the singularization to come, and if it is true that infrapolitics results “from the dissociation from any figure of the commons” and commits us to the acceptance of the “tragic condition,” “the fateful fissuring of being,” then infrapolitics must search for a tonality of inscription of life in thought and thought in life. Infrapolitics is the search for an imperative style that commands no one but submits to its own command, which is the heterononous command of freedom.

I invite discussion. As always, I do not presume I speak in anybody’s name but mine, if that.

At the end of Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (286-89), Reiner Schürmann explicates four “Consequences for the Direction of Life.”   This is to comment on some punctual sites in the explanation with no pretense of exhaustivity but with a view to establishing their possible productivity for infrapolitical thinking.

1. Schürmann mentions a “heuristic” function in Being and Time’s concentration on “everyday activities” in view of the need to establish a “fundamental ontology.” But “there is another priority of praxis in Heidegger, which appears as early as in Being and Time and which remains operative throughout all of his work: to retrieve the being question from the point of view of time, a certain way of life is required. To understand authentic temporality, it is necessary to ‘exist authentically;’ to think being as letting phenomena be, one must oneself ‘let all things be;’ to follow the play without why of presencing, it is necessary ‘to live without why.’ Here the priority of praxis is no longer heuristic . . . According to the mainstream of the metaphysical tradition, acting follows being; for Heidegger, on the other hand, a particular kind of acting appears as the condition for understanding being as time. Here praxis determines thinking. In writings subsequent to Being and Time, it is suggested that this praxis is necessarily of a political nature” (287)

This second (non-heuristic) priority of praxis is fundamental to the infrapolitical constellation, which emphasizes it and names it “existential.”   A praxis of existence—not a politics, not an ethics, certainly not a disciplinarization or institutionalization of existence—opens the way to infrapolitical reflection to the very same extent infrapolitical thought cannot be premised on anything but a specific relation to existence.   Whether Heidegger himself indicated the possible political relevance of this existential understanding of praxis is probably irrelevant for infrapolitics, but it may not be irrelevant regarding the fundamental thrust of Schürmann’s interpretation.   There is, in the attribution to the late Heidegger of a (reluctantly) “anarchic” political drift, an assumption I would not share: that changes in thinking, in order to be relevant, are necessarily epochal (even if, at a certain point, under the hypothesis of the closure of metaphysics, their epochal stance would mark, according to Schürmann, the end of epochality, the end of epochal history), and, as epochal, they reach and affect and shape and force the compliance of the totality of the political collectivity as such.   For Schürmann “anarchy,” on his terms, is not the singular choice of a thinker but rather the offspring of the contemporary economy of presencing with which the (contemporary) thinker should comply.   Anarchy would be a “nomos” at the end of principial (metaphysical) epochs. “The nomos or injunction always and everywhere determines the oikos, the abode of man” (235). There is a certain ultimate incoherence in claiming both that thinking presupposes a particular exercitium that belongs to the thinker’s singular existence and that thinking only lives through attunement with a nomic or temporal presencing that affects everyone.

2. “Being can be understood as time only through its difference from history. The investigation into the concrete epochs and their regulation is what binds the later Heidegger’s phenomenology to experience. Since this is, however, not an individual’s experience, the issue of phenomenology proves to be political in a broad sense. An economy of presence is the way in which, for a given age, the totality of what becomes phenomenal arranges itself in mutual relations. Any economy is therefore necessarily public” (287)

The politicality of epochs has to do with the fact that epochs force an order of the visible (things, words, actions) into an order of domination. Principial epochs guarantee the domination of the principle as hegemonic domination (at the time of modernity subjectivism dominates hegemonically, and so forth, and it dominates all orders of existence: politically as well as philosophically or artistically, etc.)   But Schürmann’s distinction between history and time prepares his affirmation of an end of epochal history that opens the visibility of presencing as non-domination. At the end of the cycle of principial epochality, where we hypothetically are (this is the closure of metaphysics), the thinker can move or prepare the way for anarchy as non-domination. But the politicality of the thinker is then either prophetic or it has the character of a historical vanguard.   In both cases it appears as messianic, as it incorporates and enables a promise (the “early” correspondence of the thinker, as response to an unconcealing presencing, is a commitment to and an announcement of a general dispensation to come).   Infrapolitics prefers to consider posthegemony as the deconstruction of all political legitimation, including the preparatory, anticipatory, or transitional legitimation of a purported, posthistorical economy of presencing of universal reach. Infrapolitics gives up on preparatory thinking as it refuses the distinction between history and time.

3. “The hypothesis of closure results from the reduplication ‘will to will’ substituting itself for the difference ‘being and entities.’ Enframing, then, is not like any other principle. It is transcendence abolished. Total mechanization and administration are only the most striking features of this abolition and reduplication, of this loss of every epochal principle; a loss that, as Heidegger suggests, is happening before our eyes” (288).

