Rethinking Community from Peru

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Jon

What kind of political philosophy should one expect of a novelist? Irina Feldman’s fascinating Rethinking Community from Peru: The Political Philosophy of José María Arguedas prompts this question, as it proposes to present us with the political philosophy of José María Arguedas, the Peruvian author of Los ríos profundos, Todas las sangres, and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (among much else). Her starting point is the (in)famous 1965 Mesa Redonda sobre Todas las Sangres, in which (as she explains) Arguedas’s vision of Peruvian society was “severely questioned by a group of progressive scholars” (p. 3). His interlocutors felt that Arguedas had spurned class analysis in favor of an atavistic (if not reactionary) attachment to indigenous cultural forms such as the ayllu. For Feldman, what they missed was that Arguedas saw in such forms “an alternative project of community” that might carry over to a socialist society. But the more fundamental problem with this discussion was that the social scientists reading the novel had overlooked the fact that ultimately it was literary artifact, not sociological analysis. And to some extent Feldman replicates that mistake in seeking to squeeze a full-flown “political philosophy” from Arguedas’s fiction.

The bulk of this book is a reading of Todas las sangres highlighting the failures of the Peruvian state to achieve anything like hegemony in the highlands. What we see instead, we are told, is something more akin to what Ranajit Guha terms “dominance without hegemony” (p. 85). But in fact, in the Andes the state is not even dominant. As Feldman shows, Arguedas’s novel documents at least three other competing powers: the traditional hacendado system of large landowners with quasi-divine authority over “their” Indians; the indigenous ayllu, with its rotating leadership of varayok’s; and the forces of multinational capital, represented here by the Wisther-Bozart mining consortium. And though the haciendas are in decline–also, if more arguably so, the ayllu–the pressures of capital investment and resource extraction are such that the state can hardly carve out space to institute a liberal civil society, even if it wanted to do so.

Arguedas has a surprisingly positive view of the landowning class, perhaps because–like the varayok’s–they manifest the “solid bodily presence of the figure of authority” in contrast to the absent, “ghostly state” (p. 33). Hence the novel presents us with Don Bruno, a landowner who mobilizes his authority on the Indians’ behalf. But he can do so only by means of a self-sacrifice that destroys any chance of an effective alliance with the indigenous, and that further undercuts the state’s claims to sovereignty, rendering ordinary people all the more defenseless in the face of the mining corporations.

The saving grace of Andean culture, Feldman tells us, is its refusal to grant a “negative connotation” to physical labor, enabling “the indigenous serfs [to] escape the process of alienation” thanks to “the ritual appropriation of work in the mine [. . .] which signals a possibility of symbolic appropriation of the means of production” (p. 116). It is not clear, however, how much the real owners of the means of production are concerned about such symbolic reappropriation, so long as the workers continue to do their jobs without grumbling. In other words: is this not the most minimal, even self-defeating, revolution imaginable? Yet this is a phenomenon that Arguedas repeatedly depicts in his novels, from the communal road-building in Yawar Fiesta to the procession demanding a Catholic mass in Los ríos profundos: even in hegemony’s absence, the indigenous continue to struggle for their own servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation.

This may indeed be (as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest) the fundamental problem of political philosophy, but it is not clear that Arguedas grasps it as such. Should he? I am unconvinced that Arguedas ever satisfactorily rethinks the concept of community. His work is more symptom than solution, and if anything its weakness is that too often he does think like a social scientist, not least in his anguished concern for a Peruvian national project. The fact that Feldman’s examples of an Arguedan “political philosophy” in action all come from Bolivia, not Peru, shows the error of taking the nation-state as political horizon. More fundamentally, rather than trying to extract a political project from Arguedas’s fiction, it is more rewarding to see it as among the best mappings of Andean infrapolitics; that is, as an exploration of the conditions of possibility (and impossibility) of politics tout court.

A Note on Gabriela Basterra’s The Subject of Freedom. Kant, Levinas (New York: Fordham UP, 2015). By Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 14, 2015 by alberto moreiras

This note does not measure up to a review, and it does not intend to. I simply want to point something out, controversial as it may be. The Subject of Freedom takes its initial bearings on an intricate examination of several antinomies of reason as presented by Kant in the first Critique and goes through Kant´s practical philosophy (essentially through the second Critique and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, although there are references to other texts) into some key issues in Levinas’ later thought as represented by Otherwise Than Being. The discussion includes the debunking of some influential positions on Kant´s ethics, such as Dieter Heinrich´s. Basterra is interested in showing how Kant´s critical categories must be subjected to the scrutiny of a post-structuralist understanding of reason as essentially connected to language rather than to the forms of spatio-temporal intuition.

The significance of Basterra’s book is the critical double turn that consists in presenting Emmanuel Levinas’ thought as a philosophy of freedom in the Kantian sense, and, conversely, Kantian thought as a philosophy of auto-heteronomy. The implications of this double move for political thought are significant: essentially, but still rather superficially, The Subject of Freedom gives us a chance to understand the Kantian-Levinasian subject of the political as a non-liberal if still republican subject, and consequently gives us the chance to revise our notions of democratic republicanism through an alternative understanding of ethico-political subjectivity. This is revisionist in terms of the dominant traditions in political philosophy that have linked Kantian republicanism with a mostly liberal, or perhaps liberal by default, conception of both subjectivity and the political.

