Regarding the discussion on reading Heidegger today, I was asked during it whether I could provide specific personal reasons why it would be important to keep doing it, beyond, say, merely historic-philosophical reasons or a sense of responsibility to the archive.  The context was framed by the notion that “les non-dupes errent,” that is, that reading Heidegger might also be a particular kind of (more or less) intelligent stupidity.  I thought of posting this paper I wrote once, presented somewhere, and never published, perhaps because I thought it was too personal.

Harassed Unrest. Notes on Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking”

At some point in his 1951 lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking” Martin Heidegger mentions the notion of “harassed unrest,” attributing it to the life that should not be lived and will not be lived if a proper relationship to dwelling were to be accomplished. He says: “Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest” (328). So I would like to start by asking you to reflect for a moment: is your life adequately qualified under the notion of “harassed unrest”?   Are you living a life of “harassed unrest”? Have you by now come to consider that state of affairs chronic and unavoidable? Have you in fact already given up on any hopes of redress?

The opposite of “harassed unrest” is not “unharassed rest.” It is not a matter of resting without the strain of harassment—perhaps that is what you do by night, when you sleep, but it is not an alternative for day dwelling. Dwelling, dwelling by day, and we will not silence the fact that dwelling is being human, that humans are by dwelling, is not resting without harassment. In fact, resting unharassed, which is what, say, the turtle does after the race with the damned hare is finally over, could be said to be a temporal condition: a point of temporal stasis, the complement to the spatial structuration of the fourfold, since the fourfold encompasses the day/night divide, the seasonal succession, the yearly cycle. But harassed unrest is, for Heidegger, a kind of space trouble. Let me suggest that it may not be simply a kind, any kind, of space trouble, but rather the defining space trouble of our time. We live lives of harassed unrest, and that is the spatial condition that characterizes what Heidegger in another essay of roughly the same years, the same period, calls the age of technology.   We’ll talk about it later.

If harassed unrest is improper dwelling, if it defines a bad way of being human, it is because harassed unrest is the condition one suffers when one is in a position of dislocated location, or if you will allow me, a dis/position. Since we want to talk about space, let’s retain three determinations of space: what Heidegger calls the abstract determination, about which more later, and then either proper location, which is determined by an appropriate relation to the fourfold (sky and earth, mortals and divinities), or improper location, which is a bad relationship to the fourfold. Dwelling is dwelling in view of the fourfold. Undwelling is fourfold trouble—a certain incapacity to letting be, to letting the sky be sky, the bridge be a bridge, death be death, or thought be thought. Your location cannot reach dwelling, you do not dwell, you undwell, rather, and in that undwelling you are deprived of proper location, of good space, you are even deprived of air: you choke, you cannot breathe, and you live a breathless life.   Dis/posed into breathless life, radically disoriented, your state of unrest comes to you not like the opposite of rest, but as a more primal condition that no rest will quench or satisfy. Is it not true that rest today is, for most of us, nothing but the attempt to suppress or put harassed unrest to sleep? If rest is for us today nothing but a distraction, hence also a dislocation, a dis/position, of harassed unrest, then unrest is not properly the negative condition of rest. On the contrary, unrest takes on an ominous positivity, and it is rest that can only be experienced as the negation of unrest, as mere displacement, as escape.

If rest defines a temporal point in our private negotiation with the deprived space of our lives, the interruption of a spatial flux, the desperate reach for the oxygen of the night, then we could say that time is today nothing but the stasis of unrest. In dislocation, in disposition, we are disposed temporally into the avoidance of harassed unrest, and the avoidance of harassed unrest is the final disposition of our lives. We are all, as it were, turtles dreaming of the end of the race, wishing for the night, for final torpor.   The Roman historian Tacitus said of his compatriots once: “they created a wasteland. They called it peace.” We could say of our ourselves: “we dream of resting. We call it a life.” This is what happens, for instance, when the vacation industry orders us to the beach for a week in the summer. Or when the entertainment industry commands us to the couch for some football watching on a Sunday afternoon. Or when the life industry prescribes fifty minutes of physical exercise three to four days a week. The interruption of harassed unrest is for us our self-disposition into a prepackaged box. Our stays in the box mark our private time, and everything else is dislocation. Private time, which also means, deprived time, lacking time, is the unavoidable consequence of harassed unrest as the defining spatial trouble of our lives.

This breathless, timeless, dislocated life we are disposed into in the age of technology, will it also be a thoughtless life? It is a life where building happens, as humans can only dwell, even in undwelling, by building, and building is also, in one of its early meanings, as Heidegger says, producing culture or even thinking about culture, as you guys do in this working group. But the fact that, under harassed unrest, building goes on, even if we only build mad castles with playing cards, and that dwelling goes on, even if only in the mode of undwelling, does not automatically mean that thinking happens. Heidegger reserves thinking for something else: it is an exception. Thinking is an event that does not have the inevitability of dwelling and building, indeed, of being, as we can be thoughtless (and more about this later), and thus build or undwell thoughtlessly. We can find the register of thinking as decisive event at the end of the essay, from which I quote:

The real [plight of dwelling] lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to this homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling. But how else can mortals answer this summons than by trying on their part, on their own, to bring dwelling to the fullness of their essence? This they accomplish when they build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling. (339)

Man’s homelessness: perhaps that is what Heidegger has meant all along by “harassed unrest.” It is not harassed unrest that defines our plight, our basic disposition, and it is not harassed unrest that is the fundamental plight of dwelling, the plight, Heidegger says. Rather, our plight is that we do not think of it. This is curious: our fundamental plight is that we do not think of our plight as the fundamental plight, the plight. We have forgotten to think of it. We have forgotten that we have to learn to dwell. We live in the box, and we forget things. But Heidegger announces that giving thought to our plight might save us from our plight, provided giving thought also means to prepare ourselves for the right relation to dwelling, that is, for an abandonment of harassed unrest as the thoughtless plight of our lives.

This is a delicate point, and I want to make sure we all understand it. It has to do with the function of thinking. Thinking in this essay emerges as a relationship to dwelling, hence to building. Thinking might in fact be only this relationship to dwelling: thinking is simply remembering that dwelling is the fundamental task of the human. We forget, and forgetting is our plight, our true disposition, our true dislocation. Space trouble comes not essentially from the harassed unrest of undwelling in the age of technology, but rather from forgetting that undwelling in harassed unrest is simply a bad relationship to dwelling, a bad relationship to our own human being, to our being as human. Thinking the plight of dwelling as the plight of the human is therefore being under way to proper dwelling. And being under way towards our dwelling is no longer to live in homelessness: it is “a misery no longer,” that is, it is the end of harassed unrest.

Let me now attempt two things: I would like to set this essay briefly and, I am sure, less than adequately, into a relationship with two other texts. The first is the lecture course that Heidegger offered in 1942 on Friedrich Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” The second will be the lecture entitled “The Question Concerning Technology,” which Heidegger prepared in 1949 and revised in 1953. The 1942 lecture will enable us to understand just exactly what is at stake in the presentation of dwelling as the fundamental dimension of thinking. And the 1949/1953 lecture will perhaps offer us a hint in terms of understanding undwelling in harassed unrest as the radical facticity of men and women in the contemporary age.

In 1942 (and it is not any year, certainly not in Germany) Heidegger says: “Between the spatio-temporal grasping that extends toward world domination and the movement of settlement subservient to such domination on the one side, and human beings coming to be at home via journeying and locality on the other, there presumably prevails a covert relation whose historical essence we do not know” (49). Presumably, the spatio-temporal grasping of domination is a modality of what will become harassed unrest in 1951. Homecoming via journeying and locality is proper dwelling, or at least the orientation towards a proper dwelling, which is also the proper way of being human. I want to insist on the fact that the emphasis on the 1942 lectures on journeying, on being under way, which Heidegger links to the essence of the river in Holderlin’s poem, since the river is in the poem “the journeying of the human beings as historical in their coming to be at home upon this earth” (33), makes of dwelling not simply a spatial structure, but also radically historical. Dwelling is not simply location but historicality too, through the movement of the journey. Indeed Heidegger’s question, in 1942, “how to think the connection between the rivers and the path of the people” (31), is a question about history and about politics, which now appear as instances of dwelling. However, Heidegger says, the “covert relation” between an understanding of history and the political as domination over the world and the understanding of history and the political as the journeying toward proper dwelling remains hidden from us. Indeed, according to Heidegger, in order to understand this, we would need “an essential transformation in our essence” (34). What is that transformation supposed to accomplish? The end of harassed unrest, a proper relationship to the homely, the interruption of radical dis/position. Heidegger says:

This coming to be at home in one’s own in itself entails that human beings are initially, and for a long time, and sometimes forever, not at home. And this in turn entails that human beings fail to recognize, that they deny, and perhaps even have to deny and flee what belongs to the home. Coming to be at home is thus a passage through the foreign. And if the becoming homely of a particular humankind sustains the historicality of its history, then the law of the encounter (Auseinandersetzung) between the foreign and one’s own is the fundamental truth of history, a truth from out of which the essence of history must unveil itself. (49)

Unhomely lives, undwelling, lives of harassed unrest: they might be necessary, might have been ordained by a history whose essence remains hidden from us. The unveiling of this historical essence is of course what thinking must prepare for. The indication in the 1951 lecture is clear: thinking the plight of dwelling as the plight of the human already sets us under way. In 1942, in the middle of a war where German fortunes are changing, Heidegger strikes a hopeful note in the same direction:

