Debats128 Infrapoli_tica y posthegemoni_a 2015 dossier

Moreiras: Martínez Marzoa introduce la posibilidad de la infrapolítica al decir, en la página 138 de La filosofía de El Capital, que el produccionismo científico-técnico capitalista se enfrenta a “infinidad de microoperaciones humanas contingentes.” Es decir, en última instancia, es el concepto marxiano de Krisis el que impide la consolidación total de una conformación onto-teológica (o físico-matemática) del mundo, el que por lo tanto guarda la posibilidad de una ruptura, sólo imaginable ahí, del principio de equivalencia general. La “republica democratica” como Estado moderno, fundada sobre un sistema de garantias de igualdad entendida como sistema de derecho, es la contrapartida politica de la conformacion fisico-matematica del mundo. Por eso la infrapolitica no puede sino concebirse como el intento por suspender la hegemonia misma del Estado moderno incluso en su calidad de “republica democratica.” Esta operacion de suspenso infrapolitico tiene dos dimensiones centrales: la suspension de la legitimidad (weberiana) y la suspension de la hegemonia (gramsciana). Para mi esto es enteramente consistente con la postulacion de una democracia posthegemonica como la indicacion tanto de la necesidad de “destruccion” del Estado moderno como de una nueva potencial invencion de forma-Estado. Y la bomba: el proyecto socialista de Marx (léase comunista) supone un intento conservador de salvar la modernidad de lo moderno resolviendo sus contradicciones internas: “de las dos vías por las que puede cumplirse la finitud histórica, la ‘socialista’ es precisamente aquella que no es la ‘destrucción’ abstracta de la sociedad moderna, sino la asunción del patrimonio histórico que ella representa.”

Valero: Tal como yo lo veo lo que en ese párrafo Marzoa denomina “infinidad de microoperaciones humanas contingentes” no implicaría para el mismo Marzoa una ruptura con el principio de equivalencia general, sino que es sólo aquello cuyo quedar atrás es condición de posibilidad de que aparezca la estructura de la equivalencia general (ciencia moderna-sociedad civil). En efecto se refiere al trabajo real que no entra en el espacio de lo civil sino en la medida en que puede ser considerado trabajo abstracto, esto es, en la medida en que entra en relaciones de equivalencia. Así, en Marzoa esto define únicamente el límite que constituye la especificidad histórica de la sociedad moderna. Por otra parte si lo que la infrapolítica propone es un regreso a aquellas microoperaciones humanas contingentes, entonces estaría hablando de regresar a estructuras jerárquicas definidas naturalmente, cuando es justamente ese efecto de naturalización algo a lo cual la infrapolítica habría que oponerse.

Moreiras: Verdad que Martínez Marzoa no habla de infrapolítica ni nunca se le ocurrió hacerlo. Por eso yo digo que esas frases, es decir, ese punto preciso en su discusión, “introducen la posibilidad de,” si uno quiere pensar a partir de Marzoa, más que lo que dice Marzoa. Las microoperaciones humanas contingentes e infinitas no se llevarían a su término ni consumación incluso en el caso de una exitosa dictadura del proletariado que radicalizaría las posibilidades democráticas de la igualdad. Marzoa no habla de esto, sólo insiste en que, según él, Marx no autoriza ninguna especulación al respecto en términos de una sociedad futura. Para mí no es necesario hablar de regreso alguno, como si las microoperaciones humanas contingentes e infinitas sólo pudieran pertenecer a la “sociedad moderna” o a su figura. La “naturalización” está más bien del lado de pensar que la sociedad burguesa, en su giro revolucionario, pueda agotarlas. En el límite podría pensarse–esto lo dice Marzoa, para decir a continuación que él prefiere abstenerse de pensarlo–que la consumación revolucionaria de la república democrática como dictadura del proletariado sería la integración a la totalidad planificadora de todas esas “microoperaciones contingentes,” que en el capitalismo no encuentran funcionalidad sistémica y deben quedar desechadas o condenadas a su ruina. El socialismo sería en ese sentido “conservación revolucionaria” del sentido de la modernidad. Pero Marzoa comenta también que, una vez haya triunfado el socialismo, parece abrirse otra dimensión, el “comunismo” propiamente dicho, sobre el que Marx fue no sólo abiertamente vago sino también confuso. En fin, lo que queda es que el comunismo sería un cambio ontológico necesariamente, el comienzo posible de otra figura histórica de la que por lo tanto, al no tener su idea, no podemos hablar. Pero aquí se cuela, pienso yo, una filosofía de la historia encubierta en cuanto denegada, y es esa, la de Marx, la que está buscando reducir Marzoa. Infrapolítica se cuela por el agujero de sostener que las microoperaciones contingentes en cuanto tales, es decir, no en cuanto a su forma concreta sino en cuanto a su irreducibilidad a sistema, son el lugar en el que reside la posibilidad misma de enunciar la finitud radical de la sociedad moderna como figura, pero no en cuanto finitud diacrónica, sino en cuanto finitud sincrónica. Es decir, que son irreducibles también a la dictadura del proletariado, que son por lo tanto la reserva de la diferencia ontológica.

Valero: Mi intención era señalar que esa expresión apunta de algún modo a trabajo real que es lo que aparece ausente cuando el trabajo es social (y al cuál no se retorna por ejemplo en un tránsito revolucionario en la medida en que la revolución es un elemento más en el espacio de lo civil y no algo que lo supere) Eso conduce al “imperativo de la transparencia comunicacional” y que establecería las condiciones de la producción moderna. Entonces la cuestión para mí es cómo pensar la forma república (que para mí no es lo que Negri denomina forma estado) como conjuntos de operaciones contingentes cuando justamente en el momento de su génesis ideal está asociada a la planificación de la producción, es decir, a la socialización del trabajo.

Moreiras: Claro, exacto. Desde esta operación crítica de Marzoa el neocomunismo se desvanece como operación metafísica, es decir, queda marcado como operación consumadamente onto-teológica. Por eso esa forma-república no puede pensarse como realización positiva de un intelecto general!! Para mí pensarla, y por lo mismo criticar lo propuesto por Negri, etc., es el contenido específico, político, de la noción de posthegemonía.

Valero: La cuestión además es que la contrapartida de la ciencia moderna es, antes que el Estado Moderno, el espacio civil. Así, Estado o revolución no son superaciones del espacio civil (en el sentido de que el primero la integre y el segundo la destruya) sino movimientos diacrónicos dentro de una misma estructura que es lo civil. La forma-república excede y a la vez explica los intentos de establecer garantías en un espacio de equivalencia general que es lo civil. Así surgen aparatos de gestión de la fuerza como el Estado (y específicamente en su sentido moderno) La cuestión es que no da igual un estado que otro (aunque todos sean posibilidades de una estructura) porque no todos son capaces de ofrecer los mismos sistemas de garantías (por ejemplo hay estados que en nombre de unos derechos suspenden otros tantos) a la vez que ningún Estado satura la forma república (y los que lo hacen terminan en catástrofe) porque esta es una cuestión de iure y el estado es una cuestión de facto.

Moreiras: Cierto, pero, en la explicación de Marzoa, la dictadura del proletariado zanjaría, idealmente, esos desfases del Estado moderno consigo mismo. Creo que ahí estamos muy cerca de la noción de doble registro en el Espectros de Marx de Derrida. Lo cual nos lleva a preguntar si una forma-república trans-figurada, que es lo que tendría que pensar o concebir el segundo registro (aquí hay una fuerte diferencia entre Marzoa y Derrida) todavía podría contemplar conceptos como el de sociedad civil o incluso ciudadanía. Se me ocurre que aquí la idea de plasma, de Bruno Latour, que es parte de su crítica de lo social, podría ser interesante.