But there is a more daring task for interpretation. Once through Basterra’s analyses, and thanks to them, it is legitimate to wonder whether Kantianism is as securely established in autonomous subjectivity as it has been presumed. Or whether Kantianism, in its ethico-political articulation, opens necessarily onto a radical critique of subjectivity—this would be a stumble, a scandal in Kant’s path, or in the path of Kantianism, hence of modern philosophy. And, conversely, it also becomes legitimate to wonder whether the path of freedom does not necessarily go through a renunciation of the liberal notion of the subject, which is of course also the modern one. Not that a new image of the subject needs to be formed as a consequence—rather, another game opens up, which goes through the difficult terrain of wondering whether there is, after all, a subject of freedom, as opposed to a freedom beyond the subject.

On Charles Hatfield’s The Limits of Identity. Politics and Poetics in Latin America (Austin: U of Texas P, 2015). By Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 14, 2015 by alberto moreiras

This is an important book that, in its understated and unassuming rhetoric, actually establishes a generational challenge of fundamental importance to the totality of Latin Americanist discourse in the humanities. Beyond that, it subverts the very basis of Latin American cultural self-understanding since at least José Martí´s “Nuestra América.”

Hatfield organizes his book on the basis of four chapters, with a short Introduction and an equally short Coda, although both of the latter are significant. The chapters cover four master concepts, namely, Culture, Beliefs, Meaning, and Memory. Through them Hatfield offers a relentless critique of the Latin Americanist cultural tradition and its bearing on the present. He also makes a historical argument, hence a genealogical analysis of how the apparent truisms of the present came to be what they are. His theoretical sources are to be found in a soft North American pragmatism, fundamentally indebted to the work of Walter Benn Michaels and Stanley Fish in particular. It is a politically committed book whose urgency derives from the fact that, as the book establishes, contemporary literary-cultural reflection, or at least its mainstream, has lost its bearings and fails to realize that, contrary to its own claims, it will have no impact on “correcting the region´s most grievous injustices.”

The Introduction presents an idea of universalism as neither a belief nor an ideology, but as an irreducible dimension of any truth statement as such. It is because truth claims assert themselves as universally valid that there can (and should) be disagreement. If truth could be taken to be always and in every case particularist, that is, only valid for a given location or site of enunciation, then the very notion of disagreement would become useless and incomprehensible. For instance, the very opposition to racism, sexism, or colonialism that a certain number of Latin Americanist thinkers, if not most, would consider their own privilege or obligation against Eurocentric impositions, Hatfield shows, is already universalist, and it would be considerably weakened if we were to claim that it is only the result of the particularism of their victims. In other words, it is not because of “our” particular identity but because of a belief in the universal wrongness of racism that we can successfully and persuasively oppose racism.

So that universalism already commits us from the moment we have beliefs. Universalism is therefore not a particular form of ideology, much less a Eurocentric one, but rather a constitutive and irreducible dimension of everyday speech that cannot be disavowed without a cost. The cost is the reduction of thinking to an identitarian program–we, in other words, would not endorse a truth because we believe in it, only because it is ours or we have come to be persuaded that it is. The consequence is nefarious: “to invoke identity as the reason for a belief in a disagreement is to actually end the disagreement by refuting the universality that enables it” (“refuting” does not seem the right word here, as there is no refutation at play: “refusing” seems more like it).

It just happens to be the case that Latinamericanism in general has been throughout its history essentially preoccupied with “preserving, no matter in how contradictory or tense a manner, an idea of Latin America as the repository of a cultural difference that would resist assimilation by Eurocentric modernity.” The way this has been done–the rhetoric that sustains the concern for cultural difference–has followed patterns of anti-universalism that could only lead to identitarian dead ends. “Latin Americanism´s crucial work involves converting what is true or false into what is yours and mine.” The net result of this, in practical terms, is not a resounding denunciation of cultural oppression, or even a brave refusal of racism, but rather the trap of proposing a “liberationist” discourse that “implicates itself in many of the same discourses that it sought to repudiate.” When Doctor Francisco Laprida, in Jorge Luis Borges´s “Poema conjetural,” experiences a “secret joy” at the moment of his violent death, the complications of Sarmiento´s inaugural discourse on “civilization versus barbarism” are rendered moot: “liberation” is for Laprida, as for so many Latin Americanists, a mere return to atavistic identification with a tellurian force and a more than dubious authenticity, from which nothing but disaster can ensue.

If “Laprida´s demise at the hands of gauchos is, in a sense, the fulfillment of what Latin Americanist thinking ever since José Martí´s ‘Nuestra América’ has desired,” Chapter 1 offers an analysis of “Nuestra América” whose main thrust is the recognition that Martí´s discourse, “far from offering a post-racial vision,” “reinstates the concept of race that it repudiates” at a cultural not biological level. It also happens to be a reinstatement that has become functional to the neoliberal regime of rule, which thrives on cultural difference as a substitute for economic equality. Given Martí´s status as a cultural hero, this chapter is bound to be controversial if not fiercely polemical, and it is of course part of the merits of this book that Hatfield is courageous enough to risk the cost of debunking civilizational figures.

