Again, points for discussion on Acosta’s Thresholds of Illiteracy.  Not that Bram’s proposal is illiterate, but illiteracy is his major name for a critical apparatus that unsettles and overturns many of the fundamental tropes of Latinamericanist criticism over the last fifty years or more.   If literacy/orality, as Acosta claims, is a foundational polarity, beyond the criollo/indigenous divide, and in fact giving it legibility, Acosta presents a number of highly articulate destructions of its critical deployments–on indigenismo, for instance, or on testimonio.  I will limit myself to these two for the time being.

Illiteracy marks the terrain of collapse for the critical productivity of the literacy/orality divide, and attendant tropes.  Acosta opposes Vargas Llosa’s take on José María Arguedas to Cornejo Polar’s, not in the name of some interpretive error, but in the name of the obvious impossibility for final coherence in the critics’ position.  And he opposes Miguel Barnet’s to John Beverley’s understanding and presentation of testimonio not in the name of their incoherence but rather in the name of their inability to account for a proliferation of questions that rent the productivity of their positions.  In both cases, what finally emerges and is exposed is the gap between critical positions and primary text.

An interesting slip, not more than a typo repeated, emerges in page 138, when the informant in Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón is called Ernesto, rather than Esteban, twice–Ernesto is of course the first name of the protagonist of Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos, a novel studied in the previous chapter.   Through the fusion of the two names, Ernesto-Esteban come to stand in for a Latin American life that both primary and critical texts attempt to represent and/or come to grips with.   This is not just a life, but it is a life determined by historical tensions and conflicts, a subcontinental bios, or the allegory of one whose biopolitical containment, as it emerges, it has been the historical function of Latinamericanist criticism to produce or co-produce.

And in page 141 Acosta refers to making the life speak, “making an informant speak.”   He is addressing Barnet’s testimonio theory (“a narrative structured around the encounter between a subject and the state.  After all, ‘making an informant speak’ is not a politically neutral metaphor, nor one consistent with de-subalternization; in fact, it amounts to its reproduction.”  Zivin would no doubt call this an emergence of Inquisitional logic.

Illiteracy comes to mean the failure of the subject to come into its own, to respond to its interpellation from the mouth of a criticism understood as state or para-state apparatus.   The life will not comply, as it refuses equally to serve inside the parameters of the oral authenticity or of the artificial literacy, in resistance against nuestroamericanismo as much as in resistance against any ideology of radical heterology or wild indomestication, since both of them are shown to be the two sides of the same coin.   The illiterate response would be a screen of arrest for the critical machine, except that there is no illiterate response, there is a rather a non-response, an impossibility to respond, a silence more devastating in its anarchic potentiality than any possible articulation of an alternative contestation.  Illiteracy is therefore just an effect–an effect from the real’s unguarded possibility, as Acosta will say towards the end of the testimonio chapter.

This effect is presented as a “theoretical residue” in 119.   It is a residue of undecidability, and it is a residue of critical destruction; it may be in fact, precisely not a theoretical residue, but the residue no theory can assimilate.

How, then, not to think about the structural parallel between Acosta’s fundamental stance and Zivin’s in Figurative Inquisition?  Could we not say that Zivin’s division inquisitor vs. marrano, which produces marranismo as the field of non-assimilation, as the field of the secret, is replicated in Acosta’s division literacy-orality, which produces illiteracy as its opaque precipitate?

In the same way Zivin analyzes the field of indetermination that opens up between the two figures of Inquisitor and marrano, Acosta says:  “what we have here are two foundational conceptual models of [indigenista criticism, testimonio criticism, etc.] that are ambiguously interrelated but whose interstitial space remains critically unexplored” (140).

As in Zivin, we read in Acosta’s text that the critical destruction is undertaken at the service of “a truly progressive politics” (238) within the context of “a sustained reflection on contemporary understandings of democracy, power, and resistance in Latin America” (239).

And, in Zivin, but more explicitly in Acosta, we are also told that there is an implicit appeal “to the logic of hegemony” (Acosta 240) in the critical apparatuses under question, not just on the side of the Inquisitor or on the side of literacy, but on both sides, which are mirror sides, which it would be necessary to dismantle.

Again, the question that opens up, and it is not just any question, is the question of the production or the constitution of democracy.   Don’t we know it won’t happen?  Already?   Or not as an effect of the critical machine of destruction?   Or is it a willful, hence strategic forgetting?  Or is something else at stake?

Zivin and Acosta radically question the legitimacy of all critical proposals in the tradition.  What is left is the legitimacy of illegitimacy–if nadie es más que nadie, if no critical tradition can offer itself as authoritative, then nobody has any right to impose hegemony.   From the radical absence of social authority, from the illegitimacy of social authority, democracy may arise.  Is that it?