For Schürmann technology would be “the age without a beyond” (285) that terminates the epochal cycle, the history of being.   He claims that, at the end of the epochs, “originary time” resurfaces into a presencing no longer to be understood as the constant presence of the metaphysical dispensation.   Responding to originary time—the worlding of the world, the thinging of the thing—is what the thinker today prepares: “to think is to follow the event of presencing, without recourse to principial representations” (286). But the withering away of epochs needs not be thought as the welcoming of an unepochal dispensation, about which we know nothing and we experience nothing others may not have also known and experienced in any of the previous transitional times. Infrapolitics is an intraepochal affirmation of “simple dwelling” in the here and now, not a “step into the blue” (284) at the abyssal end of the history of being.

4. “Poein kata phusin . . . Thinking is essentially compliant with the flux of coming-to-presence, with constellations that form and undo themselves. To think is to follow the event of appropriation, to follow phuein” (289).

Schürmann proposes two master terms for such a compliance: non-attachment and releasement, both taken from Heidegger in specific reference to Meister Eckhart. There is certainly a difference between submitting to ordering principles and “acting according to presencing,” in compliance with the worlding of the world and the thinging of the thing.   But who guarantees the public, collective, universal compliance with the second under the guise of the (transitional) principle that there are no principles?   A second-order hegemony, in this case presumably guaranteed by the thinkers and the poets to come, is no better than the pedestrian economy of the principle.   Infrapolitics prefers the suspension of compliance, not out of any fundamental suspicion towards the mysterious dispensations of the fourfold, rather out of a fundamental suspicion of its interpreters.   Letting-be is infrapolitically to be thought as existential releasement for the sake of a radical attachment to the free singularity of existence.

Living in Texas I am routinely exposed to the national passion here—self-defense and home defense, not just as a response to possible merely personal crime but also (perhaps more importantly even) now in connection with terrorism: newspaper and magazine articles, and the like.  There is something self-defense theorists call, taking it from the military, “situational awareness,” which has to do with paying attention to your “bubble,” they call it, essentially a perimeter of about fifty feet from where you are.  They recommend always to be on “yellow alert,” that is, always attentive to your environment and scouting any possible threat.

Now, I wonder whether and to what extent situational awareness can be thought of in Heideggerian “existential analytic” terms: is it authentic or inauthentic behavior?  Most of my Facebook friends would immediately say:  “Inauthentic!!”  I guess it could go both ways, like anything can, but, given the fact that self-defense is such an atavistic aspect of one’s personal relation to his or her own death, what I find of particular interest is the possible (plausible?) connection of self-defense, manifested in a passion for situational awareness, that is, for a guarding attentiveness, to authentic behavior. I only need to establish its possibility. But it may be contested.  I would welcome the discussion.

In Country Path Conversations Heidegger establishes a distinction between warten and erwarten. He privileges the first, as something like a waiting uncontaminated by its object, a destinal or historical awaiting.  But I think the decision for “waiting,” where waiting has no specific object, applies to precisely meditative reflection, in other words, it has to do with a particular capacity of the human—an opening to the clearing where things and world can be let be.  It cannot and would not rule out other capacities, particularly in the context of the existential analytic.  The sticking point is, letting-be also applies to one’s own life.  Or, as the self-defense theorists will tell you, to our loved ones against an external threat.   So there is no “das Man” necessarily here (although there could be, say, if one is mimicking the gestures of self-defense, trying to imitate buddies, trying to be cool or tough, and so forth), at the limit (which is where I want to think it), there is precisely “jemeinigkeit” to zero degree, we could say—self-defense could also be about protecting our inmost possibility for being.  So situational awareness, which of course in itself pretty much incorporates finitude and a deep involvement with temporality and death, could in fact be an essential, enabling part of existential “authenticity” in its more radical sense, which is the confrontation with one’s own death.   Again, it could also be mere bs.  But it is not that necessarily. The question here is whether self-defense is a mere matter of a subjective appropriation of one’s own life or whether it itself opens up to, indeed, whether it conditions, a meditative change in existence in view and full experience of the world and its worlding.   Self-defense is immediately and for the most part our only path towards letting things be, after all. Without self-defense we are all broken.    Mortality means ongoing and radical self-defense.

The question arises, is the “waiting,” as defined above, the condition of possibility of authentic care, of authentic existence, or is it the other way around?  Is it the defense of—that is, the insistence in–authentic existence that opens up, for the first time every time, the possibility of a “waiting for no object,” that is, of a different (non-subjective, non-calculative, non-representational) attunement to existence? If self-defense is irreducible, then it seems to me infrapolitics is irreducible.

Heidegger said many times that the existential analytic was the basis for everything that came later.  Perhaps in a modified form, but I am not sure the modification hits this particular spot.  There is an imperative dimension in it: you must strive for authenticity, and authenticity is always radically self-defense. Which of course happens at a level other than the level of the subject—at the level of “a life” individuated or singularized temporally in the Dasein we each are.