Chapter 2 deals with yet another cultic intellectual presence over the last century, namely, José Enrique Rodó, whose Ariel has been described as “the most important Latin American essay.” In Ariel Rodó inverts Sarmiento´s dichotomy and claims that Latin America, far from being the site of an impotent failure of civilization, should emerge as the true repository of spirit–the culmination, not the limit place, of Western civilization. But Rodó does this through a reaffirmation of “nuestroamericanismo,” that is, through the repeated assertion, which organizes the core of his essay, that a pursuit of identitarian strategies counts as the highest example of thought, and the only one available to Latin Americans. Hatfield complements his analysis of Rodó with the analysis of a book that would seem to be its direct antagonist, namely, Rodolfo Kusch´s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, to the extent that, if Rodó´s target audience is the Latin American liberal-criollo class, Kusch places his civilizational bet on a recovery of indigenous cosmovisions. But Hatfield persuasively shows that Kusch shares with Rodó “the idea that the only arguments that we can make for or against beliefs are that they are ours–or not.” An understated aspect of this chapter happens to reside in the fact that today the field of Latin American studies could be easily defined as the combat between “arielistas” and “decolonials,” which is still a combat between Rodó and Kusch, were it not for the marginal if persistent existence of a number of dissidents (Hatfield himself, for instance). One of the arguments that Hatfield deploys with devastating effect is that this kind of thought is circular and therefore vicious: “Seminal thinking is the thinking to which Kusch wants to return and simultaneously the theory that makes available that return.” And he shows that the contradictions internal to current-day proposals for a return to indigenous thinking have a terrible price, if it all comes down to “lining up your philosophy with your skin:” “all of this in no way means that it is impossible or intrinsically contradictory to make a case for indigenous thinking, or any mode of thinking. It means only making a choice between the commitment to indigenous thinking on the one hand, and difference on the other.”

Chapter 3 opens up the frame of reference and avoids the concentration of the analysis into one master figure, like Martí or Rodó. In this chapter Hatfield goes through a number of more contemporary critics and writers in order to show the pervasiveness of the nuestroamericanist ideology in the present. He starts with a masterful reading of Borges´ “Pierre Menard: Author of Don Quixote,” examines a number of critical takes on it, seeks to establish its correspondence with pragmatic conclusions, and moves on to deploy those conclusions in the context of the work of people such as Roberto Fernández Retamar, Ricardo Kalimán, Octavio Paz, and Doris Sommer. Through all of it Hatfield argues that identitarianism must recognize an impossible resistance in the literary text, which may point us in the direction of a denunciation of literature as insufficient for the political tasks it is expected to perform. But it can equally point in the direction of literature “as a site of disagreement, rather than of difference, and in so doing” show that “literature gives us a model for a better politics.”

Chapter 4, on “Memory,” is one of the most original and brilliant in the book. Taking its departure from the disturbing thought that neoliberalism has already managed to enthrone cultural difference and has hence deprived the contestatory dimension of mainstream Latinamericanism of any conceivable ground, it moves on to an analysis (again, understated and unassuming, but very powerful) of the critical constellation associated with “politics of memory.” In other words, this chapter analyses “the shift away from culture and towards history and memory as the cathected objects for Latin American identitarian thinking.” But history and memory are not the same thing: if history refers to knowledge, memory refers to experience. The thought that we could rehearse the memory of experiences we have not had is at the core of memory thinking over the last two generations of Latin Americanism. And it is a deeply limiting thought, because the project of turning history into memory cannot be distinguished from the project of turning knowledge into identity. Hatfield makes a historical argument that goes back to the 1960´s and the beginnings of testimonial writing in Latin America, through the rise of oral history as epistemic practice in the 1980s, through José Rabasa´s radically nihilistic account of the Acteal massacre in the 1990s (“truth and falsity do not matter for Rabasa, because the idea of truth makes identity irrelevant”), and into the curious conflation of apparently irreconcilable subjectivist thought in contemporary critique (Beatriz Sarlo and John Beverley are the examples in this section). But Eduardo Galeano, Gustavo Verdesio, Diana Taylor, and Raymond L. Williams are also gently brought to task, together with Carmen Boullosa. All of these authors are of course only examples of a widespread metonymy in the field. It is part of the elegance of the book´s rhetoric that the author lets the reader draw her own conclusions as to the general state of the field, including the position taken by some of the more popular or well-known critics that are barely mentioned and not frontally analyzed.

The Coda on New Latin Americanism is essentially an analysis of John Beverley´s recent Latin Americanism After 9-11. Hatfield presents the thought that, on Beverley´s own premises, if the neoliberal market has brought about “a play of differences that is not subject, in principle, to the dialectic of master and slave,” then the current predicament “equals a game-over on two counts for Latin Americanism itself. First, if ideologies of Latin Americanism at heart have always been about cultural dehierarchization, which is just another way of saying identitarian anti-universalism, then the recognition of cultural dehierarchization´s hegemony leaves it without anything to do. Second, the fact that Latin Americanism´s project of cultural dehierarchization was achieved by and in neoliberalism poses the question of whether that project ever–but especially now–counts as a progressive form of political resistance to capitalism.” This is the fundamental impasse today, and of course Hatfield shows that Beverley´s counterproposal does not work: “Beverley´s new Latin Americanism, boiled down, is almost like a definition of the old one,” which is quite unfortunate. There is a lot of genuinely new work to do, and it can change the game, but only if the playing field, Hatfield suggests, is rebuilt from scratch.

On Professional Bliss. By Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 13, 2015 by alberto moreiras

So many constant misunderstandings eventually come to our ears one no longer knows the battles one wants to fight—surely not the battles we have not sought, whose result is indifferent in the best of cases? Yes, this group (not the blog, but the group the blog is connected to) is composed mainly of people who are not professional philosophers, whatever that means, and mainly of people from the academic disciplines of Hispanic Studies, which is for many a double problem (first, we are said to speak out of line, as whatever we say has “nothing to do with our language and tradition,” whatever that means, which makes us incomprehensible; second, we are said to speak as mere impostors and amateurs, because we have no proper legitimation—say, through the Heidegger-Gesellschaft or the Derridean establishment, one would suppose, or through philosophy departments perhaps?) And yet we are trying to develop a path of thought, which takes many years, particularly against such obstacles, depressing. And that is rarely granted. Much less helped. We do not complain (we like marranismo, and dis-inheritance is part of what we do), but at some point—now, for instance—this must be registered.