This is just to get a discussion going on Zivin’s work, I do not mean to write up any complete response to what I have been reading. Just a few thoughts–and they are not a critique, as it should be obvious but may not be!

“Beyond Inquisitional Logic” is, in a strong sense, a companion piece to the book Figurative Inquisitions. I say “in a strong sense” because it means to state what the book only leaves implicit, namely, that there is a political bite to the notion, in the book, perhaps its central or originary intuition, that “the subject is precisely the failure to become the subject” (Figurative 101), attributed to Mladen Dolar glossing both Althusser and Lacan’s notions of subjectivity, and sustained in Judith Butler’s theorizations as well.   In a minimal formulation, what obtains is that “the sudden transformation of individual into subject necessarily produces a remainder” (101).   The status of the remainder—radically, the nonsubject—triggers, I think, Erin Graff Zivin’s investigation, both in the book and in the companion piece.

The notion of that remainder is said to divide the intellectual field, tropologized as Latinamericanism in the article and as Luso-Hispanic Thought in the book. It prompts the emergence, necessarily retroactive, as only its naming brings it into being, of a pervasive “Inquisitional logic” in the tradition, which is, summarily, the logic of the negation of the remainder, against which another logic, less clearly named, opens up. This second logic “would subvert totalitarian or totalizing thought” (Figurative 105).

The question must therefore be asked as to the hold of the division: is the second logic a radical alternative to the first?   Or it is simply the “shard” (a word that shows up several times in the book) within the first?   Is the second logic simply the destabilization of the first, its ongoing deconstruction, if you will? Or is the first logic, in every case, the manifestation of a decision to foreclose the aporias and dead-ends of the second one, to get on with it and make a move towards some goal, to refuse paralysis or perplexity?   Another way of putting it: Does Inquisitional logic know its other in advance, and likes to ward it off, or is it only the second logic that knows in advance, and always too well, always excessively, the sinister work of the first one?   Is it the case that one of the two logics is in excess of the other, the excess of the other, or is it rather the case that both form a closed set (whose frontiers would also be the uncertain frontiers of the intellectual field) within which each of them occupies a certain amount of territory?   Finally, is the second logic the auto-immunitary disorder of Inquisitional logic?   Or is the second logic itself the remainder of the first one in the same sense that “the subject is the failure to become the subject”?

I do not know if there is a way of answering any of those questions satisfactorily, that is, without having any possible answer proliferate into a subsequent series of questions.   Another way of going at it would be to say, perhaps, that Inquisitional logic occupies the political terrain for the most part, at least insofar as one holds to a conception of the political as the field of division between friends and enemies.   Whereas the second logic does not so much refute enmity as it relocates itself in a space that it substracts from politics as such—while acknowledging the latter exists.

If so, what would be the “political bite” of the political subtraction?   Zivin says, in the essay, “infrapolitics,” but she also says “democracy.” In fact, she also says “exposure without ulterior purpose.”   Thereby linking the three answers into one.

The idea would be that a deconstruction of Inquisitional logic in every case would open the way for the possibility of democracy, would therefore be a condition of democracy, even a hyperbolic condition of democracy.   Infrapolitical exposure without ulterior purpose—the specific “an-archaeological” destruction, or archic dismantling in any analysis, such as the analysis in display in the examples given (Draper, Williams, Steiner, plus of course Zivin’s own literary analyses in Figurative Inquisitions)—could not become a goal without incurring contradiction: it is not a goal, but a condition, in fact, the hyperbolic condition (that is, a condition that takes its conditional register to an unconditional extreme: a condition without condition) of a democratic practice, certainly at the level of thought, or intellectual activity within the field.

If so, then the second logic makes an incontrovertibly strong claim on the first or Inquisitional logic: Inquisitional logic is a political logic of mastery, in every case. But the second logic in every case un-masters mastery, lets it loose as the fantasy that it always is.   Now, as fantasy, it will not fail to exercise power, as it is power itself.   Inquisitional logic is therefore always already abominable, and always already there.

At some point Zivin says that we need, urgently, the translation of the ethical demand into a spectral demand.   I take it she means we need the conversion of an ethical approach into something else, something that can and will haunt politics, or the political region, both critically (against Inquisitorial logics) and affirmatively (as democratic construction).

But the word “conversion” is crucial there: how is that demand for conversion—which is, really, the demand for infrapolitics to give up on subtraction, to invest the political field—not already caught up in the Inquisitorial injunction?

The latter is not a rhetorical question, it is however a question for which I do not believe we can find a productive answer (responding yes is not a productive answer, and responding no is probably an error).   The problem is that, by being unable to move past that impasse, we seem to be sanctioning the endless survival of Inquisitorial logic.  Can we do otherwise?  Beyond literature or even in literature?