First Note: Heidegger’s time=our time. The time of reading remains the time of writing.   This can be said of Heidegger’s work but not of Hegel’s or Nietzsche’s.   But it can be said on the basis of Heidegger’s own thought. It is Heidegger’s thought that reveals or unconceals a state of affairs—but this state of affairs is the state of affairs out there, in the world out there, with things themselves, with the thing as it is.   Heidegger’s thought is the unconcealment of a temporal state of affairs that is still ours.   The state of affairs is: our time, and Heidegger’s time, is the unlimited and unqualified, de-qualified time of being.   Heidegger’s thought is, on the one hand, the determination, in the sense of unconcealment, of a particular state of affairs with being (unlimited, de-qualified). On the other hand, the meditation on it: if so, what of it?   How do we relate to what relates to us fundamentally, how do we dwell in unlimited and dequalified time, how do we survive our belonging to it, if it is a matter of surviving, of not simply falling for it?   We assume that it is a matter of surviving it on the notion that time as unlimited and dequalified is historical, that is, that it has come to be, that it is not eternal and fixed—it therefore has an outside, there is an outside of the time that fundamentally determines our belonging.   Keeping the question open regarding such an outside—that is Heidegger`s thought, and there is, there would be nothing else to it but that.   It is a simple thing. If time is historical, there would be, and there would have been, another time . . . Being is the referent of that fundamental, and abyssal, frameless frame=the history of being is history as such.

[We could say: deconstruction is a working out of that state of affairs, essentially the thought that the state of affairs exceeds or subceeds the state of affairs, that there is always something that escapes. As to infrapolitics, it comes to the same: if, precisely, the time of unlimited and dequalified time is also the time in which, for the first time, one can say that everything is political, that everything is politics, if politics has now become one with the state of affairs of time as it is, if politics, at the time of the completion of metaphysics as the metaphysics of subjectivity, exhausts the horizon of time, and time exhausts the horizon of politics, then infrapolitics is only the simple claim that there is an excess, or sub-cess, that there is an outside to politics, an otherwise than political when politics is nothing but the implementation of unlimited and dequalified time. And that is a simple thought that, however, calls for a task: the task of an alternative understanding of the time of life. Perhaps infrapolitics, vis-à-vis Heidegger’s work or the task of deconstruction, is only its turn towards the thought of the time of life—which is not the time of work, and is not the time of the subject.]

(Note from Jorge Alvarez Yagüez: El tiempo del cumplimiento de la metafísica es el tiempo de la “techné”, no el de “polítiké”. Esta desaparece justamente por el recubrimiento de todo por aquella, la política se convierte en “gestión”, que es el modus técnico en la esfera en que se mueve. La extensión (e intensión) planetaria de lo técnico pone todo a disposición del sujeto, que al mismo tiempo adopta formas de relación consigo y con los otros de carácter técnico (estratégicas, calculísticas), su propia subjetividad, todo é, sensible y cognitivamente, es colonizado por aquello que coloniza. La forma que impone al mundo se le impone a sí. El momento de desaparición de lo político es paradójicamente el momento de su posible potenciación, toda vez que esa disponibilidad universal demanda una decisión compartida guiada por el interés de la polis, el de lo común. Y ahí entra la infrapolítica, en una doble tarea: 1) la de rescatar lo político sobre lo técnico; reivindicación de lo político 2) la de debilitar lo político mismo (este es su lado”infra”, en el sentido de inferiorizar, menoscabar) en la nedida en que este se asuma aun como forma del imperio de la subjetividad. Es posible que esto segundo no pueda ser cumplido sino dando lugar a una forma nueva ya no catalogable como “política” (ni siquiera en el sentido de la contraposición entre lo político y la política), pues esta no sea susceptible de superar su condición moderna. Y tal intento demanda otro manera de pensar, otro modo de pensamiento, que no puede ser sino, al mismo tiempo, otra forma de vida, y un modo en que pensamiento y acción (uso, inoperosità, praxis pura ??) vengan a fundirse.)

Second Note: There is a thing, or the thing, but we cannot be certain that we have access to it. There is the thing, it can always escape. By the same token, we may have access to it.   Let us bracket for the moment the thing that is only certain. Every other thing is also uncertain.   But it is a curious uncertainty, because of every thing we can say there is a possible certainty, even if we miss it.   In other words, there is a position of certainty for every thing in the context of everything else. This mote of dust is here (or it is not): if it is here, our certainty is correct. If it is not here, then we must revise our position regarding every thing else as well. (Hegel: the universe itself would be destroyed if a mote of dust in it could be destroyed: everything is interdependent.)   But this means, if we are properly certain of one thing, then we are properly certain of every thing else: we have access to the ens unicum, also called, the subiectum, the what of every thing.   The ens unicum, the subiectum, the what of everything, that thing of which things can be predicated (a cat is . . . an animal), opens the thought that the ens unicum is also the ens totum, the totality, the one-all.   This is metaphysics, but not any metaphysics. This notion of the thing, die Sache, re, to pragma, is itself historical. The thing as explained is modern metaphysics, certainly Hegel’s.

So the question is about the question. If the thing ends up in the one-all, this has to do with the nature of the fundamental question behind it.   We don’t ask about what we already know, we ask about what is somehow distant.

Modern metaphysics reveals itself as a distance from the thing which is at the same time a distance with the totality of things.   We ask about the thing because the thing has vanished or sunk, the ens unicum is distant, and so is the one-all.

But of course even here we find a difference between the type of distance to things that turns them all into an “indefinite, neutral, aconceptual, merely quantitative multiplicity”—this would already be the vulgar version of modern metaphysics, what would be ordinary or prephilosophical.   And the philosophical determination of the question of the being of beings in modernity. Both are certainly related, but there is a difference between them. If nothing else, this difference is the very alibi of modern metaphysics (and science, and politics, etc.): a disparaging reference to a vulgar understanding that does not rise to the level of a concept with which, otherwise, it is perfecty compatible (in a vulgar manner). [We need only point out to the difference between actually existing communism and its idea, or actually existing democracy and its idea, or actually existing religion and its idea, etc.]

So modern metaphysics is already the symptom of a loss, of an uprooting (“desarraigo o pérdida o desapego”) (we ask about what is no longer ours). But there is no turning back to the moment prior to it. The loss is all there is. Understanding that is assuming the distance, understanding the distance as loss, the loss as distance.   The one-all as unlimited continuum is loss. Every thing from now on would be an arbitrary, gratuitous cut in the continuum, every thing is just as good as any thing else—things are de-qualified [and general equivalence, which is the same thing as indifferent difference, reigns].

“La pérdida no es sino la propia comparecencia de aquello que se pierde; ello mismo acontece perdiéndose, su tener lugar es su escaparse,” “el zapato es en verdad zapato sólo mientras no es aquello de lo que se trata, es decir, mientras simplemente caminamos seguros.”

Being therefore means not just presence, but also and inseparably that which in presence has been left behind.

Third Note: We call that double sense “ontological difference.”   In a precise phenomenological sense: what is is ontic. The ontic prompts a question—the question makes us move towards . . . something that will not be found, because it is not itself ontic (and only ontic things can be found).   This is a tearing, a “desgarro.” There is this and there is the fact that this this is already a loss. When I say cat I kill the cat, when I say shoe I kill the shoe.

How can one, then, thematize the ontological difference without killing the ontological difference? [Is this not the fundamental question of what we are calling infrapolitics?]

Modern metaphysics has always already solved that question, appealing to the non-vulgar understanding of the being of beings as one-all, unlimited continuum, the absolute.   “La cuestión de cómo hay que entender y pensar para que se pueda estar en efecto reconociendo la exigencia de totalidad es, en este espacio, la peculiar versión de la diferencia ontológica; claro que no es la cuestión ontológica, pero precisamente por eso en cierta manera sí, porque no es la omisión estéril de esa cuestión, sino justamente la marca de ausencia de la misma, a saber, el que la cuestión del ser ya es expresamente sólo posible como cuestión de lo ente uno y total, el que la cuestión ontológica ha derivado en cuestión óntico-total . . . la cuestión óntico-total sólo es posible como derivación o marca de ausencia de la cuestión ontológica.”

There is therefore a peculiar mode of saying, of Saying, in modern metaphysics, just defined. But—is there an alternative Saying? Is there a Saying that could say the ontological difference without covering it over as the ontic-total vs. the particular thing?   There is always a “sense” of the questioning, and the question about that “sense” is the question about a particular kind of Saying.

Could the poet be the fellow who can Say the ontological difference without killing the ontological difference?