The representations of space and time that have held reign for almost two and a half thousand years are of the metaphysical kind . . . Our thinking remains everywhere metaphysical, and this is not only because remnants of the Christian worldview remain operative everywhere, if only in terms of a reversal and secularization, but rather because metaphysics first begins to achieve its supreme and utter triumph in our century as modern machine technology. . . . Modern machine technology is spirit, and as such is a decision concerning the actuality of everything actual. . . . Nothing of the historical world hitherto will return. . . . All that remains is to unconditionally actualize this spirit so that we simultaneously come to know the essence of its truth.   When we say “all that remains” then that sounds like “fatalism,” like merely a tired surrendering to the course of things. Yet in truth this “all that remains” is . . . the first historical path into the commencements of Western historicality, a path that has not at all been ventured hitherto. (53-54)

But the return to the commencements of Western historicality, if it is true that “nothing of the historical world will return,” can only be a return towards the ground that grounds the essence of Western humanity. For Heidegger, this is the fourfold: “The essence of Western humankind, the relation to the world, to the earth, to gods and to alternative gods and false gods. This is to be human. The essence of the river relates to this” (43). We must “unconditionally actualize [the] spirit [of modern machine technology]” so that we may come to know “the essence of its truth.”   Is this what Heidegger calls following the law of the encounter, of the Auseinandersetzung, between what is foreign and one’s own? We cannot avoid to hear in this passage the sinister overtones of an ultimate justification of war. It is indeed, Heidegger seems to say in 1942, through the massive conflagration under way that the essence of history will unveil itself, and Germany and the West might find a path, their path, toward the river. What is foreign, however?   The foreign is the unhomely. It is what keeps us from homecoming, but it is also ultimately that through which homecoming becomes possible. Homecoming is of course the accomplishment of location, the accomplishment of a proper relation to the fourfold, that is, to the essence of the human. Homecoming is the end and the abandonment of the harassed unrest of our lives.

The notions of Ge-stell and Bestand, standardly translated as “Enframing” and “standing reserve” respectively, are given in the 1949/1953 text “The Question Concerning Technology” as a further clarification of unhomeliness, a further clarification of the pervading harassed unrest that marks our lives in the age of modern machine technology.   We need to realize that the question concerning technology is not simply a question about technology, but it is a question about the undwelling of our age. Our age is defined by technology to the extent that technology, as the latest and most extreme manifestation of the metaphysical arrangement of things, defines our lives. And it defines them as lives under Ge-stell, that is, as enframed lives. Enframing is the essence of technology and, as such, it is, not the essence of the human, but rather an essential determination of human lives in the age of technology. It is the determination that throws our lives into a radical dis/position, and that makes us conceive of our own spatio-temporal determination as, precisely, “a grasping toward world domination and the movement of settlement subservient to such domination.”   Through the push for world domination the world becomes Bestand, that is, standing reserve: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve” (17).

But dwelling or undwelling in the world as standing reserve is still a form of dwelling. There is a covert relation, unclarified, between the grasping for world domination, the enframing of the world as standing reserve, and the poetic enterprise of dwelling in a proper relation to the fourfold.   Heidegger quotes the Holderlin verse: “poetically dwells man upon this earth” (34). There are simply different historical forms of poetic dwelling. Heidegger uses the German word Her-vor-bringen for the general form, that is, to bring forth hither, of which he says: “Bringing-forth-hither brings hither out of concealment, forth into unconcealment. Bringing-forth comes to pass only insofar as something concealed comes into unconcealmente. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing (Entbergen)” (11). There is an echo of this in “Building Dwelling Thinking:” “The Greek word for “to bring forth or to produce” is tikto. The word techne, technique, belongs to the verb’s root, tec. To the Greeks techne means neither art not handicraft but, rather, to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way.   The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear. Techne thus conceived has been concealed in the tectonics of architecture since ancient times. Of late still remains concealed, and more resolutely, in the technology of power machinery” (337).   Poetics, technics, are forms of dwelling. “The essence of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its essential nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build” (338).

So what is the difficulty of building, of dwelling, in the age of modern machine technology? Heidegger says that poetic revealing, that is, the relationship of man to unconcealment, to truth, “does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis” in modern technology (14). “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging (Herausfordern),” a “setting upon,” a “challenging forth” (16). The world, under the sway of the impulse for human domination, becomes a standing reserve. Nature, and with it, life “reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and it remains orderable as a system of information” (23). And let me quote for you what I believe is the key passage in Heidegger’s text, the passage perhaps where all the threads of this presentation will find each other:

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself . . . In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only only himself. (27)

There is then, perhaps unsurprisingly, something else, a spatial state that is worse even than the dislocation of harassed unrest. That would be what comes after the fall into the condition of absolute illocation, the condition that I will call of biopolitical life—when man has become identified with a nature, or a life, beyond objectlessness, of mere calculability and orderability, a life which is as abstract as the abstract space that Heidegger counterposes throughout “Building Dwelling Thinking” to the space of dwelling. The passage of man into standing reserve, a precipitous fall, is the passage into a generalized biopolitics—man is from then on only to be distinguished from nature as life, but to the very extent that the general procedures of human domination of the earth will now be applied to him. In biopolitical life we are ourselves standing reserve, we are the orderable and the extractable and the storable. Enframed, we are at the same time but no longer primarily the enframers, as the minimal distance that gave the human still the possibility of addressing his own undwelling as plight is now lost. Because there is no longer plight, because the plight is now terminal as mere absence of plight, biopolitical life can resolutely proceed to the final arrangement of world domination, in total subservience to it. Man now dominates himself, but no longer as man—only as standing reserve, as a pool of genes or labor force, as human resource or consuming power, as the orderable and calculable or, inversely, as undesirable dis/ponibility marked for disappearance or extermination. It is then that man encounters only himself or herself, in the mirror of natural life, believing that only his or her constructs exist.   There is no longer an outside—only a generalized field of identity, but it is an identity that has managed to surpass the condition of harassed unrest into the unharassed rest of biopolitical fixity, of biopolitical infinity.

Is this the necessary result of the age of modern machine technology, of Enframing as its essence? Heidegger only thinks of it as a danger, the “supreme danger” (26). This supreme danger is the final loss—the loss that has forgotten what it is to lose—of location, the abandonment of dwelling also in the plightful sense of undwelling. But there is another possibility, which “Building Dwelling Thinking” associates with the old notion of freedom:

Let us listen once more to what language says to us. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye; and fry means preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free actually means to spare. The sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the one whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own essence, when we return it specifically to its essential being, when we “free” it in the proper sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its presence. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing. (327)

And sparing is letting be. From the core of the fourfold there comes a thinking that is dwelling and that, through dwelling, lets things come into their peace, into their dwelling. It is a thinking that is only that—a free relationship to space and to spacing as such, against biopolitical rapture, against the abstract, boundless, and, hence, roomless and breathless space of technopolitics.

Alberto Moreiras

September 2008

Works Cited

Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Basic Writings. David Farrell

Krell editor and translator. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 319-339.

—. Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. William McNeill and Julia David translators.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.

—. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology

and Other Essays. William Lovitt editor and translator. New York: Harper &

Row, 1977. 3-35.

In the Introduction to Thresholds of Illiteracy Bram Acosta sets his own book against the two books published in 2010, John Beverley’s Latinamericanism After 9/11, and Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony, that, he affirms, will “establish the terms and grounds of cultural debate in Latin America for the next several years.”    I have already written on Beverley’s book, and in favor of the notion of posthegemony, albeit not in a sense that fully endorses Beasley-Murray’s theoretical positions, so I won’t repeat myself.   What I find interesting and useful in Bram’s view is that he reminds us that both master concepts advanced by those two books, namely, posthegemony and postsubalternism, have two apparent intellectual enemies, namely, deconstruction and subalternism, or perhaps it is just really one enemy, deconstructive subalternism or subalternist deconstruction.   Or perhaps the latter is not really the enemy, only the specter they must fight in order to establish their own legitimacy.  “Both Beverley and Beasley-Murray explicitly name deconstruction and subaltern studies as modes of analysis that are no longer adequate for contemporary reflection and from which one must now move away.  While both name deconstruction as the larger underlying problem for political reflection today, neither, it could safely be said, offers any serious critical engagement with it at all; in each case, they appear as offhand, casual dismissals” (Thresholds 21).    Beasley-Murray would say that deconstruction is too negative, and Beverley would say that deconstruction yields “diminishing and politically ambiguous results.”

It occurs to me that it is this couple of unwarranted attacks on deconstruction that has actually fueled our project through some mediations that it would be easy to reconstruct.  So they need to be welcomed.   And we need to reflect a bit on their substance:  merely negative?  politically ambiguous results?  What is being demanded, or rather, offered, as a result of the combined critiques (but Acosta makes it very clear those critiques are dramatically at odds with each other as well) is therefore some positive presentation of the state of affairs through politically unambiguous and suitably powerful means.

Beasley-Murray and Beverley of course play to a choir of bedmates, if I may mix metaphors for a moment, that they may actually not want in their beds, but so is life, and they will have to keep them at arm’s length themselves.  Yes, there is little short of a universal uproar about the pathetically negative ambiguity of deconstruction from people who apparently enjoy calling a spade a spade and seeing a spade as a spade.   But the uproar is misguided and it originates in a misdiagnosis–it ain’t deconstruction that is ambiguous, but the political process, and it ain’t deconstruction that is negative, rather the way it irrupts into hostile consciousness.