Heidegger discussed many times what he called “fundamental attunement”—this starts in Being and Time (actually, before) and goes on through the middle period and all the writings surrounding Contributions up to and through the Hölderlin lectures.  In Contributions it is said that the fundamental attunement of our historical period, no longer the modern one, is terror (Erschrecken, I think).   And it is the case that we can only think historically starting from the fundamental attunement of our epoch  (this is in itself very controversial, but I think this is Heidegger’s position).   If so, then terror—which is primarily terror in front of the abandonment of being—is irreducible, but also the very site of “das Rettende.”  In other words, terror is also the trace and the hint of the divinities, the sending of being, and a condition of Ereignis, worlding, thinging, and so forth.  (On this see Andrew J. Mitchell, “Heidegger and Terrorism.”)

If terror is the essential existentiell for our time, then self-defense is (could be, authentically) an enabling characteristic of our capacity to listen to being, or for an openness to the clearing. As death—finitude—is a radical condition of life, ongoing, not just at its terminus, which is what makes Heidegger something entirely other than a biopolitical thinker, self-defense is also a defense of one’s own ongoing death, a defense of temporalizing, of the temporalizing of a life, any life, starting with what is closer by, more intimate.

Of course we do not have to equate self-defense to what the Texan theorists reduce it to—policing the perimeter. There are other possibilities. But—does this work at all?  Or am I overly influenced by newspapers and magazine articles?

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/

Se me pregunta qué es o cómo se define “lo que no tengas más remedio” que escribir, o enseñar, o servir.   Depende de la situación en cada caso. Para un profesor asistente que busca continuidad en su empleo “no tener más remedio” que terminar un libro y empezar la publicación de materiales para un segundo libro es condición de su salud laboral, con la que no vamos a interferir.   Lo demás debería en cada caso depender del estómago y de sus señales—no hay que escribir para producir cháchara que no le sirve a nadie para nada, hay que escribir porque pesan las palabras de las que hay que librarse, y sólo por eso. Ahí es cuando el “no tener más remedio” coincide con el deseo. Y los habrá que escriban mucho y los habrá que escriban poco, o quienes no tengan prisa porque la prisa mata, y específicamente mata no ya el pensamiento sino su misma posibilidad.   Pero vaya usted a decírselo a su comité de evaluación, a quien en general le importa sólo la publicación cuantitativa, y que estructuralmente no sabe ya qué es la cháchara.

En cuanto a la enseñanza uno enseña sólo lo que sabe y a veces se sabe poco. Pero enseñar—que nunca es otra cosa que dejar aprender–lo que uno sabe, en su pobreza misma, es todo lo que deberíamos hacer para no inundar las cabezas de los estudiantes de tontería. Enseñar lo que no se sabe es malo para todos—para el enseñante y para el enseñado, porque lo que no se sabe no puede dejarse aprender. Claro, a veces dejar aprender lo que se sabe, algo que uno mismo aprendió, puede llevar años.   Pero nuestra profesión, en su ritmo cada vez más condicionado a lo que se presume “gustable,” traiciona toda enseñanza en nombre de una pedagogía barata e instrumentalizada por razones hoy ya explícitamente meretricias.   Sin vergüenza alguna.

Y en cuanto al “servicio,” ¿a quién servimos? Sí, los comités son necesarios para llevar adelante el departamento.   Pero es “servicio,” por ejemplo, y de la peor especie, orientar nuestro tiempo universitario a buscar bequitas (no otra cosa es accesible en humanidades, o muy raramente) y premios, señal de supuesta “excelencia,” queriendo la recompensa de la palmadita en la espalda por habernos esforzado en adaptar nuestro deseo y por lo tanto nuestro ser, y nuestro estar, a las demandas con frecuencia inanes de esos grupos anónimos designados por la administración cuya función es aplicar en cada caso el criterio raso de una “excelencia” que no es más que conformidad a las normas corporativas en la mayoría de los casos.   Lo cual no quita para que ningún trabajo no excelente deba hacerse (nada peor que el que busca la “excelencia” convencional y aun encima lo hace mal.)   En fin, lo “estrictamente necesario” en el servicio tiene que ver con la lealtad a la idea de la universidad que todos deberíamos entender, y justamente con ninguna otra cosa.

Un viejo profesor mío, Bernard Dauenhauer, decía que hay libros que son meras colecciones de páginas y libros que son otra cosa, en los que hay algún favor o gracia, y que en la universidad norteamericana—supongo que en todas—la noción de libro está falseada desde el principio por la noción de publicación urgente, enemiga de la gracia. Que uno se puede pasar la vida escribiendo sin llegar nunca a un libro, y que así son las cosas, aunque por el camino se publiquen muchos “libros.”   Y que por lo tanto hay dos clases de escritores, dos clases de intelectuales: aquellos que entienden que el libro se espera y aquellos que entienden que el libro se produce.   “Libro” aquí significa otra cosa que libro como mero producto editorial, por cierto, al menos en la imaginación de mi profesor.   Y tiene todavía menos que ver con su “éxito” o “impacto” público. La universidad nunca tuvo ese valor como valor, y deberia volver a olvidarlo.