Fourth Note: But who is the poet? Is the poet just . . . the poet?   Or do we invert the definition and we talk about the thinker of ontological difference as the poet?   Poet= whoever can Say the difference, that is, say the difference without killing it. So, it is not in any case a matter of the poet being poetic and casually hitting, through her or his innate genius or poetic talent, whatever escapes the metaphysical taming, the withdrawal of Being as such in its articulation with its presencing.   We could even say that, as Willy put it in a recent comment, the last thing we need are poetic poets—they are just as bad as authentic authentics or musical musicians (they always end up whistling Bulgarian wedding tunes in any case, pachan pachan).   So perhaps we can say that there is a problem as to “the poet” in Heidegger, concretely regarding the question “what is a poet supposed to Say?” Because it is the Saying that makes the poet, not the other way around (this may not be so for right Heideggerianism, where a nationalist poet might qualify as the Namer of Being.)   Is Cecil Taylor a poet, in the Heideggerian sense?   Is Cezanne a poet in the Heideggerian sense?   Perhaps the answer is yes.   But then Lope de Vega may not be a poet, Espronceda may not be a poet, Neruda may not be a poet—mere amateurs.

Which brings us to Hölderlin.   Heidegger depends on Hölderlin in a way, says Martínez Marzoa, that cannot be limited to the dependence of a thinker on a poet.   Why? Because Hölderlin, who was a member of the Jena Circle, that is, a friend of Schelling and Hegel, understood something crucial (that very thing that Kant may also have understood but pulled away from, according to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics)—it was so crucial that could and would have put German Transcendental Idealism on its head.   It has to do with the fact that the ens unicum, the interdependence of the thing with the one-all, the belonging of the thing to the unlimited continuum of timespace, means that the thing is subordinate to the one-all, that what truly is is the one-all, that a thing is only insofar as it is subsumed into the one-all.   The one-all is therefore the self-positing of everything, the subjectum of everything. And this is what German Idealism would have called the ego, I, the subject. The subject is the substance. This is the moment in modernity that begins the completion of metaphysics (Nietzsche will take one more step and so forth).   The self-positing of being as substance is the moment of maximum withdrawal of the ontological difference, the moment of the triumph of Being as Presence.   But, through the extreme absence of the question of the difference, the question of the difference returns as maximum presence, in the same way that only places from which even the ghosts have departed can be full of ghosts.

Hölderlin would have understood that, which is that in Hölderlin that drastically attracts Heidegger. But we don´t have the time to see how Hölderlin processes such an understanding through his poetry—except to say that it has something to do with Greece. Why?

Hölderlin understood, and stated, that in the apotheosic absolute self-positing of metaphysical modernity something “queda atrás,” is left behind, withdraws, and sinks into concealment.   Modernity refuses to understand that, and sees in its very refusal, in its “clearing of the ground,” a radical “absence of prejudice” which is consistent and compatible with the general indifferentiation of things into the unlimited continuum.   It is clear that the unlimited continuum is not historically new—it had been posited in the Hellenistic period. But, at that time, it was considered a state of affairs pertaining to the world of appearances, which could only be made consistent through theology (onto-theology). Modernity does away, in regards to the unlimited continuum, with the notion that things are inconsistent, that the world of appearances is only illusion. It posits its own understanding as final—prejudice-free empirical materialism, which of course does not preempt the belief in ontotheological spirit as well.

Another way of saying that: it is not the absence of the question of the ontological difference that identifies modernity, rather it is the fact that the absence has become principial, constitutive, grounding.   And this started with Hellenism, that is, after Aristotle. Aristotle is still a thinker for whom the ontological difference counted as a problem that had to be dealt with. Hellenism has already dealt with it, has already made its own solution “obvious,” and that dealing launches the history of modernity as the history of a forgetting.

So, Greece, and Greece also for Hölderlin and in Hölderlin’s work, is the historical name for the moment in which our history begins. How does it begin? Politically: “Que el juego que siempre se está jugando pretenda hacerse relevante él mismo, eso es lo que llamamos la pólis, no doctrinas acerca de la pólis, sino precisamente la pólis misma; y el que esa relevancia sea a la vez la pérdida podría decirse exponiendo cómo la pólis perece no por el ataque de los bárbaros, sino precisamente porque se sostiene.”

So Greece is the name of that historical beginning whose examination may help us remember the dual face of being, the ontological difference, also in or starting from, the political realm.   Why should we do this? Because our time, our modernity, our completion of the loss and the forgetting, our plight of having forgotten the plight itself, makes itself noted.   It is simple: if there is a problem you cannot solve, study the problem—historically.

Fifth Note: So who is the poet? And what is a poet? It just so happens those are not Greek notions, they are Hellenistic. In Greece proper we find no word for poets, or poem, or poetry.   What we have there is a notion of an excellent Saying.   And the Saying was excellent also in the sense that it was preeminent—not as it is the case with us, in which there is an objective, normative Saying, which is precisely not poetry.

So in Greece there is an excellent Saying that is excellent because it achieves relevance and preeminence.   In what sense?   In the sense of the ontological difference: “la excelencia del decir comporta . . . el que lo que lo que siempre ya queda atrás tienda a hacerse ello mismo relevante de alguna manera. . . . en el decir excelente, el decir, diciendo en todo caso las cosas, esta y aquella y la otra cosa, a la vez permanece especialmente enganchado en el decir mismo como tal.

The Saying of the poet is the saying of the ontological difference.   Excellent Saying says beings in reference to Being.

And was that not precisely what Dasein is supposed to accomplish as Dasein, that is, insofar as Dasein remains authentically as Dasein instead of letting itself be covered over by the inauthenticity of a false saying? If Dasein has it in itself to access Being, that is, to be responsible to the call of Being, if the voice of conscience, which calls to Being, is precisely the constant reminder of ontological difference as such, beyond the thrownness into the midst of beings, the Saying that corresponds to that is . . . Saying.

Can we get its possibility back from historical forgetting at the time of the full completion of metaphysical onto-theology as technology?

Sixth Note: The unlimited continuum is the unlimited continuity of the now—it is secondary (if it were not secondary, there could not be things, since a thing always implies a limit), it only operates on the (primary) absence of the question of sense (which is also the question of the ontological difference).

Dasein wonders about sense, because Dasein wonders about its own limit—being means limit. The affirmation of the limit is also at the same time the questioning of the unlimited continuum.   But Dasein’s limit is: death.   The anticipation of death is both the questioning of the unlimited continuum, the realization that it is secondary, and the priority of another temporality, a temporality that, as coming from the future, embeds the question of the ontological difference.   Time is already the ontological difference, and points to it. Time breaks time.

In the mood of the unlimited continuum, however, time does not break, it simply fails. Why? Because the one-all has no opposite, nothing is its opposite. And if the one-all confronts nothing, it does not take place. Nietzsche realized this. Hence his Doctrine of Eternal Return is his attempt—the last doctrine of metaphysics—to guard time from itself, that is, from its own failure—in the metaphysical mode, although inverted.

We talk about Hegel and Nietzsche, but the situation they reflect, the situation their thoughts reflect, is the general situation, that is, it also applies, for instance, to the State, and to everything else. Which means that the time of the end of metaphysics is also the time of the completion of the State, hence of the end of the State, the time of the end of ontotheological politics, etc.

But Heidegger has left few indications to take his thought into realms alternative to the philosophical tradition, particularly as regards the political sphere, civil society, and the like. And yet we can say: “la posición del Estado con respecto a la cuestión ontológica es la que hemos atribuido a la ciencia en sentido fuerte; por así decir: él es un problema ontológico, e incluso se basa en que haya quedado atrás la cuestión ontológica, pero no es él mismo ontología.”

The scientist, the statesman or politician, the poet—they eventuate truth in different ways.   The thinker is not the poet or the artist: if the latter two Say the truth, the thinker interprets it. The thinker is the hermeneutist, the reader.

But this means, for the thinker: the thinker can only read the unthought in the thought, that is, the thinker can only read what appears insofar as it is lost; what appears withdrawing, in withdrawal.   Everything else is, today, merely culture, and cultural industry.

[Understanding history, understanding the event of history—if this is all that is left, at the end of the pathway, for Heidegger in Martínez Marzoa’s interpretation, and if we claim Heidegger as an important guide towards infrapolitics, the question comes up: is infrapolitical reflection merely, and nothing but, a mere understanding of history, a mere dwelling in the errancy of history, a mere freeing of the hermeneutical relation? And yes is the only possible answer—which does not make it any easier.]