In any case, I think we should make it clear that whatever infrapolitical deconstruction means, it does not mean at all to establish the terms and grounds for cultural debate in Latin America or anywhere else.   I think it has already abandoned any intentions, or pretensions, to speak in Latinamericanist terms about Latin American culture.   So they can have that ground to themselves, and go on calling a spade a spade in fully positive terms, don’t you think?   We need to make exodus from a field of engagement whose presuppositions are vaguely lethal for us, just about at every level.

That, regardless of the fact that we may very well want to endorse posthegemony, and manifest our political sympathies on the general side of the Latin Americanist left.   And also regardless of the fact that people change their positions, and Beasley-Murray and Beverley may not be now quite where they were a few years ago.  As to the bedmates, well, that is a different issue!

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/king-dead-heideggers-black-notebooks/?print=1&fulltext=1

• (This discussion, which took place in the Critica y Teoria Facebook group, continues a thread that begins in the Comment to Note on Recordings, then continues in the Comment to Breve nota acerca de la posición de Martínez Marzoa respecto del nihilismo.  This is the third installment, therefore.)

  Pablo Domínguez Galbraith Sorry for intervening this late in the conversation. I have always viewed deconstruction as signaling the internal breaks within Western Metaphysics, not as destroying -in the sense of Benjamin’s destructive character, a joyous destruction, a making space, finding openings and straight lines)- through a big break, nor making philosophy in the nietzschean sense of “killing fllies with cannonballs” (matar moscas a cañonazos) or writing with a philosophical hammer capable of breaking everything with fundamental blows. For me deconstruction means more an awareness of the impossibilities of being faithful without being unfaithful, thinking otherwise without repeating the same logic that one is trying to escape, of freeing from any logo/phono/falo-centrism without being captured again by the same structure one is trying to implement. Derrida wanted to use Heideggerian thought and articulations against Heidegger himself: he saw that the only way to go beyond Heidegger was to be very precise and conscious of Heidegger’s own internal breaks, the moments where he was betraying himself by being most faithful to his most intimate desire of breaking with metaphysics (the same with Rousseau, Mallarmé, Kant, Hegel, etc.). In a sense, the breaking of metaphysics Heidegger was trying to achieve would ultimately mean breaking with himself and his own work. I am very thankful of reading the conversation you all are having here, it has made me read today Heidegger’s letter to Jünger, where I found this fundamental quote that I think may be (or may not be) Alberto’s position in this matter. It would be great if Alberto would let me (us) know if he feels close or not to what Heidegger is trying to say to Jünger here:

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  Pablo Domínguez Galbraith “In which language does the basic outline of thinking speak which indicates a crossing of the line? Is the language of the metaphysics of the will to power, of Gesalt, and of values to be rescued across the critical line? What if even the language of metaphysics and metaphysics itself, whether it be that of the living or of the dead God, as metaphysics, formed that barrier which forbids a crossing over the line, that is, overcoming of nihilism? If that were the case, would not then the crossing of the line necessarily become a transformation of language and demand a transformed relationship to the essence of language? And is not your own relation to language of a kind that it demands from you a different characterization of the concept-language of the sciences? If this language is often represented as nominalism, then we are still entangled in the logical-grammatical conception of the nature of language.”

  – Heidegger, “On The Line”, a letter to Jünger.

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  Alberto Moreiras Pablo, may I also ask you to put this comment of yours, and the quote, in the blog? Thanks a lot for it. I think we are in agreement, if we can agree, as I think we can, on this: when you say “thinking otherwise without repeating the same logic that one is trying to escape, of freeing from any logo/phono/falo-centrism without being captured again by the same structure one is trying to implement,” is that not precisely the figure of the most fundamental break, the one that cannot be contained precisely because it is not a mere inversion of the prior position? Inventing an other language, moving toward an “other beginning:” we know how difficult that is, how impossible, even. But this is what Heidegger called to be unterwegs, in order to point out that there was nothing yet accomplished in that order. Also De Man, in his essay on Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” when he says that we can only ever prepare. These are cautious people that do not want to go out on a limb and risk a faux pas (like the ones Heidegger detects in Jünger) but yes, their intent has never been less than revolutionary. Regarding the quote, yes, that is what Heidegger actually said many times, in one form or another, but that is one of the classic passages. I am in agreement, which means, I understand that “the inversion of a metaphysical statement is still a metaphysical statement,” which means the only path outside the tradition, for an other beginning outside what Heidegger thought in the wake of Hegel and Nietzsche was a terminal exhaustion of Western historical thought, is to reach “a transformed relationship to the essence of language.” What does that mean? Well, is the infrapolitical project something other than the attempt to reach a transformed relationship to political language? Doesn’t mean it will happen, but we can only try, with all kinds of caution and care. This brings up another topic for discussion which has been lurking for many years but there has been no decisive thought on it: is “language” really prior, the prior? When we talk about transforming the relationship to language, do we essentially think of and about language? Or is language, here, against the current of the last sixty years, code for something that is not language, but that feeds and nurtures language? It was Marx who said first “not language, but economy,” and it is easy for us to say that was a bit crude. A century plus later, is it still so easy for us to say “language, that’s all”?

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  Alberto Moreiras Incidentally, the way I see it, infrapolitics is precisely that attempt at modestly initiating the path along something that may not exhaust itself in language alone.

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  Jaime Rodríguez Matos I don’t think there was a disagreement at all about the idea of the break. The point I think was that this would still be the case even if we were “back” at the height of Althusser or Sartre, or Badiou, or Marx, or even Descartes. Back at the point where all of these systems did not yet seem to be exhausted. So that the point becomes how to get away from the idea that the break is somehow tied to their exhaustion or whatever we want to call it. This is why for Heidegger it was so important to not simply refute or dismiss previous ontologies–because that was the history of our stumbling regarding that which does not exhaust itself in language (or in the form of the object or the thing, and so on).

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  Alberto Moreiras Jaime, ok, let’s accept there is no disagreement on the notion of the break, let’s move on to exhaustion. Not refuting means, in Heidegger, “destruktion of the history of ontology” in 1927, which by the time of “Nietzsche’s Word” (1943) will have become “destruktion of ontology” plain and simple. And take Nietzsche. Heidegger will look, for instance, at his History of an error, in Twilight of the Idols, and will say that Nietzsche was led into a positive affirmation of nihilism because of his inability to progress beyond metaphysical inversions (“from the real world to the apparent world, but then, with the destruction of the real world, have we not also destroyed the apparent one?, etc.”). You may say that is not a refutation in the traditional way, but how is it not an affirmation of the historical exhaustion of Nietzschean thought? Even though at the same time Heidegger said that we needed to devote 10 to 15 years to reading Nietzsche before we thought of doing anything else . . . In other words, “exhaustion” does not mean we stop reading these people and stop learning from them even in a most productive way. It means something else, that has to do with radical historiality. It is not, for instance, that we should read Sophocles only because Sophocles may still be close enough to “the beginning,” no, we should read Sophocles because we need to understand what Sophocles was trying to share with his public, which pertains to history. At the end of the day, history is being, and being is history.

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  Pablo Domínguez Galbraith Thank you very much for your answer Alberto. I will gladly put this comments on the blog, but I do not see a thread with all this discussion already posted. I think we should try to post everything together, as it has been a continuous discussion (and my comments emerged from reading yours and the others). Regarding the second part of your long last answer, on prioritizing language, I just wanted to supplement Heidegger’s quote with something he writes later in the same text, something he says to Jünger around the question of crossing the line. Jünger says that crossing the line brings a new direction of Being and “with it there begins to shimmer what is real.” Then Heidegger reverses the question saying rather that it is the new direction of Being which first bring the moment for the crossing of the line. But what does “Being” means? For Heidegger, Being means the turn itself, the turning-toward man, or the turning away. Man is always turning toward or away from Being, there is always a movement and there is always an asymptote that cannot be crossed (an infinite/infinitesimal line of existence unbearable and un-inhabitable?). Elsewhere in the text Heidegger mentions the spiral again, a figure you touched on in the first seminar. Isn’t the spiral the figure for this distancing and approaching (always closer or farther away) from the impossible contact, the impossible break? At times I hear Heidegger (and Derrida) insisting on this fundamental impossibility, the impossibility of crossing the line, the spiral you will always fall into by pretending (trying, believing) to have crossed it. But the again, as Jamie and yourself just mentioned, there is something that does not exhaust itself in language alone, something that could approach Being without falling in the grammatical/nomination pitfall, that may be worth pursuing.

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  Jaime Rodríguez Matos (I see that you erased the previous comment, but I’ll leave this one here anyway.) Of course. That is the key. Exhaustion means something different. Just as event or break mean something different. What is the best way to convey that change so that it becomes a central aspect of how we write and think, particularly within an academic environment that is constantly turning toward the exhaustion of previous models or methods of research in order justify itself? I don’t have the answer to this question.

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  Alberto Moreiras The thread started being copied as a comment to On Recording, and then moved on to Guillermo`s posting. You can continue posting as a comment to Guillermo, which will pick up on the previous set of comments. Or you can start a new thread. I think breaking long discussions into threads is a good thing, particularly because they become a lot more visible (the system does not give good notification regarding comments, only regarding posts.) We can add editorial inserts (I can do that), telling people where to start if they want to go back to the beginning.

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  Alberto Moreiras Jaime, I very well understand what you mean and are saying. And it is also politically important to avoid obvious pitfalls. Ultimately, however, gross misunderstandings of the kind we know are unavoidable, so I think, after all is said and done, all attempted and failed, the best thing to do, actually, is to ignore the pitfalls altogether and to move on as rigorously and thoughtfully as we can. And, as the immortal Amarillo Slim said (was it Amarillo Slim?), “let the chips fall where they may.”