Infrapolitics is to be understood, genealogically, as a repetition of the Heideggerian adventure in the destruction of metaphysical thought (which of course Derrida took up and continued). It seems to me we can date the notion of infrapolitical legacy, in the restricted but nevertheless immediate way that concerns Heidegger, to the moment, in the 1920 lecture course on Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, in which he says: “Philosophy has the task of preserving the facticity of life and strengthening the facticity of Dasein.” This is of course the precise moment that Agamben takes up–quoting, through Foucault, some other, later text–at the beginning of Homo Sacer, and that marks the beginning of what he conceives of as his own project in biopolitics. Essentially, if philosophy, or thought, which is in itself a particular way of factical life, must make it its business to understand that which it is a part of, then two main possibilities ensue: one of them has been called biopolitics. But the essential problem with biopolitics is that its horizon is and cannot not be politics. The other one is infrapolitical, which includes politics but is not constrained by politics. I suppose this is difficult to understand, or to accept, for many? But we only claim to want to do what we can.

So yes, there are many of us by now but we are on our own (like in the old joke about Galicians lost in the desert), provided we keep it up (otherwise, not even that). It is hard to know why–surely we have not historically militated in favor of isolation and silence? And yet that is what we usually get, insofar as we speak up. But never mind: the real thing, if it ever was, is no longer in these battles that we cannot win precisely because they are battles we have not sought and do not want to fight. What seems much more sensible is to persist, to persevere, and the writing will have to speak for us by itself eventually and in the future, if that is important.

Postscriptum a Tiempo universitario y deseo. Por Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 9, 2015 by alberto moreiras

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

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

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

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

Roberto Esposito’s L’origine della politica. Hannah Arendt o Simone Weil? (1996). By Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 9, 2015 by alberto moreiras

(The news that this book will soon be published in an English translation by Gareth Williams and Vincenzo Binetti in Fordham UP prompts me to post this review here. The connections between infrapolitics and Esposito’s “impolitical” are as intricate perhaps as the connections between Arendt and Weil Esposito explores here.)

This 1996 book occupies an important place in the context of Roberto Esposito’s work. It marks the transition from a dominant or primary concern with the deconstruction of the fundamental concepts of political modernity associated with a sustained reflection on the “impolitical” to the emphasis on the understanding of the constellation of concepts around the Latin munus (immunity, community) and its derived biopolitics. And it marks it in rather complex ways.

For instance, there are different ways in which Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil are thinkers of the limits of the political. On their lifelong reflections, however, it is possible to sustain that they are both still thinkers of the limit, and that both were finally unable to renew the ontological horizon of political modernity. If L’origine studies both authors, it is primarily with a view to the dismantling of a tradition in and through the work of two of the authors that, for Esposito personally, nevertheless originate the possibility of a genealogical move towards an ontology of the present. But, if Esposito will later sustain that Arendt’s entire discourse becomes exhausted in its very productivity as a modality of political thought, Weil will retain her force in the post-munus stage of Esposito’s thought, and will be influential in his formulation of a renewed concept of “the impersonal,” which today sustains his project.

The grounds for such moves are explicitly treated in L’origine—a book that opens by announcing that Arendt and Weil each think the shadow within the other’s light, the silence within the other’s voice, the void within the other’s fullness. A thought of “life” is already prefaced here when we understand that political action fulfills for Arendt a function similar to what the notion of labor fulfills for Weil—and how both thinkers, who paradoxically think of what the other negates, do it for the sake of establishing “a rapport with the world” that would not let itself be reduced to the immediate facticity of “bare life.”

In the process, we learn, for instance, that while Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism is based on the positing of its radical opposition to a political life, for Weil 20^th century totalitarianism stems from the same logic as political modernity. It is therefore no longer a matter of rescuing the origins of politics from themselves, and thus rescuing politics and the possibility of a political life, but rather of understanding that there will be no political life that is not at the same time the unworking of politics and its abyssal confrontation with its impolitical underside. In other words, and this is already Esposito’s parti pris, Modernity is not sick because it has betrayed its origins, rather it is sick because it has brought out its antinomical foundations in full force. So—what is there to do?

The succession of chapters studies the relationship between the two major thinkers of the 20^th century on the basis of a thematic constellation—truth, beginnings, war, third spaces, nothingness, force, the common, empire, topology, and love. This is not just any thematic constellation. It means to point out how, in the Western tradition of realist political thought, the conflict between power and interests has always resulted in the suppression, on the side of power, of conflict itself, as major violence and major political violence. If Arendt and Weil are indeed major thinkers, it is because both of them, in different and even complexly different ways that were paradoxically, even chiasmatically, related, were able to replace a thought of conflict at the site of its symbolic mediation or suppression, thus liberating the terrain for a fresh, genealogical look at political ontology.