It should not be surprising that Jacques Derrida’s “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” dated 1983, has some connections to Martin Heidegger’s “A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” published in 1959.   Pablo Domínguez Galbraith said a few weeks ago that, in his opinion, Derrida in fact takes explicit distance from Heidegger in a few of his lines, when he says “I would not even dare to say, following a Heideggerian schema, that we are in an ‘epoch’ of being-in-deconstruction, of a being-in-deconstruction that would manifest or dissimulate itself at one and the same time in other ‘epochs.’   This thought of ‘epochs’ and especially that of a gathering of the destiny of being and of the unity of its destination or its dispersions . . . will never be very convincing” (4).   But distance is a form of relation.

What is at stake in the Derridean letter to his Japanese friend?   Apparently a definition of deconstruction, since it is the demand for a “schematic and preliminary reflection on the word ‘deconstruction’” that prompts it.   The definition will not come: “What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of course!” (5).   Which leads Derrida to say that, therefore, deconstruction must not be a good word (“bon mot,” 5).   It can be or could have been “of service” (5) in the European languages “in a highly determined situation,” that is, historically speaking (5). But translation may have more to say, particularly as “translation is [not] a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text” (5).   Derrida then goes on to say that the Japanese translator, the “friend,” may be able to find a “more beautiful” word (5).   And, in his last lines, hints, merely, that translation, as a “writing of the other,” is of the order of the poem (5).   This is, then, the “positive” contribution of the letter, responding to the demand of the friend that Derrida’s reflection should “avoid, if possible, a negative determination of its [deconstruction’s] significations or connotations” (1).

But there is a little more, starting with the notion that, even in French, there is a shadowy (“somber,” 1) gap between the ostensible meaning of the word and its “usage itself, the reserves of the word” (1).   How did it come about? Derrida tells us that the word came to him by itself at the time of Of Grammatology, as he was trying to translate the Heideggerian “Destruktion or Abbau” (1), for an operation “bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or Western metaphysics” (1). The models or regions of meaning provided by the archive of the French language were only models for it—and they in fact “have been behind a number of misunderstandings about the concept and word of ‘deconstruction’ because of the temptation to reduce it to these models” (1).   Against those models, Derrida invokes the “use value” of the term as he has been using it (1).

So, yes, at the time of structuralism, it seemed important to rehearse an “antistructuralist gesture” (2): “Structures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented” (2). “But the undoing, decomposing, and desedimenting of structures, in a certain sense more historical than the structuralist movement it called into question, was not a negative operation. Rather than destroying, it was also necessary to understand how an ‘ensemble’ was constituted it and to reconstruct it to this end” (3).

The perceived negativity was hard to erase, particularly as one realized that deconstruction could not propose itself as an “analysis” (“the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin” [3]) or as a “critique:” “the instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential ‘themes’ or ‘objects’ of deconstruction” (3).   And the same can be said about “method” (3), which has the pleasant/unpleasant corollary that deconstruction, therefore, is not a methodology for reading and interpretation and can therefore not be “reappropriated and domesticated by academic institutions” (3).   Neither analysis nor critique nor method, it is also not an “act or an operation” (3), because there is something more passive about it than the passivity that is opposed to activity and because it does not return to an “individual or collective subject” (3). The most that can be said, therefore, is that deconstruction happens, there is deconstruction, ca se déconstruit, and the “se” “bears the whole enigma” (4).

If there is “that,” ca, then there is deconstruction. And that is one thing. But there is one other thing, and “all my essays are attempts to have it out with this formidable question” (4). This is the question of deconstruction’s timeliness or modernity or contemporaneity—and here is where Derrida introduces his “distance” from Heidegger.   Right after it there comes what I think is the single most important determination of the use value of “deconstruction” in this text: “It is therefore only a discourse or rather a writing that can make up for the incapacity of the word to be equal to a ‘thought’” (4). This is rather enigmatic, and Derrida does not elaborate on it at all. What is this “thought” that hover beyond the word?

So, let me suggest that the thought that there is a thought that hovers beyond the word organizes in this text the proper distance from the Heideggerian “Dialogue on Language.” Which is also very much a relation.

Let me attempt a few brief indications—I have to give up in advance on the pretense of doing justice to the later Heidegger’s text.   It is one of the texts where something like a cosmopolitical perspective insinuates itself in the Heideggerian oeuvre. And let me say it right out, but tentatively: Heidegger’s cosmopolitanism would here be organized around the notion that there is some incapacity of the word to be equal to a possible thought.

The Japanese visitor is a student of Count Shuzo Kuki’s, one of Heidegger’s Japanese students in the early 1920’s.   They rememorate the fact that many conversation with Kuki revolved around the Japanese word Iki. The word “incapacity” shows up in the second page. According to the Japanese, the encounter with European thinking has brought to light “a certain incapacity in [Japanese] language” (2).   Because Japanese would be deprived of a certain power to produce concepts.   The Inquirer is skeptical about the claim and refers to an inconspicuous “danger” that emerges through the very claim, but is left unspecified for the time being.   What is said is that the danger is embedded in the dialogue, on the basis of the fact that the near-impossibility of translation shows up in it, but also remains concealed. The Inquirer says, “I do not yet see whether what I am trying to think of as the nature of language is also adequate for the nature of the Eastasian language; whether in the end, which would also be the beginning, a nature of language can reach the thinking experience, a nature which would offer the assurance that European-Western saying and Eastasian saying will enter into dialogue such that in it there sings something that wells up from a single source” (8).   The question, the question that remains, is therefore whether a single thought can come into language, or whether language, in and through its very multiplicity, will remain incapable of reaching it.

Hermeneutics has everything to do with this, as defined: “the art of understanding rightly another man’s language” (11). The example of Iki comes up again. What is Iki? Can a non-Japanese grasp Iki through a European language?   Or is that word, and other words such as Ku and Iro, inevitably destined to be betrayed by the metaphysical structuration of the European language?   The danger is then that, in dialogue and through dialogue, the very possibility of saying “that of which we are speaking” be destroyed—and it is a danger that is only increased by what the Inquirer calls “the complete Europeanization of the earth and of man” (15).   Kurosawa’s Rashomon is now discussed as another example of dangerous translation, since, on the one hand, says the Japanese, Rashomon is a symptom of the fact that “regardless of what the aesthetic quality of a Japanese film may turn out to be, the mere fact that our world is set forth in the frame of a film forces that world into the sphere of what you call objectness. The photographic objectification is already a consequene of the ever wider outreach of Europeanization” (17), and on the other hand, there are in the film inconspicuous gestures that point in the direction of something other than Western.   But how can such gestures be discussed?

A brief discussion of gestures in No plays seems to take a step forward, as they are said to be a “gathering which originally unites within itself what we bear to it and what it bears to us” (19), in such a way that the gesture, “so gathered, bears itself to encounter emptiness in such a way that in and through it the mountains appear” (19).    But is this mention of emptiness not similar to what the Inquirer attempted to describe as “nothingness, that essential being which we attempt to add in our thinking, as the other, to all that is present and absent” (19)?   If so, this is a nothingness that a Japanese could never understand as “nihilistic” (19).   At this point in the conversation the notion of an “overcoming metaphysics” comes up to be described as neither a destruction nor a denial, but rather “an original appropriation” (20).

The danger of a dialogue, and the danger of language, is always to opt out of the concealed original appropriation, the concealed essence or nature of language.   How would the Japanese refer to language?   Is there a Japanese word that can express the appropriation of language, the ‘thought’ of language?   If so, as a word about essence, in terms of language, it would not refer to anything linguistic. Languate cannot represent language—and this is a limit where the danger conceals itself. Conceptual representation is not adequate to a manifestation of the nature of language—perhaps only gestures or “hints” will do. Perhaps only hinting at the nature of language is possible (24). Perhaps a word “is a hint, and not a sign in the sense of mere signification” (27).   And a hint of what?   The ontological difference, here called the “two-fold,” the “ambiguity of Being” as Being and beings, is perhaps already hinted at in the Japanese’s words: “And while I was translating, I often felt as though I were wandering back and forth between two different language realities, such that at moments a radiance shone on me which let me sense that the wellspring of reality from which those two fundamentally different languages arise was the same” (24).