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  Alberto Moreiras Pablo, by the time of the Jünger letter Heidegger was keenly aware that it was not a matter of a decision, that it was not for us to decide to cross the line or indeed to develop a transformed relation to language or to anything else. That we could only be attuned, hope to be attuned, aim to be attuned, to a situation (in history) that totally escaped our control always and everywhere. That is why he would say that being is the turning, that is, being is historical attunement. Although, for the most part, it is also historical non-attunement, withdrawal, and abandonment. One doesn`t cross the line by being very earnest about it, which was Jünger`s naive and decisionistic position. It is only the new historical dispensation that can or may do it for us. Hence the importance of understanding, in the sense of the hermeneutics Guillermo was discussing earlier. But that is, of course, an “understanding” that is more than an understanding in the traditional sense.

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  Alberto Moreiras And yet there is nothing mystical about this. Our tools for this attunement are only two: mood and study. But the two are necessary, and one does not come without the other.

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  Alberto Moreiras The reason why I insist on additional blog posting is that I don`t want these discussions to be lost, or left to mere memory. And they will, if we leave them only on facebook, where they are too difficult to find after a few weeks.

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I have the recording from yesterday’s session, and everything came out fine.  But I can’t, unfortunately, upload them to the blog.  It is a M4 file.  I don’t even think I can upload them to Facebook.  I’ll talk to the tech people and we’ll think of something. All best, Alberto

It may have been a mistake to associate all too early infrapolitics and the non-subject of the political, but then maybe not.   Do remember that the expression “the non-subject of the political” does not refer to the fact that politics is done by non-subjects, rather that politics and subjectivity do not coincide, so that there is politics beyond the subject.   We could say something similar about infrapolitics–infrapolitics and subjectivity are not the same thing, which does not mean that they have nothing to do with each other.  Using only partially Badiou’s terminology we could say that infrapolitics is, to a certain extent, not totally, the region of obscure subjects, that is, (non)subjects not (fully) subjectivized by conditions of militancy.   Really, it is probably best to understand the non-subject as an excess to the subject of conscience, the traditional subject of metaphysics, whose mode of presence cannot however be linked to the Levinasian subject-as-hostage, subject-of-persecution, subject-of-responsibility, since it also exceeds it.   I am copying below a paper I wrote this summer that is perhaps unfinished, but I think it gives a certain idea that might be useful.  Let me put it this way: for a certain interpretation of Javier’s actions, they are wholly infrapolitical, even if for some other interpretation Javier is a total and complete evil jerk or worse.   We could talk about an infrapolitics of friendship . . .  I am also copying this piece because Los enamoramientos is a novel I will ask you to read further into the seminar.  

La religión marrana: Los enamoramientos, de Javier Marías, y el secreto literario.

            Mi intención no es hacer crítica literaria, ni presentar la novela de Javier Marías a ustedes ni a público alguno, en la precisa medida en que la novela se presenta a sí misma mucho mejor de lo que nadie podría hacerlo por ella. Coloco mi lectura, desde mi título, bajo dos complicadas condiciones, “religión marrana,” si es que la hay o puede haberla, y “secreto literario,” si es que lo hay o puede haberlo. Para establecer la posibilidad de tal lectura debo referirme al argumento de la novela, lo que la novela cuenta, un tanto selectivamente, aunque creo que también de forma central y sin forzamiento alguno. Mi proyecto no es en todo caso dar cuenta del proyecto novelístico de Marías ni imputarle a él pensamientos o teorías a las que le gustará permanecer ajeno; sólo usar, con algo de descaro, aunque con ciertos principios, su novela para mis propios propósitos. Al fin y al cabo, como alguien dice en ella, “es una novela, y lo que ocurre en ellas da lo mismo y se olvida, una vez terminadas. Lo interesante son las posibilidades e ideas que nos inoculan y traen a través de sus casos imaginarios” (166).

            Confieso mi fascinación por Los enamoramientos (2011), pero no puedo revelar por qué me fascina–su secreto me afecta también de esa manera, en la medida en que, en cuanto lector, sólo me es dado establecer una relación siempre parcial con él. Mi hipótesis para estas páginas, es decir, mi modalidad de relación parcial con su secreto, que hace la tarea de interpretación abierta e inacabable, sería que es porque constituye una suerte de escenificación del sacrificio de Isaac, que es al mismo tiempo su puesta de inmediato bajo tacha. Si la historia de Abraham remite a una ley, la religión marrana, que es necesariamente traidora a la relación monoteísta, sería una relación al secreto más allá de toda ley–en cuanto tal, religión sin religión. No hay otro discurso que el que ofrece la literatura para tematizar y explorar tal recurso–ni la filosofía ni la teología pueden servir. En “Literatura en secreto” dice Jacques Derrida: “La literatura ciertamente hereda de una historia sagrada con respecto de la cual el momento abrahámico permanece como su secreto esencial (¿y quién querría negar que la literatura es un resto religioso, el vínculo y el lazo con lo que es sacrosanto todavía en una sociedad sin Dios?), mientras que al mismo tiempo niega esa historia, su herencia y su pertenencia a ella. Niega la filiación. La traiciona en el doble sentido del término: es infiel a ella, y rompe con ella justo en el momento en el que revela su ´verdad´ y descubre su secreto. Es decir, el secreto de su propia filiación: posibilidad imposible. Esta ´verdad´ existe bajo la condición de una negación cuya posibilidad ya estaba implícita en el acto de atar a Isaac” (157). El acto de atar a Isaac es el acto de seguir un mandato que obliga incondicionalmente. La literatura a la vez guarda ese mandato y lo destripa en negación traidora: religión marrana y posibilidad imposible.

            En Los enamoramientos esa latencia de toda literatura se hace patente. En mi opinión la novela tematiza la secularización del sacrificio de Isaac y borra al mismo tiempo tal secularización en nombre de un secreto no reducible a la política–de un secreto no secularizable, no compartible, no comprensible por la comunidad, que solo puede desarrollar con respecto de él un rumor infinito.   Javier Díez-Varela es en la novela la figura abrahámica, con respecto de la cual su enamorada María Dolz, la narradora, sólo puede exponer su incomprensión dañada.  María se siente muerta también por Javier, ella es la muerta que vive, el fantasma desplazado que querría no ser quien es ni saber lo que sabe.   Y es en su absoluto desamparo, al final del texto, donde afirma bellamente su religión sin religión: “Al fin y al cabo nadie me va a juzgar, ni hay testigos de mis pensamientos. Es verdad que cuando nos atrapa la tela de araña–entre el primer azar y el segundo, [esto es, entre el nacimiento y la muerte]–fantaseamos sin límites y a la vez nos conformamos con cualquier migaja, con oírlo a él–como a ese tiempo entre azares, es lo mismo–, con olerlo, con vislumbrarlo, con presentirlo, con que aún esté en nuestro horizonte y no haya desaparecido del todo, con que aún no se vea a lo lejos la polvareda de sus pies que van huyendo” (401).  

            La novela empieza con la mirada de María fija en la pareja sentada en una mesa cercana de la cafetería de todas las mañanas.   María mira a Miguel y Luisa, “lo que más agradaba de ellos era ver lo bien que lo pasaban juntos” (15). Miguel y Luisa están enamorados.   Pero Miguel muere, apuñalado por un loco en la calle. Y ciertas circunstancias permiten que María conozca a Javier, el mejor amigo de Miguel, en la casa de Luisa, en el trascurso de una visita en la que Luisa le cuenta a María lo terrible de la muerte de su marido, lo devastador de su duelo, de su dolor. María percibe la solicitud de Javier por María. Poco tiempo después María y Javier empiezan una relación de amantes, y María se enamora de Javier.   Una tarde María duerme en la alcoba de Javier después de hacer el amor, y se despierta por los timbrazos de alguien que llega al piso. María no puede evitar escuchar una conversación en la que se revela lo peor: Javier ha mandado matar a Miguel. A partir de ese momento sabe que su relación con Javier debe terminar. Javier también lo entiende así, pero le explica a María lo que pasó: no fue un asesinato, solo un homicidio, que fue lo que Miguel le pidió como acto de amistad.   Andando el tiempo María encuentra, en el restaurante chino del Hotel Palace, a Javier y María cenando juntos, felices, mutuamente absortos. “Estaban pendientes el uno del otro, charlaban con vivacidad, se miraban de vez en cuando a los ojos sin cruzar palabra, a través de la mesa se cogían los dedos” (391). Entre la primera escena y la última se consuma una terrible educación sentimental.

II.

            La novela corta El coronel Chabert, de Honoré de Balzac, tiene un papel importante en el intertexto de Los enamoramientos. [1] Javier le habla de ella a María con cierta insistencia obsesiva. María se esfuerza por conseguir y leer la novelita queriendo saber por qué Javier, de quien ya está enamorada, “la utilizaba como demostración de que los muertos están bien así y nunca deben volver, aunque su muerte haya sido intempestiva e injusta, estúpida, gratuita y azarosa como la de [Miguel] Desvern, y aunque ese riesgo no exista, el de su reaparición. Era como si temiera que en el caso de su amigo esa resurrección fuera posible y quisiera convencerme o convencerse del error que significaría, de su inoportunidad, y aun del mal que ese regreso haría a los vivos y también al difunto” (179).   Estamos ya en ello en plena teoría del fantasma, que Marías ha usado en otras ocasiones de su narrativa. Javier parece estar preocupado, quién sabe si trastornado, por la perspectiva del retorno de un muerto, su amigo Miguel, asesinado por un mendigo, “cosido a navajazos por nada y en camino hacia el olvido” (150). Pero no está claro el olvido: el retorno de Miguel está implícito en la preocupación ostensible por la novela de Balzac, y por el partido que Javier toma por la mujer o ex-mujer del coronel, la ahora condesa Ferraud, que tiene que enfrentarse con el retorno de un marido al que creyó muerto en batalla diez años antes.   Los muertos, a pesar de que no regresan nunca, tienen también muchas formas de regresar.