If politics is after all always already a thought of the real, then the real is what comes through the Auseinandersetzung of the two thinkers. Esposito will say that true passion, through the most extreme effort of thought, always results not only in a passion for the real, but in a loving passion as well: in other words, the passion of thought is only a loving passion of the real, as Alain Badiou will claim himself in quite a different key. But, if so, that means that thought is not and can never be an attempt at the suppression of conflict. Thought does not just fight—it is the fight itself. This is the impolitical reflection of political thought, the radicalization of the realist tradition, and finally the possibility of a new beginning for (im)political thought, away from the aporias of modernity and of its classicist internalizations. That political thought turns impolitical for Esposito is another way of saying that Esposito moves on the basis of a fundamental ontology of war. For him, as for Heraclitus, perhaps Nietzsche, perhaps Heidegger, perhaps Derrida, war marks what a previous tradition would have called “the unity of being,” which has implications.

The development of those implications is of course what Esposito has been trying to accomplish with his work. L’origine della politica constitutes a privileged vantage point into it, not only through its masterful conceptual analysis and through its insights into the two key thinkers it studies and critiques, but also because, as it makes explicit the stakes of the impolitical approach, it also ruins so many of the foundations of modern political thought and prepares the way for its fundamental renewal.

Tiempo universitario y deseo. Por Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 8, 2015 by alberto moreiras

Supongo que no estamos preparados para reconocer que nuestra situación como profesores universitarios en las humanidades es el resultado de un fracaso íntimo de carácter inmemorial—estaríamos donde estamos porque nunca supimos cómo hacer otra cosa. Supongo, por lo tanto, que todavía alienta en nosotros una noción positiva de la vida intelectual, que en algún momento pudo ser llamada vocación, y que para nosotros nunca estuvo vinculada a la adquisición de saberes técnicos sino a su contrario estricto—a una especulación libre vinculada a las posibilidades de una lengua. Pero ese deseo, que es un deseo de libertad, acaba profesionalizándose, y a partir de ese momento se convierte en un problema: o bien el deseo mantenido contra viento y marea pervive y sobrevive como fuente siempre secreta de alegría, o bien el deseo se desvanece y queda enterrado y olvidado entre las miserias de una vida secuestrada por la mera ocupación sólo aparentemente productiva. Sin duda hay épocas y generaciones en las que la sobrevivencia del deseo se hace más plausible, mientras que hay otras en las que la supuesta presión de profesionalización, según criterios que pertenecen siempre al Gran Otro y que por lo tanto no pueden menos que ser vividos como opresivos, prevalece. Estamos en el medio de una época de la segunda clase.

¡Tantas cosas que hacer! Eso se oye por doquier, y a veces es todo lo que se oye. Uno está muy ocupado en la universidad. Uno está tan ocupado, entre enseñanza (pero ¿qué enseñanza?), papeleos, emails, servicio de resultados siempre dudosos o más que dudosos, estudio y escritura—pero ¿qué escritura?—que justamente no hay tiempo ya para el juego del deseo, que queda diferido sine die—pero un deseo que se abandona es necesariamente un deseo que abandona. El abandono del deseo es vida dañada.

¿No es hora ya de abandonar el abandono del deseo, impuesto por un mandato de profesionalización opresivo? ¿No es esa la primera necesidad de politización real en la universidad para todos nosotros? Hemos permitido que la presión social, hostil en su naturaleza misma, enemiga resentida de toda libertad posible, entre en nuestro cálculo de manera exhaustiva. Hemos internalizado valores que no son los nuestros ni pueden serlo: productividad, fama, apariencia de ocupación infinita, proteísmo ridículo del que se esfuerza sólo para poder llenar líneas de curriculum y casillas de la evaluación anual. No hay ya felicidad posible, ni tampoco satisfacción. Sólo queda el goce oscuro del esclavo universitario, que sueña con no serlo a través de la frenética actividad que lo esclaviza, y en la que ilusamente ha puesto toda su esperanza de placer.

Cada uno sabrá cómo lucha con sus propios demonios. Esta breve reflexión, motivada por cierta desoladora experiencia (del otro) que no puedo hacer pública, sólo quiere preguntarse si es posible imaginar—o si es ya demasiado tarde para imaginar—algo así como unas reglas básicas de conducta profesional que permitan salvaguardar la vocación de deseo, contra su sacrificio. Que permitan, por lo tanto, salvar el tiempo de nuestra vida, y no jugar a su pérdida infinita justamente allí donde creemos que nuestra apuesta dará mejores resultados.

Yo propondría sólo cuatro para empezar:

No escribas más que lo que no tengas más remedio que escribir.
No enseñes más que lo que no tengas más remedio que enseñar.
No sirvas más de lo estrictamente necesario.
Cambia tu vida de forma que tu tiempo coincida con tu deseo, y sostén siempre que esa es tu verdadera misión universitaria y tu única forma de responder al vínculo social en el que se sostiene.

Two Reasons for Marranismo. By Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 6, 2015 by alberto moreiras

“Is he still not afraid? He has already been hunted down to be put to death for doing this, and he ran away; yet here he is again burying the dead!” (Tobit 7. 3-7)

So what is it? Are we proposing to engage in a revisitation of the experience of converso Jews from the 14^th through the 18^th century or so in Spain and its imperial possessions, and of some of its ramifications? What is the worth of the term today? What can it do?

I am not going to offer a full answer to those questions (I would not be able to do it), only a partial one, in an attempt to clarify, first of all to myself, my own interest. I am interested in marranismo for two main reasons, I suppose: one of them is biographical in an extended sense, the other one is speculative.