Perhaps language, or a thoughtful reflection on language, can only aspire to produce tidings of that sameness—we may want to call it hermeneutics if we are to say that “language defines the hermeneutic relation” (30) as the relation of human nature to the two-fold.   “But the word ‘relation’ does want to say that man, in his very being, is in demand, is needed, that he, as the being he is, belongs within a needfulness which claims him” (32). This is the needfulness of the two-fold, which aims to be preserved. But can this needfulness be represented?   It can only be “used” (33). “The two-fold is not an object of mental representation, but is the sway of usage” (33).   Usage names the “originarily familiar,” which, the Japanese tells the Inquirer, “is what your thinking pursues” (33).

This “originarily familiar”—“our dialogues speaks historically precisely in its attempt to reflect on the nature of language” (34)–, would it not be what the Japanese must strive for? “Professor Tanabe,” says the Japanese, “often came back to a question you once put to him: why it was that we Japanese did not call back to mind the venerable beginnings of our own thinking, instead of chasing ever more greedily after the latest news in European philosophy” (37). The question can then be turned to the Inquirer regarding his own interest in the Greeks.   If the Japanese must turn to their venerable beginnings, says the Inquirer, “our thinking today is charged with the task to think what the Greeks have thought in an even more Greek manner” (39), which seems impossible, but has a plausible twist, or a twist of plausibility: it has to do with thinking the unthought of the Greeks, and “to see it so is in its own way Greek, and yet in respect of what it sees is no longer, is never again, Greek” (39).

The unthought of a thinking is the concealment of the two-fold, the non-appearance of appearance. “In the source of appearance, something comes towards man that hold the two-fold of presence and present beings” (40).   It is a “voice,” the “almost imperceptible promise announcing that we would be set free into the open” (41).   Heeding that voice implies a “transformation of thinking,” to be understood as “a passage . . . in which one site is left behind in favor of another . . . and that requires that the sites be placed in discussion. One site is metaphysics. And the other? We leave it without a name” (42).

Can we then speak of Iki not aesthetically, that is, metaphysically, but on the other trail?   Let us venture that Iki might be grace, or the gracious. Iki is a hint of the two-fold, “the message of the veiling that opens up” (44).

What about Koto ba, as the Japanese word for the non-linguistic essence of language? Is it also graciousness? Would there be a connection with the Sophoclean “charis,” which is also called “tiktousa—that which brings forward and forth” (46). As Dichten and tikton say the same, “graciousness is itself poetical, is itself what really makes poetry, the welling-up of the message of the two-fold’s unconcealment” (46).   Yes, there would be, as Koto ba refers to the “petals that stem” from “the happening of the lightening message of the graciousness that brings forth” (47).

We would now have to find a Western word that could match Koto ba, that could establish a relation and a dialogue with Koto ba. The word is Saying, as “let appear and let shine, but in the manner of hinting” (47), “the beginning of that path which takes us back out of merely metaphysical representations, to where we heed the hints of that message whose proper bearers we would want to become” (48).

But it is a beginning, and it still guards a danger. The danger is, Saying cannot be a word “about” language, because “speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into a concept” (50). Saying speaks from out of language not about language.   But this means, saying could only be a dialogue (51), a “saying correspondence” (52) in usage.

So that there can be dialogue.

Can there be?   Deconstruction may not be a good word for it. But it can be used. And it can be used in order to let the “se” of se déconstruit come into its own. That “se” is the mark of the two-fold, of ontological difference, of a transformation in favor of a passivity anterior to the difference between passivity and activity, an originary passivity that breaks, graciously, into poetical (or infrapolitical) dwelling. It is, in other words, a matter of translating, through dialogue, the untranslatable—historical thought, for the sake of cosmopolitical “appropriation.” Or, if the word “appropriation” “will never be very convincing,” perhaps we should stick to the more modest “transformation” as a mere passage to another site.

The reference in the blog entry below to “there is no non-somnambulic hero of thought that can claim infrapolitical sovereignty” is a negative reference to #25 (“Historicality and Being) in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. (Of the Event.).  This paragraph seems to me a very clear and explicit articulation of the notion of inceptual thinking in Heidegger with fascism; henceforth, one of the passages that our project needs to counter.  Notice Heidegger’s thorough biopoliticization of politics, and then the claim of a totally other space for the masters.  And the masters are those who would make it possible for the political process of drastic uprooting for the sake of a new rootedness (a clear reference to the brutality of Nazi power, endorsed) to result in a proper thorough transformation of what he would in other places call “the essence of the human:”

“Historicality here grasped as one truth, the clearing-concealing of being as such.  Inceptual thinking as historical, i.e., as co-grounding history in compliant disposability.”

“Sovereignty over the masses who have become free (i.e., groundless and self-serving) must be erected and sustained with the shackles of ‘organization.’  In this way can what is thereby ‘organized’ grow back in its original ground, so that what is of the masses is not simply controlled but transformed?  Does this possibility have any prospects at all, given the increasing ‘artificiality’ of life, which facilitates and by itself organizes that ‘freedom’ of the masses, that arbitrary accessibility of everything for everyone?  No one, however, should undervalue resistance to the inexorable uprooting, calling a halt to it;  indeed, that is what must happen first. Yet would that guarantee the transformation of the uprootedness into a rootedness, and above all would the means necessary for such an action guarantee this transformation?”

“Still another sovereignty is needed here, one that is concealed and restrained and that for a long time will be sparse and quiet.  Here the future ones must be prepared, those who create in being itself new locations out of which a constancy in the strife of earth and world will eventuate again.”

“Both forms of sovereignty, though fundamentally different, must be willed and simultaneously affirmed by those who know.  Here at the same time is a truth in which the essence of beyng is surmised: in beyng there essentially occurs a fissure into the highest uniqueness and the flattest commonality.”   (I do not know–I do not have the German original–whether the word fissure is Riss.  If so, then it ain’t just a fissure, also a relation of sorts opens up, which would be a fascist one indeed. If it is Zerklüftung, then the question remains as to what Heidegger meant by fissure between “those who know” and the common ones in need of a new rootedness.)

If the project of the Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective has a common genealogy, and it must have it, although it is lived differently by every one of its members, we could probably find it in themes that have been developing since the late 1990s. They would be: the necessary destruction of the general cultural studies paradigm, a critique of the history of the left, including the so-called academic left, a dissatisfaction with dominant theoretical paradigms in the larger field of the humanities and in the smaller field of the Latin Americanist humanities, including subalternism, a critique of the neoliberal turn in the university as such, and, finally, a critique of so-called North American deconstruction.  I would myself propose that all of these negative or critical predispositions developed in the wake of a certain congenital marranismo, understood as the interesting side of the Hispanic intellectual and existential tradition.

And yet IDC means to insist on, and to continue to let itself be inflected by, a tradition of thought marked by the Heideggerian scheme concerning the history of being/end of metaphysics/end of epochal history/end of principial thought.   The former list of genealogical conditions should make it abundantly clear that it was never our intention to be in favor of any particular valorization (or de-valorization) of particular historico-cultural horizons or specific human profiles.  Indeed the notion of value, or any form of cultural value, was denounced by some of us as incompatible with a subalternist approach even at its most superficial.   Our marranismo had a few teeth, but not to chew on the exaltation or denigration of any form of human life: letting-be was our fundamental political position, from which every critique sprang.

The ongoing publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks makes it clearer than it ever has been–there is now no doubt that Heidegger was also an anti-Semite, and not just merely some sort of idealistic or deluded or merely opportunistic Nazi–that our project must also affirm a radical anti-Heideggerianism as well.   If the Heideggerian scheme on the history of being, which is very much a variation of the Hegelian one, hence it pertains to the history of thought as we know it, cannot be renounced tout court, and can only be engaged thoughtfully, the explicit, intentional undertones revealed by the Black Notebooks suggesting an “ontic” or “existentiell” plunge into both anti-Semitism and an overvaluation of “German” destiny in the preparation of the inceptual thought of the Other Beginning must be rejected not just in themselves, but also as master tropology for any kind of alternative cultural-historical valorization.   IDC must affirm the radical suspension of any cultural-historical valorization as principial thought, which, as principial thought, would always already be committed to hegemonic power and hegemonic accomplishment.

The Heideggerian thematics of the end of epochal history can only be referred by us to the end of the hegemonic/sacrificial structuration of history and historical life.  IDC articulates itself as a renunciation of power as principial force from an idea of an-archy whose foundations can be traced back to Heidegger as well, mediated by Emmanuel Levinas and Reiner Schürmann among others.