            Cuando María llega al término de la novela y se encuentra con las palabras que el abogado Derville le dice a su asociado Godeschal, a propósito de la maldad humana y de su acostumbrada impunidad, nota lo que ella llama un “error de traducción” (180) en el detallado recuento que de la novela le había hecho Javier. Javier, en traducción improvisada del francés, había citado: “He visto a mujeres darle al niño de un primer lecho gotas que debían traerle la muerte, a fin de enriquecer al hijo del amor” (172, 181).   Pero la novela no dice “des gouttes” sino “des goûts,” y por lo tanto la traducción correcta hubiera debido empezar diciendo “He visto a mujeres inculcarle al niño de un primer lecho aficiones (o quizá ‘inclinaciones’) que debían acarrearle la muerte” (181). María trata de interpretar el oculto sentido de ese lapsus de traducción, insólito en quien tiene tan buen acento en la lengua. Imagina que “es muy distinto causar la muerte, se dice quien no empuña el arma (y nosotros seguimos su razonamiento sin advertirlo), que prepararla y aguardar a que venga sola o a que caiga por su propio peso; también que desearla, también que ordenarla, y el deseo y la orden se mezclan a veces, llegan a ser indistinguibles para quienes están acostumbrados a ver aquéllos satisfechos nada más expresarlos o insinuarlos, o a hacer que se cumplan nada más concebirlos” (183). La novela introduce así una dimensión infrapolítica en su estructura, que tiene que ver con la investigación de la actio in distans, la capacidad de “los más poderosos y los más arteros” de no mancharse nunca “las manos ni casi tampoco la lengua” (183), de cometer crímenes impunes, y de arruinarle el estómago al abogado Derville. ¿Sería posible que Javier hubiera mandado matar a Miguel, su mejor amigo, para poder cazar a su esposa, a Luisa, para dejar el campo libre y poder realizar eventualmente su deseo? ¿Y cómo no pensarlo así, desde qué posible perspectiva?

III.

            María imagina, tratando de lidiar con una verdad difícil o enmarañada que la convierte tambien en una narradora no poco digna de fiar en cuanto tal, sino, en cuanto absolutamente digna de fiar, en esa misma medida incapaz de estar segura de que su verdad sea toda la verdad, o la verdad sin más. Quizá, para empezar, hay cosas que uno no debe decir, guardarse mucho de hacerlo.   ¿Qué cadena incalculable de acontecimientos podría provocarse si uno le dijera a su amigo (por ejemplo, Miguel a Javier) algo así como “si algo me pasara un día . . . si me sucediera algo definitivo,” ocúpate por favor de mi mujer y de mis hijos; “ella ha de tenerte a ti como repuesto” (Marías, Los enamoramientos 117).   Es peligroso jugar con fuego, pedirle a tu amigo que colabore en tu obliteración definitiva, porque entonces tu amigo podría sentirse tentado a hacerlo. Le diría a tu fantasma, tú me lo pediste, acuérdate, no me vengas ahora con reproches, cuando ya eres sólo un fantasma de manos frías, cuando ya nadie apenas te recuerda. Lo que fue un gesto de amistad, lo que implicaba confianza y abandono, puede acabar provocando un asesinato, limpio o sucio, aunque sea póstumo. Es mejor para tu mujer y tus hijos que te quite de en medio, sobre todo ahora que has muerto, estarán mejor, serán más felices. Tú mismo lo entendías así cuando me pediste lo que me pediste, sin llegar a reconocerlo, pensando que era una solución de futuro, pero el futuro dura mucho tiempo y llegó la hora de que seas apartado terminalmente de la escena. Fue una idea tuya, no fastidies, tú me lo pediste.

            Sí, uno puede pensar que se trató sólo de una ligera transgresión, para eso está la amistad, para absorberlas, uno puede exponerse demasiado con un amigo sin que eso tenga efectos, sin que se produzca incalculabilidad alguna, sin que advenga lo inesperado.   Yo no le dije a mi amigo que me borrara, ni ahora, mientras vivo (¿o estoy ya muerto?) ni después de muerto. Al revés, yo le pedí a mi amigo que procurara ocupar mi función, en cierto sentido que fuera yo, que me mantuviera vivo entre los míos. Vivo y no muerto, dándole a los míos lo que yo mismo he tratado siempre de darles.   Yo no quería borramiento sino pervivencia, aun sabiendo que ya no estaría, aun conociendo y aceptando su vicariedad.   Para eso están los amigos, me parece. Si no, ¿para qué están? Además, tú no le dijiste a tu amigo que te sustituyera literalmente. Tú le dijiste: “No te pido que te cases con ella ni nada por el estilo . . . Tú tienes tu vida de soltero y tus muchas mujeres a las que no ibas a renunciar por nada . . .   Pero, por favor, mantente cerca de ella si yo alguna vez falto . . . Sé una especie de marido sin serlo, una prolongación de mí” (117).   Le pediste no que fuera tú, sino que fuera tu sucedáneo, tu secretario, tu representante. No es para tanto, esa supuesta transgresión. Es lo normal en estos casos, lo que uno espera, para eso tiene uno amigos.

            Claro que a él no le gustó, o no pareció gustarle, y me dijo: “¿Me estás pidiendo que te sustituya si te mueres . . . Que me convierta en un falso marido . . . y en un padre a cierta distancia?” (118); “¿Te das cuenta de lo difícil que es convertirse en un falso marido sin pasar a serlo real a la larga? . . . Si tú te murieras un día y yo fuera a diario a tu casa, sería dificilísimo que no pasara lo que no debería pasar nunca mientras tú estuvieras vivo. ¿Querrías morirte sabiendo eso?” (119-20).   Casi me acusó de querer chulearlo, de celestineo, y eso me molestó un poco, la verdad, que corriera tan rápido a la conclusión de que podría ocupar mi lugar, desde luego, más allá de lo que yo le pedía. No pensé entonces que algo se había abierto ya, quizá en ese preciso instante, o estaba abierto desde antes, no sé. Lo incalculable, lo imprevisible estaba asomando su fea nariz en la protesta misma de mi amigo, y yo traté de calmarlo y le dije que no, que cómo se le ocurría, que a mi mujer no le iba a interesar él de esa manera, que lo conocía ya demasiado bien, que eran muchos años, que para ella él era como un primo o hermano, que no jodiera. Yo no le pedía que él me barriera, que borrase mi recuerdo y mi rastro y me sepultase, sólo que se ocupase un poco una vez se hubiera acabado mi propia historia, eso me tranquilizaría, su promesa, que para mí sería eso sólo, una promesa de ocuparse, nada más. Y le dije: “Así que sigo pidiéndote que, si me pasa algo malo, me des tu palabra de que te encargarás de ellos” (124).   Y él, todavía un poco molesto, me parece, me dijo entonces: “Tienes mi palabra de honor, lo que tú digas, cuenta con ella . . . Pero haz el favor de no volver a joderme en la vida con historias de estas, me has dejado mal cuerpo. Anda, vámonos a tomar una copa y a hablar de cosas menos macabras” (126).

IV.

            Sí, yo me sospechaba algo, claro, cómo no, podría decir Javier, pero Miguel no quiso confirmármelo entonces, o entonces él mismo aun no sabía. Fue en otro momento, dijo, cuando tuvimos la otra conversación, la verdaderamente aterradora. Me pidió que lo matara, o que lo hiciera matar, pero aquel día sólo hablamos de él, no de su mujer ni de sus hijos, bastante había. Me dijo que sus médicos le habían diagnosticado una severa forma de cáncer, un melanoma intraocular, en realidad un ‘melanoma metastático muy evolucionado’ que le daría no más de un par de meses de vida vivible y lo llevaría a la muerte en medio de dolores atroces en unos pocos meses más, sin o con tratamiento supuestamente paliativo (332-33; 334-35).   Me pidió que tramara su muerte en el plazo de un mes y medio o dos meses, no tengo fuerzas para el suicidio, me dijo, no es tanto morir sino morir mal lo que me aterra, no estoy dispuesto a ello, no quiero permitir que Luisa y mis hijos pasen por ello. Habrá pasado mi tiempo, me dijo, y no hay que prorrogar lo improrrogable. Mátame, quítame de en medio. Pero no me digas cómo ni cuándo, “haz lo que quieras, contrata a alguien que me pegue un tiro, haz que me atropellen al cruzar una calle, que se me derrumbe un muro encima o no me funcionen los frenos del coche, o los faros, no sé” (345).   Yo al principio me negué en redondo, “le dije que eso no podía ser, que en efecto era demasiado pedir, que no podía encomendarle a nadie una tarea que sólo le correspondía a él” (346).   Pero “desde el primer momento supe que no me quedaba alternativa. Que, por difícil que se me hiciera, debía satisfacer su petición. Una cosa fue lo que le dije. Otra lo que me tocaba hacer. Había que quitarlo de en medio, como él decía, porque él nunca se iba a atrever, ni activa ni pasivamente, y lo que lo aguardaba era en verdad cruel” (347).    