As to the biographical in an extended sense, I am referring of course to my situation as an expatriate (Galician) Spaniard. I do not think and have never thought of myself as an “exile” in any dramatic sense, I did not leave Spain for any kind of political reasons or in a forceful manner. I left because that seemed a good idea at the time. That happened in 1981. I have no complaints, but it has become quite obvious to me over the years that, for no doubt structural reasons, my life, such as it is, is to a certain intimate extent characterized by an experience of double exclusion that I assimilate to marrano history in a strong sense. It is therefore only natural, I think, that I would want to thematize the secular marrano experience—that particular kind of historical experience that turned an uncountable number of my compatriots into strangers in their own land or in any other land. So, this is what I would call a concrete universal for me—out of an experience of expatriation and structural double exclusion, which could be universalizable among all of those who share it, I make it concrete by assuming a certain legacy as my own, not in the name of identity, not in the name of community, but in the more (or perhaps less; yes, definitely less) spectral sense of claiming as my own the ghosts of those whose bodies are buried nowhere visible, in no grave of their own.

As to the speculative reason, I would like to think that the marrano register remits to a certain kind of intellectual experience of the world, or, what comes to the same, a certain kind of worldly experience of intellectuality that has more to do with survival (and sur-vival) than it has with being traditional or revolutionary, conservative or progressive, organic or inorganic, specific or general, engaged or uncommitted, and so forth. Take Gramsci’s distinction between traditional (say, priests, university professors) and organic intellectual. Where does a marrano stand without forcing his or her own hand? Marranismo preempts organicity or turns it into betrayal. (And what I recently read in a novel by Héctor Aguilar Camín may be true: all “real” problems end up being problems of loyalty and betrayal.) But marranismo equally preempts any kind of traditionality. It is barred from both. So I want to thematize, in my own life, and in my own work, a marrano existence, I want to reflect on marrano intellectuality, and I want to claim that it is irreducible to any kind of more conventional understanding of intellectuality as it may have been defined in the last couple of centuries. It is of course quite reluctant to think of itself as in any way biopolitical—biopolitics, as the administration of life, whether from above or from below, is the enemy of a marrano experience who only has for itself the possibility—only the possibility—of a non-administrative relationship to death. But it is also reluctant to think of itself as “political:” it has no choice, it is always already a political existence, like all existences are, but its focus is not on politics. It is on what is always already before, and therefore always already after, politics. It claims, therefore, an infrapolitical politization and only that.

The crossing between the biographical and the speculative—a marrano life—seems to me worth exploring, as there would be nothing better to do. For some of us.

Notes on “Différance” and the Ontological Difference. By Alberto Moreiras

Posted on December 2, 2015 by alberto moreiras

Notes on “différance” and the ontological difference.

Following up on some discussions in the last few months I was led to reread “La différance” (Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, 1972, 1-29, but the text was a conference first given and then published in 1968) looking for the nuances and discrepancies, or the nuances in the discrepancies, Derrida establishes between his (non)concept, (non)word, “différance,” and the Heideggerian conceptualization of the ontico-ontological difference between Being and Time (1927) and The Fragment of Anaximander (1946). I will simply jot down a few comments for discussion. (I have to be selective in my quotes and references, otherwise I would risk reproducing within quotation marks the entirety of such a rich and carefully written essay.)

What is the nature of the differend, if there is a differend? Can we say that Derrida rejects the thought of the ontico-ontological difference? Or does he merely continue it, taking it elsewhere? Is there a differend in the sense of polemos, in the sense Derrida himself takes back to Heraclitus’ “diapherein”? Or is it something other than that, itself inscribed in the différance of différance? And what is at stake? (For him or for me? For me, frankly, what is at stake is my interest in basing infrapolitics on some version—but neither the first one nor the last one: rather their progression in the path of thought, not only Heidegger’s, and whatever may come after it—of what was originally named the ontico-ontological difference; secundarily, my interest in supposing, like Derrida himself did, that “différance” unequivocally affirms a plurality of discourses not organized as a kingdom, that is, not organized as hierarchically dependent on the rule of any discursive king; in the third place, my interest in rejecting a certain notion of biopolitics and biopolitical reflection as the only or dominant “philosophy of the future,” in Giorgio Agamben’s phrase.)

In connection with an elucidation of the role of the ontico-ontological difference in Derrida’s 1968 essay, several things ought to be taken into account. The first is the one given in the only footnote to the text, which comes towards its end (27-28), and was obviously added during the preparation for the republication of the essay as the first chapter in Marges de la philosophie. There Derrida presents the essay as an introduction to the totality of the essays in the volume, as its “’élaboration préliminaire,” where what is intended is to deploy the notion of “texte général” not only against its metaphysical sequestering in the different disciplines (Derrida mentions political economy, psychoanalysis, semiolinguistics, rhetoric), but also against its metaphysical sequestering in general or fundamental ontology. The idea is then to undo any claim of a monarchic or sub-monarchic priority for thought, of any kind of a hierarchical regioning of discourses. Given the well-known Heideggerian insistence on the priority of philosophical thought, in his style, to any regional scientific production, the anti- or non-Heideggerian approach in this respect is explicit. (And shared by me: infrapolitical reflection is not merely or even primarily philosophical reflection.)