There is then a practical question in terms of how to read the Heideggerian text, which is at the same time the text of the end of metaphysics.   Given Heidegger`s own use of the tropology of “destruction,” it might not be appropriate to imagine our own reading of Heidegger as a practice of destruction (just as it would seem dubious to claim that one wants to undertake a deconstruction of Derridean deconstruction).   But “critique” seems to fall short as well.  We have been trying out the notion of “demetaphorization” in the wake of the recent publication of Derrida’s 1964 seminar on Heidegger and the Questions of History and Being.   We have used its corollary, “de-figuration.”  Catherine Malabou’s book on Heidegger (Le change Heidegger) also insists on a “third incision” in the Heideggerian wake having to do with desymbolization as a new practice or imagination of the real.   The object of all of this would be to arrest the very possibility of either of the two false exits from the Heideggerian schematic structuration: the rupture of the principle of general equivalence in favor of an alternative ontic or existentiell hierarchization; or the philosophico-artistic (or poetic) pretension that a refoundation or historial re-inauguration can be prepared by the thinkers or the poets, “the future ones” from Contributions to Philosophy.   IDC does not favorably hierarchize the labor of thinking or poetizing because it refuses to hierarchize values.  There is no non-somnambulic hero of thought that can claim infrapolitical sovereignty.   All of this forms one of the theoretical crossroads of our project.  We have tried to address it as the problematic of an infrapolitics of transfiguration or an infrapolitics of “vencimiento.”

La infrapolítica es, mínimamente, un campo de reflexión abierto a la indagación de condiciones y manifestaciones de experiencia en la época de la consumación de la estructuración ontoteológica de la modernidad.   Entendemos que la experiencia, la de todos y la de cada uno, está cruzada por la política, que la marca y determina y enmarca de forma fundamental e irreducible, pero postulamos que la determinación política no agota la experiencia. La experiencia excede o subcede la política, y puede por lo tanto ser tematizada y estudiada infrapolíticamente. Postulamos también que la política en la época de la consumación de la estructuración ontoteológica del mundo conocido no es un fenómeno naturalizable como dado por supuesto, sino que está él mismo sometido a condiciones históricas de manifestación.   La esencia de la política, podemos decir mimetizando a uno de nuestros pensadores de referencia, no es en sí política. Pero la infrapolítica no busca determinar filosóficamente cuál sea la esencia de la política, ni siquiera en sus dispensaciones contemporáneas. Su interés, hermenéutico, fenomenológico y deconstructivo, se da más bien en el intento de acotar la determinación política a favor de su exceso o suceso.   La infrapolítica es un campo de reflexión que indaga el suceso de la política en nuestro mundo.   En cuanto su-ceso, es decir, exceso que precede, campo experiencial no circunscribible ni agotable por determinación política alguna, la infrapolítica tiene dimensiones críticas—la infrapolítica piensa la política en la medida en que piensa su negación–, pero su ejercicio primario no es crítico (de la política) sino interpretativo.   La infrapolítica vive en una retirada de la política de la que no se nos oculta que incluye una intensa politicidad—pero es la politicidad impolítica que suspende y cuestiona toda politización aparente, y la coloca provisionalmente bajo el signo de su destrucción. Llamamos a la dimensión de politicidad impolítica de la infrapolítica posthegemonía, o democracia posthegemónica. La infrapolítica encuentra en la democracia posthegemónica, y en su praxis, que es la democratización posthegemónica, la interrupción suplementaria de su propia praxis subcedente.

Es claro en lo que antecede que este proyecto se sitúa en una tradición de pensamiento marcada por la obra de Martin Heidegger, a la que busca interpretar o reinterpretar en diálogo con sus continuadores históricos, de Reiner Schûrmann a Catherine Malabou, de Luce Irigaray a Felipe Martìnez Marzoa, de Jacques Derrida a Jean-Luc Nancy, de Giorgio Agamben a Roberto Esposito o Davide Tarizzo, e incluyendo a muchos otros. Pero también que la reflexiòn infrapolítica aspira a constituir un archivo de pensamiento más amplio y no contenible en la estela heideggeriana.   Nos interesa la práctica artítstica, la literatura, la ciencia y la religión en la misma medida en que también en esas prácticas se da reflexión y poetización de la encrucijada historial a la que remite el fin de la estructuración ontoteológica de la modernidad.   Nos interesa también el pisicoanálisis, que en ciertas de sus versiones puede entenderse como paradigmático de la práctica infrapolítica avant la lettre.   Y nos interesa el mundo de la vida cotidiana, con sus trazas de maquinación y cultura, de ética y moralismo, de historia y de desnarrativización perpleja.

Lo que proponemos es sólo derivada y subsidiariamente una práctica académica. Muchos de nosotros somos miembros de alguna universidad y tendemos a realizar nuestro trabajo en el contexto del aparato universitario.   Pero entendemos que la universidad está hoy sometida a condiciones de producción, en sí derivadas del acabamiento metafìsico de la modernidad, que son incompatibles con el futuro del proyecto infrapolítico. La infrapolítica es postuniversitaria y antiinstitucional en la medida en que busquemos su necesaria radicalización.   Se entiende como una modalidad de pensamiento salvaje, lo que Malabou llama la irrupción de lo fantástico en la filosofía, que nos desborda tanto como nos convoca, y nos destruye tanto como nos informa.

La infrapolítica no pide inscripción ni perdón. Se anuncia como voluntad de pensamiento al margen de canales establecidos y reconocibles, al margen de toda política cultural, al margen de toda recuperación biempensante. Tratará, por supuesto, de crear sus lugares, pero nuestra querencia es virtual y oscura, y nos atraen más los bares y las playas y los desiertos que las aulas, las salas de conferencia o los grandes hoteles convencionales. No insistimos en secreto alguno, pero sabemos que el pensamiento es siempre secreto.   No pedimos comunidad, no pedimos filiación, no pedimos siquiera comprensión alguna.   Nos manifestamos contracomunitarios y hostiles a toda formación de captura. Y apostamos a un largo plazo incalculable desde el cómputo servil del produccionismo excelentista.   Sabemos que sólo contamos con nuestro tiempo de vida, y que tal tiempo excede, y sucede, al tiempo de trabajo. Y esa es la cosa.

El vencimiento de la estructura ontoteológica de la metafísica, si esa es la tarea de pensamiento asumida, pide un cambio en la dis-posición del pensamiento mismo, también de la escritura: una nueva Ge-Stell escritural. Contra la representación calculativa hacia una meditación recolectiva. Tal cambio sólo se hace posible en la época, presumiblemente la nuestra, de la consumación de la metafísica en el agotamiento de sus recursos metafóricos o foranómicos.   La metafísica hoy está ya de antemano desmetaforizada—de ahí que la desmetaforización imposible sea el nombre del peligro mismo del pensamiento otro (dado el riesgo de su contaminación saturante.)   Ese cambio—prepararlo, ejercitarlo (ex + arcare, exercitium, Ge-Stell de escritura), ejecutarlo—es actividad de pensamiento desde el fin de la historia que nos vive hacia otro comienzo posible, desde cierto fin del pensamiento hacia un pensamiento otro posible.   Pero no conocido. Tal esfuerzo, cuya necesidad no es cuestión de fe sino que se siente o no, por lo pronto, íntimamente, poéticamente, es ya un esfuerzo infrapolítico. La infrapolítica es el doble juego de destrucción o desestructuración crítica (desmetaforizante, en su peligro) del pensamiento tradicional, que constituye la hegemonía de Occidente, y del paso atrás o salto hacia una re-estructuración posthegemónica.   Pero esto último implica una mutación, un cambio en, dentro de, el cambio permanente que informa y estructura la tradición metafísica, un cambio otro que sólo puede ser entendido como salto fantástico. En cuanto fantástico no es locura sino que permanece como proyección orientativa. El motor del pensamiento infrapolítico es el fantasma de esa intimación. A ese fantasma hay por lo pronto acceso poético, o mejor, poetológico, en la medida en que se trata de una instancia que debe tematizarse (Ge-Stell de escritura) para ser. Dice Derrida en algún momento de La bestia y el soberano que de Paul Celan puede derivarse una política: quizá hay que añadir que esa política no es política, sino infrapolítica. La política, en cuanto a la vez necesariamente aprisionada en la esencia ontoteológica de la metafísica e instancia fáctica del manifestarse en cada caso de la voluntad de voluntad, en el fin epocal de la metafísica, debe también ser destruida, desestructurada, desmetaforizada.   Se trata de encontrar una relación libre con la política. La retirada de la política es su necesario retrazo. El nombre de ese paso atrás o salto hacia una sub-stancia destituyente puede ser, es, infrapolítica del vencimiento. Pero, si esto es un programa, la letra no está escrita. Pasa por la liquidación del fantasma, por su encarnación vital.