            Así que busqué ayuda, pedí favores, y tramamos un plan que permitiera su muerte, si todo funcionaba bien, sin atraparme en las consecuencias legales. El gorrilla que dormía en un coche abandonado y que conocía a Miguel de indicarle la mejor plaza de aparcamiento en la calle fue el elegido. Le proporcionamos un teléfono móvil al que le fuimos llamando acuciándolo contra Miguel, contándole que Miguel era el responsable de la prostitución de sus hijas, y le dimos tambien, le dejamos en el coche, un cuchillo mariposa que podría o no elegir utilizar. Y acabó haciéndolo. Y cosió a Miguel a navajazos la mañana de su cumpleaños, mientras Luisa lo esperaba en un restaurante para el almuerzo.   Fue un acto de piedad por nuestra parte, no un asesinato, fue un homicidio quizá, un crimen, también contra el mendigo, aunque esté ahora mejor en el psiquiátrico de lo que estaba antes, viviendo en su sucio coche abandonado, pero su muerte fue lo que Miguel quería, y dársela fue un acto de amistad.   Sin embargo, “he sabido siempre que en origen hube de pensar y actuar como un asesino” (349).   Y ahora estoy muy cansado.   “Lo que tú creas, María, con todo, no tiene demasiada importancia. Como quizá puedas imaginar” (349).

V.

            Antes de saber todo eso, María sospechaba gato encerrado, o no sospechaba sino que sentía que podía haberlo, cuando ella misma, en su enamoramiento no correspondido, empieza a darse cuenta de que la desaparición o muerte de Luisa podría traerle la recompensa de conseguir el amor de Javier.   Si ella puede desear la muerte de Luisa, no hay razón aparente para que Javier no hubiera deseado o podido desear la muerte de Miguel. Es obvio para María que Javier está enamorado de Luisa, y que está esperando el olvido, el paso del tiempo y su reparación, para acabar ocupando en la vida de Luisa la posición de su antiguo amigo muerto, asesinado.   María sabe que ella misma no es más que un sustituto temporal en la pasión de Javier, que Javier busca a Luisa, que Javier está enamorado de Luisa. Y le aterra, dada la muerte de Miguel, que las cosas hayan sido demasiado afortunadas para Javier.   Quizás Javier deseó largamente, demasiado largamente, la muerte de Miguel.   “Uno no se atreve a desearle la muerte a nadie, menos aún a un allegado, pero intuye que si alguien determinado sufriera un accidente, o enfermara hasta su final, algo mejoraría el universo, o, lo que es lo mismo para cada uno, la propia situación personal” (191-92).  

            María escucha de Javier su versión de lo que pasó. Javier tramó la muerte de Miguel. Javier está profundamente enamorado de Luisa.   Una primera versión posible de lo que realmente pasó es ampliamente sórdida, pero ¿cómo no creerla? Es la lógica, la razonable, la realista. La historia que cuenta Javier, ese cuento, es sólo, dice María, quizá “engañar con la verdad” (293).   Javier está enamorado de Luisa, Javier mandó matar a Miguel, eso es así. ¿Será cierto que Miguel tenía un melanoma metastático muy evolucionado? ¿Será cierto que Miguel le pidió que lo quitara de en medio para ahorrarse a sí mismo la necesidad de una muerte infinitamente más atroz, o el suicidio? Esos son o pueden ser inventos de Javier. Los periódicos no mencionaron tal cosa, la autopsia obligada no parece haberlo revelado, pero los periódicos no son fiables y “en España casi todo el mundo hace sólo lo justo para cubrir el expediente, pocas ganas hay de ahondar, o de gastar horas en lo innecesario” (359). Después de todo, cualquier forense podía ver que Miguel había muerto por las nueve o dieciséis puñaladas.   En cuanto a lo que realmente pasó “nada era concluyente” (393) para María, excepto que Javier tenía en sus manos sangre de Miguel, y ahora en su cama a Luisa.   Así que es posible que Javier sea una más de las siniestras figuras que hacen al abogado Derville decidir retirarse de su bufete de abogado: “Nuestros despachos son cloacas que es imposible purgar . . . No puedo decirle todo cuanto he visto, porque he visto crímenes contra los cuales la justicia es impotente. En fin, todos los horrores que los novelistas creen inventar están siempre por debajo de la verdad” (Balzac, Coronel loc. 1162, archivo Kindle).

            Pero hay otra lectura posible, contra María, aunque María no es necesariamente capaz de desecharla.   Dice María: “Peor que la grave sospecha y las conjeturas quizá apresuradas e injustas, era conocer dos versiones y no saber con cuál quedarme, o más bien saber que me tenía que quedar con las dos y que ambas convivirían en mi memoria hasta que ésta las desalojara, cansada de la repetición” (354). Quizás Javier hizo lo que le pidió Miguel, y se sacrificó por Miguel, en la completa incertidumbre de obtener el amor de Luisa, o incluso poniendo tal posibilidad radicalmente en peligro.   Quizás Javier hizo lo que le pidió Miguel por amistad y necesidad de cumplir la demanda de su amigo, sin más.   O quizás por alguna otra razón, ni siquiera por amistad, ni siquiera como pago de deuda alguna. Pero ¿cómo saberlo? Cuando Javier dice que “desde el primer momento” supo que tendría que cumplir el deseo de su amigo–mandato abrahámico, conversión en asesino, suspensión inmediata de toda cotidianidad, entrada en una relación extática con el secreto–, Javier entiende que su soledad traiciona no sólo a Luisa y a María, también a Miguel mismo, y que hipoteca la totalidad de su propia existencia.   Lo incalculable entra en su vida más allá de toda justicia y más allá de toda justificación. ¿Por qué exponerse a ello?   El amor de Javier por Luisa no necesita el asesinato, no necesita la acción voluntaria de Javier, si es verdad que Miguel padece un cáncer terminal y va a morir en cuestión de meses.   Ningún cálculo justifica la acción de Javier, pero María no puede saber si es el cálculo mismo el que establece una narrativa siempre mentirosa: engañar siempre, engañar con la verdad. Dice María, recordando que Javier le había dicho que lo que ocurre en las novelas da lo mismo, “Quizá pensaba que con los hechos reales no sucedía así, con los de nuestra vida. Probablemente sea cierto para el que los vive, pero no para los demás. Todo se conviete en relato y acaba flotando en la misma esfera, y apenas se diferencia entonces lo acontecido de lo inventado. Todo termina por ser narrativo y por tanto por sonar igual, ficticio aunque sea verdad” (331).   Javier, en los oídos de María, no puede sino engañar con la verdad porque la verdad de Javier está más allá de toda narrativa y enlaza con una desnarrativización radical.   Ya Javier le había dicho a María: “Has comprendido que para mí mis anhelos están por encima de toda consideración y todo freno y todo escrúpulo. Y de toda lealtad, figúrate. Yo he tenido muy claro, desde hace algún tiempo, que quiero pasar junto a Luisa lo que me quede de vida” (307).   Pero esta voluntad salvaje no puede explicar su decisión de acceder al deseo de Miguel, que permanece fuera de toda historia, en el secreto, en una obligación sabida incondicional que por lo tanto ni siquiera la lealtad explica, ni el freno, ni el escrúpulo.  

            Hay dos versiones, y sólo una de ellas entra en el cálculo o en la economía narrativa. La otra versión es ajena a ella, aunque sólo pueda por otra parte narrarse: narración sin narración, la narración que empieza diciendo “desde el primer momento supe que no me quedaba alternativa.” Y quizá la literatura no sea otra cosa que el intento secular de tocar ese borde de la narración más allá de la narración. Esta es la dimensión infrapolítica de la literatura, su actio in distans, sin la cual la literatura no puede ser sino alegoría comunitaria, en cuanto tal caída. En última instancia, quizás las palabras de Javier a María, cuando está laboriosamente tratando de explicarle a María la historia del coronel Chabert, son las apropiadas: “Lo que pasó es lo de menos. Es una novela, y lo que ocurre en ellas da lo mismo y se olvida, una vez terminadas. Lo interesante son las posibilidades e ideas que nos inoculan y traen a través de sus casos imaginarios, se nos quedan con mayor nitidez que los sucesos reales y los tenemos más en cuenta” (166).

VI.

            Derrida habla del sacrificio de Isaac no como un acontecimiento absolutamente único en la vida de Abraham, sino más bien como lo que llama “la cosa más común” (68).   Dice Derrida: “Tan pronto como entro en relación con el otro, con la mirada, la demanda, el amor, la orden o la llamada del otro, sé que sólo puedo responderle sacrificando la ética, es decir, sacrificando lo que quiera que me obliga a responder también, de la misma manera, al mismo tiempo, a todos los otros” (69).   Javier entró en esa relación cuando Miguel le pidió que lo quitara de en medio (si es que lo hizo).  [The text seems to be too long for the blog.  See end of the paper in Comments.]

Alberto Moreiras

Texas A&M University

Works Cited

Balzac, Honoré de.   El coronel Chabert, seguido de El verdugo, El elixir de larga vida,

y La obra maestra desconocida.  Traducción Mercedes López-Ballesteros. Madrid. Random House Mondadori, archivo Kindle, sin fecha.

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Trad. David Wills.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.

Marías, Javier. Los enamoramientos. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011.