The second has to do with a certain genealogical determination of thought, hence a provenance of thought against the background of Hegelianism. Derrida establishes a line from Nietzsche and Freud and Levinas to Heidegger, with an important reference to Bataille as well, and with a special mention, but perhaps not in the same line, of Saussure. But the more extensive genealogical analysis is dedicated to Heidegger. Indeed, against the Hegelian background, Heidegger’s thought hangs heavy on Derrida’s vacillations concerning the notion of a philosophical epoch—there seems to be an epoch of thought, which those four or five thinkers punctuate or form (he says at one point that the names are themselves symptoms of a time), but at the same time Derrida will not allow that epoch of thought to be considered part of the Heideggerian history of being—so that the epoch of thought, written as “epoch,” will not be itself a part of the history of being: some other unmentioned horizon might determine it “historically,” but this is left ultimately unclarified in the essay. (The main statement is: “la différance . . . m’a paru stratégiquement le plus propre à penser . . . le plus irréductible de notre ‘epoque’” [7]. And he even says, echoing remarks from the seminar given in 1964 on Heidegger and the question of history and being, that différance constitutes a thematics historically situated to the very extent that it could and should be replaced “un jour,” becoming part of another tropological chain. At first Derrida says he parts, “strategically,” from our time and place, from a certain “’nous,’” although he warns the reader at the same time that it is only “différance” that marks who and where “we” are, therefore the epoch does not enframe différance; it is différance that enframes the epoch and any possibility of epochal time. Later in the essay, already confronting Heidegger explicitly, Derrida remarks that “epoch” always already belongs to the history of being, and is therefore, in its very notion, contaminated or captured by that thought. This is the point where he says that différance is “plus ‘vieille’” than the history of being, claiming a precedence that destroys history and sinks itself into the immemorial. “Epochality,” like history, can be used strategically, then, but always under erasure. I find this unsatisfying—there is no overwhelming reason why “history” must in every case be thought onto-theologically, particularly if “différance” makes a claim to exception for itself.)

And the third one, in my opinion, has to do with the fact that Derrida, while taking explicit exception to Heidegger, to a certain extent and after recognizing Heidegger’s thought as unavoidable, orients his notion of différance on the very path of the ontico-ontological difference, insofar as one can choose to read this particular essay at least as a mere correction to the Heideggerian text. Looking into the correction might then elicit the question, and a possible answer, as to the status of it—does the correction imply a fundamental break away from Heidegger, or is the correction more in the order of a breaching, a Bahnung, a facilitation of the way? I think the latter is the case.

Différance: “On ne peut l’entendre et nous verrons en quoi elle passe aussi l’ordre de l’entendement” (4). This surpassing the understanding probably makes reference to a certain impossibility for the understanding to master the labor of différance. To the extent mastering equals naming—or the naming is always already an (alleged) mastering–this remark is not casual, as it already contains, in cypher, what will ultimately emerge as the main criticism regarding Heidegger. The radical opening of différance to its own unnaming—this is why différance can neither be a concept nor a word—makes it ready to claim an endless and ceaseless surpassing: “La différance est non seulement irréductible à toute réappropriation ontologique ou théologique—onto-théologique—mais, ouvrant mëme l’espace dans lequel l’onto-théologie—la philosophie—produit son systéme et son histoire, elle la comprend, l’inscrit et l’éxcede sans retour” (6).

On Hegel Derrida says: “malgré les rapports d’affinité très profonde que la différance ainse écrite entretient avec le discours hégélien, tel qu’il doit ëtre lu, elle peut en un certain point non pas rompre avec lui, ce qui n’a aucune sorte de sens ni de chance, mais en opérer une sorte de déplacement à la fois infime et radical” (15). Is it the same minimum but radical displacement that would constitute the relationship with Heidegger? Not in my opinion. I think the displacement vis-á-vis Hegel is of a much more extensive kind, to the very same extent that Hegelianism is the epitome of the privileging of presence as self-presence, through the notions of subject and substance, and through the ultimate equivalence between the two. That this is Derrida’s fundamental target is made explicit by the fact that, always according to him, the thinkers that interest him—Nietzsche, Freud, Levinas, up to Heidegger—would have attempted to destroy it as well, and always following a thinking of diapherein against every possibility of consciousness’ “certitude assurée de soi” (18).

In any case, the differences between that particular, “epochal” constellation of thinkers and Hegelianism open up, up and through Derrida’s mention of Bataille. They remain obscure, certainly, but it is through such a darkness that tentative steps are taken in order to initiate a reinscription of the very project of philosophy, “sous l’espèce privilegiée du hégélianisme” (21). It is interesting to quote Derrida on “la plus grande obscurité,” since its designation as such ought to be enough to let us understand that something like the proper “epochal” project of philosophy is presented there. If so, then it is a matter of importance to elucidate the answers given to it by the chain of thinkers Derrida is referencing, up to Heidegger and then Derrida himself. I will limit myself to pointing out in this context that not only are the following sentences as good a description of the task of deconstruction as any other we have, but also, more cryptically perhaps, that they also fit Heidegger’s work like a glove—if perhaps a different glove: “Comment penser á la fois la différance comme détour économique que, dans l’élément du mëme, vise toujours à retrouver le plaisir où la presence différée par calcul (conscient ou inconscient) et d’autre part la différance comme rapport à la presence impossible, comme dépense sans réserve, comme perte irréparable de la présence, usure irréversible de l´énergie, voire comme pulsion de mort et rapport au tout-autre interrompant en apparence toute économie” (20).

There is a redescription of that reinscription, we could say, in more familiar terms. It is simple enough: “delimiting the ontology of presence” (cf. 22). Here is where the confrontation with Heidegger becomes focused. If différance, or deconstruction more generally, interrogates and solicits “the determination of being as presence” (22), Derrida notes that it is not possible to avoid “l’incontournable meditation heideggerienne” on the ontico-ontological difference. Furthermore, that it is not possible to give “a simple response” to the question as to the difference between différance and the Heideggerian prompting.