No conozco la obra de Hans Blumenberg, y así no conozco sus presuposiciones. Lo que me interesa en esta nota es sólo iniciar una exploración, tentativa en la precisa medida en que, para mí, el texto de Blumenberg es todavía difícilmente descodificable, que se vincula a varias conversaciones recientes—sobre desmetaforización y diferencia ontológica en particular.   Quiero referirme a las páginas finales de Naufragio con espectador desde la traducción al inglés, Shipwreck with Spectator.   Allí Blumenberg introduce un comentario sobre Heidegger que me parece astuto y útil, pero al que Blumenberg parece darle una carga negativa que depende de sus presuposiciones (que son las que no conozco).

La segunda parte de Shiwreck with Spectator es “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality.” Comienza diciendo que su propia teoría de la metáfora ha cambiado desde tratar de ser un método subsidiario para la historia de los conceptos a concebirse como un “caso especial limitado” de noconceptualidad (81).

La perspectiva metaforológica, por lo tanto, en la versión de Blumenberg, no trataría ya fundamentalmente de incidir en la explicación de la constitución de la conceptualidad, sino que habría girado hacia las conexiones de la metaforicidad, y del sistema de metáforas o incluso de cualquier puntualidad metafórica específica, con “el mundo de la vida como el apoyo constantemente motivante . . . de toda teoría” (81).

Siguen algunas consideraciones donde lo que parece el rasgo dominante es asegurar la estabilidad de la conciencia a partir de los mecanismos metaforizantes—si es así, el proyecto de “asegurar la estabillidad de la conciencia” sería una de las presuposiciones fundamentales de Blumenberg (fundamental en el sentido de que no es una presuposición trivial).   Dice Blumenberg que la metáfora puede ser entendida no sólo como elemento desestabilizador, sino quizá primariamente como todo lo contrario, reparador de desarmonías. “To repair its disharmonies, to again and again find its way back to the harmony of the data as data of one experience, remains the constitutive accomplishment of consciousness, which assures it that it is following reality and not illusions” (82).

Hay una escisión básica entre metáfora e intuición teórica, parece decir Blumenberg, que no es meramente histórica sino estructural.   Esto lleva a Blumenberg a una afirmación de carácter fundamentalmente nietzscheano, y criticada por Heidegger como dependiente absolutamente de la comprensión del mundo como campo de expresión de la Voluntad de poder. Se trata de la división del mundo entre objetualidad propia (susceptible de certeza) y objetualidad potencial o artística, que dependería del entusiasmo estético—verdad en cuanto certeza y arte son dos facultades primarias de la Voluntad de poder. Dice Blumenberg: “The homelessness of metaphor in a world determined by disciplined experience can be seen in the uneasiness encountered by everything that does not meet the standard of a language that tends toward objective univocity. Unless it fits into the opposing tendency, as ‘aesthetic.’ This attribute provides the ultimate, and therefore completely unhampering, license for multiple meaning” (88-89).

Ese sentido múltiple se derivaría de una necesidad elemental de lo humano no colmable por pensamiento teórico o univocidad científica.   Para Blumenberg, una teoría de la noconceptualidad entiende esa “situación de necesidad” como necesidad de “racionalización de una carencia” (96).   La teoría se relaciona con esa racionalización de carencia “supplementing the consideration of what we should do to fulfill the intentionality of consciousness with a—more anthropological—consideration of what we can afford in the way of fulfillments” (96). En mi opinión este es un claro reconocimiento de que la capacidad crítica de la metaforología entendida como teoría de la noconceptualidad tiene un horizonte estrictamente antropológico y antropologista.

Y es desde ahí desde donde se produce el comentario sobre Heidegger, introducido mediante una curiosa referencia al principio de equivalencia general. Blumenberg nos cuenta que el dinero buscó “hacer presente el valor” buscando una conexión con el oro, pero que esa relación oro-dinero debía estar refrendada por la autoridad gobernante.   Pero que el símbolo, en todo caso, no está refrendado. “It maintains distance in order to constitute between object and subject a sphere of nonobjective correlates of thought, the sphere of what can be represented symbolically. It is the possibility of a mere idea having an effect—an idea as the sum of possibilities—just as it is the possibility of value” (98).

And then Blumenberg adds “or the possibility of ‘being’” (98).   De esta forma Blumenberg está ya introduciendo, no sé con qué grado de intencionalidad, una “valorización” del ser como monetización simbólica, lo cual sería, desde el horizonte heideggeriano, una operación altamente ilegítima.  Blumenberg parece acordar con el horizonte general del principio de equivalencia general en cuanto herencia de la Ilustración.   Y esta sería, en nuestra interpretación, una diferencia irreconciliable con los parámetros del pensamiento de Heidegger.

“Do we really understand what was meant by Heidegger`s fundamental ontological question about the ‘meaning of being’?” (98).    Blumenberg habla de un “truco” de sustitución mediante el que Heidegger eludiría la necesidad convencional de dar una definición al decir, en su analítica existencial, en Ser y tiempo, que el Dasein entiende ya siempre de antemano la noción de Ser, de hecho, que el Dasein es ante todo ese saber. Esto tiene implicaciones radicales, fundamentalmente en relación con el acceso al entendimiento de nuestros modos de conducta y sus implicaciones. “That is why the being of Dasein is care, care implies time, and time implies being. Such an answer relates to none of the objects that we know, nor to their totality as a world like the one in which we live. That existence is being-in-the-world means precisely that the world of this ‘being-in’ is not composed of ‘objects’ but cannot be grasped in metaphors either” (99).

Me parece que la descripción de Blumenberg de las implicaciones de la determinación heideggeriana de la diferencia ontológica es correcta en su mayor parte–de nuevo, mis dudas ocurren en el momento de intentar entender por qué esas implicaciones constituirían un problema para Blumenberg. “Heidegger posited an enmity between his question about being and positive scientificity, and this enmity was supposed to be more deeply fundamental than that between intuition and concept, between metaphor and formula. But for this relationship too . . . it is true that the question concerning the ‘meaning of being’ can affect or even occupy us only because the question concerning the conditions of existence is neither decided nor even influenced by it” (100).   No puedo entender a qué remite la expresión “conditions of existence” en Blumenberg, porque me parece que la pregunta por el sentido del ser, o más bien dicho, la noción de la diferencia óntico-ontológica, afecta drásticamente nuestra relación a cualquier posible determinación de “conditions of existence.”

Eso no es trivial, pero puede ser la indicación de un diferendo, de una diferencia irreconciliable entre Heidegger y Blumenberg.  Pero en cualquier caso creo que Blumenberg acierta en casi todo en lo que sigue: “Nothing can be ‘represented’ metaphorically if all elementary modes of behavior towards the world find their original totality in care, whose ontological meaning lies in temporality, which in its turn is probably the unfolded horizon of an ultimate radicality whose designation may be arbitrarily exchangeable (I would also express a caveat concerning this last phrase: the arbitrary exchangeability is mere errancy: factical, yes, but not warranted). To this, the strictest prohibition on metaphors applied” (101)

Pero no es asunto de “la más estricta prohibición,” sino más bien de la necesidad de la destrucción de la metáfora, y del trabajo sostenido en la destrucción de la metáfora y de la historia de la metáfora en el sentido técnico específico de la noción de ¨destrucción” en Heidegger, puesto que la metáfora, en cuanto mediada por la historia de la metafísica o por la historia del ser en su manifestación metafísica, cubre y oculta la posibilidad misma de acceso a la diferencia ontológica.