[1]  Javier es el que primero la invoca, identificándose no con el coronel Chabert sino con su ex-mujer, para quien la re-aparición intempestiva del coronel es potencialmente catastrófica. Pero María lee la novela y se identifica eventualmente con Chabert, en cuanto personaje infausto en demanda de improbable justicia o incluso consumido, más allá de lo último, por lo fútil de su situación.   Hacia el final de la novela María dice que trató de “conjurar el peligro” de la memoria “haciéndole frente,” y decide publicar en la editorial donde trabaja una edición de El Coronel Chabert y otras novelas cortas de Balzac de la que se dan ciertas precisiones que permiten reconocerla como un libro realmente existente. Yo lo tengo en Kindle, en traducción de Mercedes López-Ballesteros, publicada por Random House Mondadori en su serie Debolsillo bajo el membrete de Reinos de Redonda, sin fecha. Una Nota del editor dice: “Este vigésimo primer volumen del Reino de Redonda está dedicado a Mercedes Casanovas, “Die Seingalt” o Real Emisaria Literaria, que quiere leer la novela corta del título, después de haber hecho tanto por otras novelas mucho más largas, más modernas y muy inferiores” (archivo Kindle, loc. 20). Con esto Los enamoramientos se hace también parte del intertexto de El Coronel Chabert. Otros intertextos de Los enamoramientos son ciertas líneas sobre morir a tiempo o a destiempo del Macbeth de Shakespeare, los pasajes de Los tres mosqueteros, de Alexandre Dumas, donde se cuenta la historia de Anne de Breuil, supuestamente ejecutada por su esposo el Conde de la Fère, futuro Athos, al encontrarle la marca infame de la flor de lis en su hombro, y la definición de “envidia” del Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española de Sebastián de Covarrubias. Cada una de esas referencias podría dar lugar a varias páginas de análisis en el contexto de esta investigación.

“Substitution” is a lecture presented by Levinas in 1967 that is widely considered the “centerpiece” of Otherwise than Being, and that, in an expanded version, came to constitute Chapter 4 of that book. I have decided to concentrate my comments on this lecture rather than on the larger and more complex book chapter. The first division of the lecture is titled “Principle and Anarchy.”  Levinas begins by linking subjectivity to archic thought—“Subjectivity as consciousness is thus interpreted as an ontological event, namely, the rediscovery of being on the basis of an ideal principle or arche in its thematic exposition. . . . This is why the ‘adventure’ is not exactly an adventure. It is never dangerous. It is always a self-possession, sovereignty, arche. What arrives of the unknown is already disclosed, open, manifest, cast in the mold of the known, and can never come as a complete surprise. For the Western philosophical tradition, all spirituality is consciousness, the thematic exposition of Being, that is to say, knowledge.”

He then introduces the notions of proximity and obsession. Proximity would be “a relationship with what is not commensurable with [a theme]; with what cannot be identified in the kerygmatic logos, frustrating any schematism.” And obsession: “The relation of proximity does not amount to any modality of distance or geometrical contiguity, nor to the simple representation of the neighbor. It is already a summons of extreme exigency, an obligation which is anachronistically prior to every engagement. An anteriority that is older than the a priori. This formulation expresses a way of being affected that can in no way be invested by spontaneity: the subject is affected without the source of the affection becoming a theme of re-presentation. The term obsession designates this relation which is irreducible to consciousness.”

So, obsession instals itself in our heads or hearts, in our guts, “as something foreign, as disequilibrium, as delirium, undoing thematization, eluding principle, origin, and will, all of which are affirmed in every gleam of consciousness. This movement is, in the original sense of the term, an-archic. In no way, then, is obsession to be confused with a hypertrophy of consciousness.”

Obsession then constitutes a subject beyond or outside consciousness. This is strange. A subject beyond consciousness? Would it be the subject of the unconscious? No, Levinas says, “the unconscious, in its clandestinity, rehearses the game played out in consciousness, namely, the search for meaning and truth as the search for the self.” [Levinas may be mistaken in this, food for thought.] But then, what is this subject that is not a part of consciousness, that is, this non-subject according to everything we know?

I do not wish to express a disagreement with, much less contest, the moving, powerful, and beyond-intolerable Levinasian universe.   It is only that I have always been unhappy that Levinas must reduce the an-archic space of radical passivity to a subject’s experience or to the experience of subjectivity as such—subjectivity prior to conscience, for sure, prior therefore also to the unconscious, but subjectivity, he says, the Ego, he says. And yet it is a curious subject, this Ego without being: “Its exceptional unicity in the passivity of the Passion of the self is the incessant event of substitution, the fact of being emptied of its being, of being turned inside out, the fact of nonbeing.”   A subject that is not—why call it a subject, rather than saying it must not be a subject, it must be a non-subject? Perhaps because the Levinasian obsession has to do with responsibility—the fact that responsibility is necessarily a call to someone, the fact that the instance of passivity, what undergoes the passion of persecution, what becomes a hostage, must be able somehow to say Yes, and the Yes can only be affirmed by ¿a subject?   It is however a mute Yes, or a Yes that gets called to speech but does not necessarily speak. “Substitution is not an act but contrary to the act; it is a passivity inconvertible into an act, on this side of the act-passivity alternative.” “It is as though the Ego’s unity and unicity were already the hold over the self exerted by the gravity of being, abandoned by the unrepresentable withdrawal of the Infinite.”   So, the Ego, the subject, is a nonlocation of nonbeing, nothing but a remnant, what the withdrawal of being sustains through some force of negative gravity.   Helpless, the subject, “the persecuted one is expelled from its place and has nothing left but itself [but what is “itself” if it precisely is not?”], has nothing in the world upon which to rest its head. Accused beyond any fault, persecuted, one is unable to offer a self-defense in language, because the disqualification of the apology is the very charateristic of persecution, so that persecution is the precise moment where the subject [??] is reached or touched without the mediation of the logos.”

Why the subject, and not simply flesh? Well, it is a flesh that can die. “This passivity is not simply the possibility of death within being, the possibility of impossibility, but is an impossibility anterior to this possibility, an impossibility of slipping away, an absolute susceptibility, a gravity without any frivolity, the birth of a meaning in the obtuseness of being, a ‘being able to die,’ submitted to sacrifice.”  The persecuted, abandoned, made hostage, endowed with a responsibility it has not sought, substitutable, sacrificeable, infinitely held, never released—“the condition, or noncondition, of the Self is not originally an auto-affection presupposing the Ego but is precisely an affection by the Other, an anarchic traumatism this side of auto-affection and self-identification, a traumatism of responsibility and not causality.”

There is flesh, Levinas seems to say, and the call turns it into a subject as subject to the call.   This is prior to ontology, to being, to conscience, to identity. Does nothing exceed this? Levinas says: “Modern antihumanism, which denies the primacy that the human person, a free end in itself, has for the signification of being, is true over and above the reasons it gives itself. It makes a place to subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, and in substitution. Its great intuition is to have abandoned the idea of person as an end in itself. The Other (Autrui) is the end, and me, I am a hostage.”

So, perhaps what bothers me is that, as hostage, I have to answer (or else they’ll kill the others).   The answer subjectivizes me, not as the militant subject of anything, rather in full passivity—subjectivation is here becoming subject-to.   Of course, there is always more: “This condition, or noncondition, of the hostage will therefore be nothing less than the primary and essential modality of freedom and not an empirical accident of the Ego’s freedom.”

But, as hostage, am I only hostage? And, if I am hostage, are the rest only persecutors? Is there in me, and in the others, an even prior or perhaps just parallel noncondition that will not result in either freedom or unfreedom? Something that cannot be subjectivized, not even in the sense of subjectivation-to?

Levinas says: “To say that subjectivity begins in the person, that the person begins in freedom, that freedom is the primary causality, is to blind oneself to the secret of the self and its relation to the past. This relation does not amount to placing oneself at the beginning of this past so as to be responsible within the strict limits of intention, nor to being the simple result of the past. All the suffering and failure of the world weighs on that point where a singling out occurs, an inversion of being’s essence. A point is subject to everything.”   This point of the singling-out, beyond any possible presence of being to itself, the point of subjectivation as hostage—yes, it undoes every conception of subjectivity held within the tradition of metaphysics.   Including, or particularly, all contemporary notions, with the possible exception of the Lacanian one.   But does the point of the singling-out exhaust me? Do we only have two dimensions—subjectivation-to, and the subjectivity of conscience, the archic subjectivity of the person? Is there not a third dimension?

Levinas talks about a third dimension perhaps, even at the end of this paper, if only to say it would be the theme of another paper. He says: “The ego may be called, in the name of this unlimited responsibility, to be concerned also with itself. The fact that the other, my neighbor, is also a third in relation to another, likewise a neighbor, is the birth of thought, of consciousness, of justice, and of philosophy.”   In other words, this third person, or third dimension, perhaps, opens for Levinas the very possibility of politics as negotiation.   But this political dimension is already a dimension within the subjectivity of conscience—it is not, therefore, a third dimension, but rather a dimension within the second dimension.

And yet, perhaps, in another moment, when Levinas talks about something that might happen, may happen, beyond the rule of certainty, beyond or before negotiation and calculation, “as an adventure of subjectivity which is not governed by the concern to rediscover oneself, an adventure other than the coinciding of consciousness,” he speaks about a “communication with the other . . . as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run.”   Is this fine risk, this dangerous life, the region of infrapolitics?   A dimension that cannot be foreclosed either by political life or by ethical life?   And that requires, therefore, articulation?  