As some of us are preparing to discuss Erin Graff Zivin’s Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Tradition, I think it will be useful to post here this companion essay, entitled “Beyond Inquisitional Logic, or, Toward an An-Archaeological Latinamericanism.” 14.1.zivin

“The Santa Muerte has no interest in the moral qualities of the favours she grants.  She sees no difference between a plea to cure cancer and a petition for help in robbing a bank.  She does not care if the request comes from a teetotal grandmother or a substance-abusing murderer.  The crux of the cult is to be on good terms with death, because death comes to everybody, whatever they may look like, whatever kind of life they may have led, and whatever their intentions may be.  The Santa Muerte becomes not only a representation of destiny, but a possibility of negotiating a stay of execution”  (Jo Tuckman, Mexico, Democracy Interrrupted, 137).   Apparently not a lot is known about the cult, which is diverse and multiple, and placed well beyond either morality or politics.  The question that comes up for me is, is this a religion (and what is a religion?), or is this precisely infrapolitics in action?  Or is it infrapolitical religion?   If anybody can help with good bibliography on it, that would be great.

Kant seems to exhaust practical reason into ethics and politics, whereas for Aristotle practical reason included rhetoric too, from its primary mechanism, phronesis.   Perhaps one could say that there is more to practical reason than ethics and politics, and that beyond the ethico-political relation, which is most definitely the business of phronesis, there is infrapolitics.  Infrapolitics would be a region of practical reason, a phronetic region perhaps, prior, that is, ontologically prior to any ethico-political determination.   Raising the question about its existence is difficult, because the tradition does not seem to give us the resources for it.   Perhaps Levinas would say that infrapolitics does not constitute an ontological region because it is in effect beyond ontology, but that means Levinas would make it part of ethics as first philosophy.   My intuition is that ethics is derivative, however, so that, if there is to be an “otherwise than being,” it would be infrapolitical rather than ethical.  I know these are rather embarrassing claims.  The question is, can they be sustained?  Are they prospectively productive from the point of view of understanding something that has remained occluded?

I wonder why it gets to be so tedious to argue with the hegemony people that there is always and in every case more to any political process than hegemonic or counterhegemonic moves.   If they accept this, just because it is difficult to disagree with the notion that “there is more than one thinks,” it is simply to sweep it under the table and ignore it in the next move, which is a move again entirely contained by hegemony theory.  But posthegemony obtains every time there is a failure of hegemony, and failures of hegemony are constant–otherwise there would be no politics.  Say, if I fail to be happy in my love for the leader, it is not because I am plotting a counterhegemonic move for the most part: it is because the hegemonic interpellation does not please me.   So, perhaps to avoid the tiresome repetition of the same obvious points every time, we should radicalize the position and say that posthegemony is the political moment or manifestation of infrapolitical jouissance.  And that, as such, it is, thank god, unavailable to any politician, ungraspable to them, and beyond capture.   It is the very distance from politics that opens up the gap of freedom, even if freedom is only the acceptance of necessity as such (as opposed to unfreedom, which is blindness to necessity camouflaged as hegemonic love.)

Deconstruction may perhaps be said to have had no discernible, no palpable, or touchable or visible or clear, political effects.   It may be said to be a thinking of ambiguity, a non-militant thinking, unavailable to politics except in the fallen and derivative sense of being a set of tools for critical destruction of the other, of the antagonist, ineffectual at that, merely abstruse, speculative, merely critical, perhaps.   Not politically efficient the way that Marxism can be argued to have been, or still to be, politically efficient. Or, say, Ernesto Laclau´s hegemony theory, or Alain Badiou`s commitment to fidelity to a political event of truth through ongoing subjectivation.   One could even say that, of all the theoretical paradigms of the last forty years, deconstruction is the least political of then, the least politically efficient, as it can be said to be considerably less politically efficient than identity thinking, or gender-based thinking, or cultural studies, or even good old-fashioned hermeneutics in the traditional sense, since at least hermeneutics in every case updated and explicitated the hidden content of the tradition.   And what has deconstruction ever done, politically speaking? Nothing. Which, naturally enough, raises the suspicion in a lot of good, well-intentioned folks that any claim to use deconstruction for political analysis can only be secretly or not so secretly reactionary and even nihilistic. It does not get any better when some of us say, as tentatively as possible, that we intend to use deconstruction, if we ever learn how to do so, to do not directly political but infrapolitical analysis. Because what can conceivably be the use of infrapolitical analysis if it is not ultimately a political use? And, if so, then even infrapolitical analysis would be reactionary, nihilistic. In principle. Before it happens. And, they say, they probably won´t make it happen anyway: too absurd.