La demetaforización, que es ónticamente imposible en última instancia, es todavía sin embargo una parte necesaria de la destrucción de la historia de la ontología, tanto de la ontología conceptual como de esa otra ontología no conceptual que forma parte de la ideologización del mundo de la vida.  Blumenberg parece indicar que esto es un error, pero sólo sus presuposiciones, que no son las de Heidegger, pueden justificar su posición.

Joan Stambaugh, the translator and editor of the volume The End of Philosophy, where both texts by Heidegger are included, warns that “overcoming” does not mean “left behind and defeated,” rather “incorporated” and somehow neutralized, as one may perhaps do with a flu. Metaphysics has already done it to Being—Being is incorporated and neutralized through the history of metaphysics, which is why metaphysics is also the history of the forgetting of Being.

Metaphysics rules today, unconditionally, determining what is real and its objects.   But, from a certain perspective, this also means that it has entered its ending, which “lasts more than the previous history of metaphysics” (85).

At the terminus of metaphysics, man is defined as the working stiff, animal laborans, itself objectified as mere will to will.

At the time of completion there is a decline: “a collapse of the world characterized by metaphysics” and a “desolation of the earth stemming from metaphysics” (86).

A metaphoric sedimentation has taken place historically, at the end of which “Man wills himself as the volunteer of the will to will, for which all truth becomes that error which it needs in order to be able to guarantee for itself the illusion that the will to will can will nothing other than empty nothingness, in the face of which it asserts itself without being able to know its own completed nulllity.”

[Esta es una frase perfectamente nietzscheana. Esa “empty nothingness” es en mi opinión el resultado de la gran acumulación metafórica de la modernidad, que es también su reducción máxima al principio de, por ejemplo, excelencia universitaria: si usted es un profesor excelente, usted publicará durante el resto de sus días no menos de tres ensayos y dos cuartos al año en revistas indexadas de al menos 7.38 puntos de estimación, y sus evaluaciones de enseñanza en ningún caso bajarán del 4.562. Lo demás no importa, para eso están nuestra tolerancia y generosidad democrática ejemplares. El corazón de la metáfora, como ya Nietzsche intimaba en el texto sobre Verdad y mentira, es la sedimentación de la gran mentira que pasa por verdad histórica, y la verdad histórica del momento (el error que necesitamos para mantener la ilusión, etc.) es por lo pronto el produccionismo excelentista. Que podríamos desmetaforizar sin que eso implique en absoluto desmemorización ni desmundianización, todo lo contrario.]

Heidegger goes briefly into the history of modern metaphysics—Descartes, Kant, Hegel. “The completion of metaphysics begins with Hegel’s metaphysics of absolute knowledge as the Spirit of will” (89).   The countermovement that follows Hegel—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, but also Marx—“completes” Hegel, completes the completion. The thought of “value,” and of Being as value as a condition of the will, accomplishes metaphysics [Heidegger never says it, but value is the condition of the principle of general equivalence. General equivalence is at the same time a condition and a determination of the world understood as will to will].

But—at the time of completion, the ontological difference, the memory of an alternative figuration, veiledly appears. “Together with the beginning of the completion of metaphysics, the preparation begins, unrecognized and essentially inaccessible to metaphysics, for a first appearance of the twofoldness of Being and beings. In this appearance the first resonance of the truth of Being still conceals itself, taking back into itself the precedence of Being with regard to its dominance” (91).

If “destiny” is the granting of the ontological difference, metaphysics wards it off.   The lack of destiny is the unhistorical.   Completed metaphysics throws up an unhistorical unworld ruled by technology, understood as objectified nature, the business of culture, manufactured politics. (93)

Representational-calculative reason (the form of reason consistent with the principle of general equivalence, although Heidegger does not talk about general equivalence) is technology’s reason.   Driven by will to power, which is will to will.   This is the scaffolding of the order of the earth: truth as certainty and stability, art as enthusiastic push and drive.

“But with the end of philosophy, thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning” (96). “Philosophy in the age of completed metaphysics is anthropology” (99).   One could choose—either anthropology or a preparatory thought for another beginning.

Let`s think of this not as it related to Heidegger´s own time, or more specifically to the 1936-46 period when these notes were composed.   Let us think of it as related to today.   For instance, as pertains to US electoral politics for 2016 as reported in yesterday’s New York Times (Jan 27, 2015), in an article about the Koch brothers’ fund directly to influence elections. Heidegger says that representational-calculative reason, guided by the principle of equivalence (although he does not say it), is “the ubiquitous, continual, unconditional investigation of means, grounds, hindrances, the miscalculating exchange and plotting of goals, deceptiveness and maneuvers, the inquisitorial, as a consequence of which the will to will is distrustful and devious toward itself, and thinks of nothing else than the guaranteeing of itself as power itself” (100-01).

This aimlessness is called “mission” (or sometimes “vision,” and often “strategic plan.”)

And here comes the Heideggerian radical indictment of all (modern) politics, hence the first historical opening into explicit infrapolitics as the thought of the ontological difference. This is an important text, and very unusual in the Heideggerian oeuvre: “The struggle between those who are in power and those who want to come to power: On every side there is the struggle for power. Everywhere power itself is what is determinative. Through this struggle for power, the being of power is posited in the being of its unconditional dominance by both sides. At the same time, however, one thing is still covered up here: the fact that this struggle is in the service of power and is willed by it. Power has overpowered these struggles in advance. The will to will alone empowers these struggles. Power, however, overpowers various kinds of humanity in such a way that it expropriates from man the possibility of ever escaping from the oblivion of Beings on such paths. This struggle is of necessity planetary and as such undecidable in its being because it has nothing to decide, since it remains excluded from all differentiation, from the difference (of Being from beings), and thus from truth. Through its own force it is driven out into what is without destiny: into the abandonment of Being” (100).

Abandonment of Being, in the double genitive sense.   Nihilism in the completion of metaphysics.   Heidegger now says something unexpected: against so much “machination” a “pain must be experienced and borne out to the end.”   It is a curious pain: the pain of the lack of need.   It needs to be understood, Heidegger says, that experiencing “lack of need is the highest and most hidden need” (102).

Heidegger now engages in a long rant on global war, which foresees Carlo Galli’s recent determination of the concept. “The question of when there will be peace cannot be answered not because the duration of war is unfathomable, but rather because the question already asks about something that no longer exists, since war is no longer something that could terminate in peace” (104). Beings are out everywhere for consumption as raw material, and war is the name for the consumption.   For that, “leaders” emerge everywhere, in the various “sectors,” including the university sector, or the poetry sector, or the culture sector.   But leaders are only “the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have entered the way of erring in which the vacuum expands which requires a single order and guarantee of beings” (105).

And Heidegger also engages in a rare diagnostic of the division of the world between superhumanity and subhumanity, hegemony and subalternity, using the category of “instinct,” which seems to take us back to Alexander Kojève’s meditation on the end of history into animality: “Instinct is the superescalation to the unconditional miscalculation of everything. It corresponds to superhumanity. Since this miscalculation absolutely dominates the will, there does not seem to be anything more besides the will than the safety of the mere drive for calculation, for which calculation is above all the first calculative rule. Until now, instinct was supposed to be a prerogative of the animal which seeks and follows what is useful and harmful to it in its life sphere, and strives for nothing beyond that. The assurance of animal instinct corresponds to the blind entanglement in its sphere of use. The complete release of subhumanity corresponds to the conditionless empowering of superhumanity. The drive of animality and the ratio of humanity become identical” (106).

What remains is an ordering as the form of guaranteeing aimless activity. “This circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a worl which has become an unworld. ‘Leader natures’ are those who allow themselves to be put in the service of this procedure as its directive organs on account of their assured instincts. They are the first employees within the course of business of the unconditional consumption of beings in the service of the guarantee of the vacuum of the abandonment of Being” (107).

Heidegger ends by warning that “no mere action will change the world” (110). Something else is needed.   In the meantime, and we might as well think here about global warming, which was not present for Heidegger as a demonstrable phenomenon, “the desolation of the earth begins as a process which is willed, but not known in its being, and also not knowable at the time when the being of truth defines itself as certainty in which human representational thinking and producing first become sure of themselves. Hegel conceives this moment of the history of metaphysics as the moment in which absolute self-consciousness becomes the principle of thinking” (110).

Something else is needed.   A process of Andenken, or recollection, Heidegger will call it, which is also a step-back from the unworlding of metaphysics.  That will be for Part II of this commentary.