Schürmann’s take helps make the ontological dimension of savage democracy appear. There is a certain over-insistence on Abensour’s part that he wants to have nothing to do with the left-Heideggerian approach, but of the reasons he gives one seems important enough: whereas Lefort would turn the originary division of the social into a primordial threshold of intelligibility, Heidegger would describe democracy, a regime of political sense, as derived from a non-political regime of sense, namely, technics. [If I may elaborate, for Heidegger, while the essence of technology is not technological, the essence of contemporary democracy is technological.]

 But what if we could use the principle of anarchy [which I prefer to call an-archy, to make clear that we are not discussing anarchism in any doctrinal sense] in order to show that it ruins any possibility of derivation/coordination of a political system from/with anything non-political?

 Let’s start: first thing to take into account, the classical metaphysical apparatus is opposed here by the claim that a new thought of the principle, or the thought of a new principle, can reinvent politics.

 The classical metaphysical apparatus is and has always been inspired on arkhai, on principles. Metaphysics is archic thought. Within its parameters, the unity of being and acting was given by the principle, by whatever principle was dominant at any given epoch of metaphysics (from summum bonum to the principle of sufficient reason to subject-as-substance to production, say). But the epoch of an-archy means, that unity is exploded. Not because acting gets forgotten in favor of the question of being, which is the banal understanding of certain hapless anti-Heideggerian militants, rather because there is no longer the possibility of referral of action to an ordering, foundational principle.

 So, why “principle of anarchy,” then?   Is an-archy a new principle? Yes and no: we cannot yet dispense with the notion of principle, and we can no longer have it. We live in a transitional time—which may last for a while. The principle of an-archy points, on one side of it, beyond the closure of metaphysics, but, on the other side of it, it remains within—it is not good to make exaggerated claims to a radical and impossible break, since we cannot dispense with language. If our acting can only be described as an-archic, we introduce the claim that there is a new principle, or a new understanding of the principle, and it says: the principle is denied. We announce the principle, an-archy, in order to deny it as principle. An-archy demands the non-principle, commands not to have it.   This is the transitional situation.

 And then: is it not the case that savage democracy also has to do with an-archy as a liberation from the enterprise of foundations? Is savage democracy not also an acting without foundations? Non-derived?

 Just to be precise: the end of the archic also means the end of the telic. Just as there is no longer a principle to follow, there is no end acting as final cause. Finality only belongs in the realm of fabrication, production, but production is, precisely, against Marx, not-all.

 For Heidegger a site is the space where a Versammlung, a gathering, obtains.   Politics is therefore, and has been, the site where the cohesive force of an epochal principle obtains. And it is this site that constitutes the State of a given principle. [It is precisely to that extent that Heidegger speaks of contemporary, that is, in the sixties, when he said it, democracy as thoroughly attuned to and derived from the essence of technology, but this is my note, not something Abensour acknowledges.]   So what happens to that thought when the an-archic turn obtains?   Perhaps the an-archic turn obliges us to substitute a topological approach—no Versammlung but dissemination within and with-out an an-archic politics of savage democracy.   Two notions of the political, then: before and after the metaphysical closure of the archic.   But the second one is a politics beyond the State, outside the State, against the State of the principle.

 So, the question: how does savage democracy, the manifestation of an experience of freedom, offer an economy that responds, that corresponds, to the internal organization of the principle of an-archy?

 Abensour certainly agrees on a series of “consonances,” and moves on to the possible “dissonances.”   Humanism, for instance, since Lefort is so insistent on the “rights of man” as crucial for savage democracy. But, Abensour says, for savage democracy, by definition, “man” is a threshold of indetermination. There is no anthropocentrism, and savage democracy deploys itself outside any “philosophy of the subject or [any] metaphysics of subjectivity.” Also for savage democracy, it is the test of Being that marks human indetermination.

 This indetermination, this undetermined “human element,” is also absolutely resistant to human engineering, which is the mark of totalitarianism. [This connects with the conversation with Jorge, transcribed a few days ago.]   Adorno could say that democracy ‘”is closer to man” than an actually existing communism that refused to accept the fundamental “strangeness” of the human, that wanted to tame the human for its own purposes, having decided in advance how it ought to be. [But, by the same token, it is also radically opposed to the sort of neoliberal human engineering that we see imposed on us every day in so-called Western democracies, whether in the name of security or in the name of collegiality or in the name of any version of political correctness.]

 At this point Abensour wants to bring in an ad hoc hypothesis that he says he will not really go into given its difficulty. It has to do with Levinas. And it asks whether this fundamental, post-humanist indetermination of the “human element” has to do with an interruption of being, with an interruption of perseverance and the conatus essendi.   This opens up the whole thematics of the Levinasian “otherwise than being” in the appeal to ethics as “first philosophy.” Abensour says that democracy, given its links to justice, to responsibility, and to non-indifference, cannot remain alien to the otherness of the human.

 This of course takes up the fundamental disagreement that Levinas enacted regarding Heidegger. Abensour wants to challenge Schürmann in the direction of a clearer commitment to democratic thought before fully sponsoring the notion of the principle of an-archy for savage democracy.  He does this partially through recourse to the notion of the law as the fundamental field of conflict, once we come to consider the law, not as the means to secure subjection, but as the means to secure an ever-expanding freedom. The law can be an-archic in that particular sense, and that, for Abensour, conjures away the “dangerous ambiguity” connected to the Heideggerian enterprise, and anchors it in concrete political work.

Part of that dissolution of the ambiguity is to cancel away the “transitional dimension” of the principle of an-archy by exploring, as Levinas does, the absolute break between principle and an-archy. [This of course refers to Chapter 4 of Otherwise than Being, that I will try to summarize and comment on within the next few days.]   Abensour says, following Levinas, that an-archy cannot be posited as principle. The dissolution of the ambiguity of the transitional principle of an-archy also ruins the ambiguity of the oscillation between order and disorder.   The latter would amount to a still-too-political understanding of an-archy.   Levinas solves that problem by positing an an-archy “that touches a deeper stratum, pre-political or rather beyond politics and beyond ontology.”

Abensour concludes with a summary reference to the negativity that obtains as a consequence. Yes, savage democracy overcomes and passes beyond the State. In the name of freedom. It disables the State, that can no longer consider itself a Whole. It ruins totalization.   [Does it then have a merely critical position? Infrapolitics has been pointed at, but the problems its invocation awakens have not been solved.]

 Abensour departs from a programatic effort—to bring into relation Claude Lefort’s notion of “savage democracy” and Reiner Schürmann’s “principle of anarchy,” the latter understood as a “left-Heideggerian” approach to politics.   He has doubts about the latter that are trivial for our purposes, but thinks savage democracy is still in need of supportive reflection.

 Lefort, from the 1960s on, would no longer have been concerned with the distinction between an authentic and an inauthentic (bureaucratic appropriation) version of socialization, but would have contested the will to abolish social division from a will to indivision that cannot fail to be related to a totalitarian pragmatics.   Lefort moves from a communist to a democratic horizon.

 This amounts, for Lefort, to a rediscovery of politics as related, not to superstructural games, rather to the originary (and endless) division of the social.

 This division was defined by Machiavelli as the division between a desire to dominate and a desire not to be dominated—desire for power and desire for freedom.   But this means that there can be no stable manifestation of the social, as it would always be exposed to its fundamental division, which is also the risk and event of its dissolution and loss (as stable). A social structure must then be defined according to the position it takes regarding its fundamental, constitutive division, and in the face of it.

 Democracy constitutes itself through the radical acceptance of the originary division of the social, that is, by never refusing the fact that there is conflict.   Non-democracy is in the first place an attempt at suppressing the very possibillty of conflict.

 Conflict is therefore the very source of a “ceaselessly renovated” invention of freedom.  

“Savage democracy” makes reference to precisely such ceaseless and untimely dimension of conflict—a conflict for freedom against domination, on the democratic side, a conflict for domination against freedom on the non-democratic side.

 Hence there is no “established order,” no established ground for political deployment, no social pact. There is only a fundamental indetermination of the social.   But, if so, the social is something that refuses definition, that exceeds every definition, that challenges the very will to define.  Democracy is “savage” because it cannot be reduced, in any given case, to an institutional formula, a political regime, or an ensemble of procedures and rules.   “Savage” hence defines the “essence” of democray, to the extent that democracy is not but ongoing contestation and vindication: non-tamable, un-domesticatable, and also un-domestic. Democracy won’t come back into the house.

Right, that is, the law, must therefore not be considered an element of social stabilization, of social conservation, but must be seen as precisely an instance exterior to power, in excess of what is established, always available to new vindications.   Savage democracy is always in excess of the State of Law, or the Rule of Law, through law itself.

 So the social is always a battlefield between the symbolic and the ideological: right is the symbolic field, whereas the ideological is the ongoing attempt at appropriating the symbolic for a group, at giving it a determined content. But the symbolic exceeds every determination.

 There is, therefore, no conceivable subject of history from a savage democracy perspective.   Democratic struggles will not fall under the spell of the One. They simply deploy tumult, conflict on the necessarily empty site of power.

 Abensour brings to an end this initial explanation of Lefort’s idea with an ontological reference particularly important for us. He refers to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the savage Spirit,” that is, “the spirit that makes its own law not because it has submitted everything to its will, but because, submitted to Being, it dreams itself always in contact with the event in order to contest the legitimacy of established knowledge.”  

 Savage democracy is therefore an experience of Being, of the opening of Being, of the principial unaccomplishment of every being.

[More to follow on the principle of an-archy]