So it is at least interesting to see Jacques Derrida himself say, in an article entitled “Abraham, the Other,” published in 2003, that from his early infancy, in fact, from the time he was ten years old, he felt “a kind of political philosophy beginning to elaborate itself wildly in [him]” (144). And that such “political philosophy” had everything to do with his experience of antisemitism in French Algeria: “and sometimes I wonder whether the deciphering of the antisemitic symptom and of the full connotation system that accompanies it indissociably was not the first corpus I learned to interpret, as if I hadn’t known how to read, or other would say “deconstruct,” except in order to have to learn to read, even to deconstruct, antisemitism in the first place” (144).

Of course the question that opens up here is how can the detection of antisemitism constitute a politics: does it?   And part of the answer has to do with that in antisemitism that concerns itself with the destruction of the other, of the neighbor.   It does so through an interpellation that instills fear, through an act of subjection that always already inscribes itself in that obscure element in the human that feels itself hostage to a debt, immemorial and unassignable: a debt of desire, or a debt in desire. But, if, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “the Jew is a Jew because others hold him to be a Jew” (quoted, 148), then anybody can be a Jew.   A wild political philosophy beginning here, in this experience of fear, is necessarily resistant to any attempt at distilling in others an experience of subjection, the negative subjectivation that is born when the subject “learns the truth” about himself or herself, that is, the truth of her unworthiness, the truth of his damnation.

In his review of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks Richard Wolin refers to the use of the letter H in the context of Heidegger’s antisemitic lunacy: “He attributes numinous powers to names that begin with the letter H: Heraclitus, Hölderlin, and Hegel. But Hitler would also seem to belong to the list, as would, of course, Heidegger” (Woling, 5).   The theme of election by Being or Destiny, by History, the theme that made a particular group of human beings think they were ordained to rule the world through the subjection or destruction of others, shows up in the uncanny H to which we could oppose the alternative H (or is it the same H?) of the election Derrida mentions at the end of his essay, commenting on Kafka´s story about Abraham: “There would be, perhaps, another Abraham, not just he who receives another name in his old age and, when he is 99, at the moment of his circumcision, experiments, d´un coup de lettre, the letter h, not just he who . . . on Mount Moriah, is called by the angel two times twice, first ´Abraham, Abraham,´ and then once again, from the heights of heaven . . . There would be no just Abram, and Abraham, Abraham . . . There would be another Abraham” (167).

This fourth Abraham, the Abraham of the more-than-one, the Kafkian Abraham, is the Abraham who can never be sure that he has been elected to anything, the one who might be ready for a call, but hears poorly, or can´t believe what he hears, and fears there must be a mistake, another guy may have been called, not him. Or it might even be worse. “It is as if, at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out laughing. And perhaps he had made no mistake at all, his name really was called, it having been the teacher’s intention to make the rewarding of the best student at the same time a punishment for the worst one” (Kafka, 2).

The theme of election, of subjectivation through election, is perhaps constitutive of politics, of every militant subject of the political.   So perhaps the wild political philosophy of the suspension of election is, in every case, an infrapolitics: a suspension of politics.

The question comes up repeatedly, the demand, to provide a clear example of infrapolitics in the sense we are developing through collective discussion that would make it an alternative to the on the other hand very interesting James C. Scott’s take on it.  It has seemed important not to rush into examples all too quickly, because examples have, sometimes, too much force, and might get in the way of an adequate approach: in other words, examples might orient the discussion towards an all-too-reductive understanding.   But it might be time to offer one, for discussion.  Take Jean Franco’s recent book, Cruel Modernity (Duke UP, 2013).  Franco reviews atrocious stories of violence in recent Latin American history, and she does it to such an extent that, towards the end of the book, one hesitates to continue to conceptualize them in terms of stories, as cumulatively they become something else.  Take the last chapter, for instance, on narco violence, the cult of Santa Muerte, religion gone over to the dark side, or the reference to Bolaño’s (and Baudelaire’s) “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.”  Could we not make the claim that the uncanny surplus of violence in all the histories reviewed by Franco constitutes, precisely, infrapolitical violence?  We know that violence is constitutive of politics.  But how do you still retain a political dimension in the very excess of violence?  There is no political valence to that excess, in fact, it makes a mockery of politics, whatever the latter is.  So this is the example:  the excessive, post-katechontic violence deployed endemically in Latin American contemporary life, from Guatemala to the US-Mexico border, from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the Atacama desert, and from  the Colombian jungles to the Devil’s Mouth is infrapolitical violence.  Which does not mean that infrapolitics refers only to violence.

In 2005 my worries were not what they are now. But this is the essay mentioned in the previous post where I used the expression “cultural-political closure” to refer to the oppressive effects of any repetition of culture in the political arena. Apologies for the self-promotion, but I have had several messages asking me to make this material available.

cultural political closure