There would be a necessity to pass through the Heideggerian meditation. If différance could be said to constitute “a more violent” approach than the thought of the ontico-ontological difference, in other words, if there is to be a critical difference between différance and the Heideggerian theme, “ce n’est ni se dispenser du passage par la verité de l’ëtre ni d’aucune façon en ‘critiquer,’ en ‘contester,’ en méconnaïtre l’incessant necessité” (23).

Derrida turns then to Heidegger’s 1946 essay on Anaximander. His leading question is whether it would still be necessary to understand the Heideggerian propositions in that essay, which include the highlighted notions of “early trace” (die frühe Spur) and usage (Brauch), as necessarily oriented towards the Wesen des Seins, or essence of being—that is, whether the Heideggerian vocabulary, engaged with truth, essence, being, and presencing, does not ultimately aim at preserving a certain kingdom (“Non seulement il n’y a pas de royaume de la différance mais celle-ci fomente la subversion de tout royaume” [22]), namely the kingdom of metaphysics. Derrida puts it somewhat awkwardly: “Pour nous, la différance reste un nom métaphysique et tous les noms qu’elle reçoit dans notre langue sont encore, en tant que noms, métaphysiques. En particulier quand ils disent la détermination de la différance en différence de la présence au present (Anwesen/Anwesend), mais surtout, et dejá, de la façon la plus générale, quand ils disent la détermination de la différance en différence de l´ëtre á l’etant” (28).

Différance has no name, Derrida says, but a perpetual dislocation in differing substitutions. There is no name, and the name cannot be retrieved. “Il n´y aura pas de nom unique, füt-il le nom de l’ëtre” (29).

This is the site of the disagreement: according to Derrida, at least in Der Spruch des Anaximander, Heidegger sustains a metaphysical engagement through his attempt to search for “a proper word and a unique name” (29). Différance, however, gives up on the name and lives in dissemination. “Telle est la question: l’alliance de la parole et de l’ëtre dans le mot unique, dans le nom en fin propre” (29). Ultimately, Derrida claims that the difference between the Heideggerian difference and his own différance is a matter of joy against nostalgic hope, in a context in which we should simply affirm hope and reject nostalgia.

It is indeed, or not, an “infime et radical” displacement. For me, a displacement within a continuum that may enrich the epochal thought of the ontological difference by underlining some of its more promising features. But it does not announce a break: only a breach that infrapolitical reflection can use, for instance, by recognizing that the Freudian thought of the death drive is not limited by its always already ontic rank (as Heidegger himself might have argued or did argue) and can thus not enter but rather entirely bypass the ontological kingdom. As itself nothing but the site of a non-administrative relationship with death, infrapolitics unashamedly links Heidegger’s existential analytics with Derrida’s determination of the greatest obscurity as the interruption of every economy.

Macrismo: populismo y nuevas derechas. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Gerardo.Muñoz

Aun no ha pisado la Casa Rosada y las medidas del macrismo ya dan un primer acorde a la época que se abre con Cambiemos: una explicitada alianza con la derecha regional en búsqueda de un acelerado agrietamiento del eje Mercosur (que en primera escena del bunker del PRO estuviese Lilian Tintori, esposa del encarcelado líder político venezolano Leopoldo López, no es un dato menor). Reclamarle a TeleSUR y a la prensa bolivariana neutralidad parece no solo injusto, sino incorrecto, ya que ha sido el mismo Ingeniero Macri el primero en hacer un guiño a la opinión pública de la nueva reorganización geopolítica en la región. Es obvio que el eje bolivariano haya contestado beligerantemente y se sienta interpelado por un marcado giro en las relaciones bilaterales con el nuevo gobierno porteño.

Si esto es así en materia internacional, en la economía ha seguido una ‘intempestiva suba de precios’ que, como ha visto en su última nota el historiador Alejandro Horowicz, marcan la clara tendencia de un proceso de devaluación y comienzo de una serie de medidas de ajuste económico que el propio jefe de gabinete Marcos Peña no ha dudado de adjetivar como “impresionante” [1]. Por el frente doméstico la sorpresiva nominación de Patricia Bullrich para el Ministerio de Seguridad prepara la grilla policial para lo que se espera que pueda ser otro ‘Diciembre caliente’. Es cierto que el actual ministro de seguridad Sergio Berni no se queda atrás en cuanto a los cumplidos de represión y despliegue securitario, pero lo nuevo aparece aquí como una réplica naturalizada por los dispositivos del discurso instalados en el mismo seno del macrismo triunfante. Lo que antes pudiera haberse leído como errónea anomalía, ahora se registra como el estado de excepción desde los cuerpos y las lenguas que lo gobiernan. Si le agregamos a todo esto, la nominación de Pablo Avelluto en Cultura y el indecente editorial de La Nación “No mas venganza” apenas un día después de la derrota del Frente para la Victoria, vale confirmar el regreso de la naturalización del discurso de los ‘dos demonios’ y de una lengua de pacificación que escamotea la continuación de la guerra sobre los cuerpos y la del propio campo de la política [2].

Están las cartas echadas y los cromos de pie para hacernos una idea de la nueva escena post-Kirchner. En efecto, esta podría ser un espejismo del kirchnerismo, aunque aun está por verse si el macrismo está en interesado o no en colonizar las reductos estatales del kirchnerismo o aplicar a la menemista, una serie de shocks sin anestesia. Esto es, solo el tiempo dirá si la ‘nueva derecha’ se constituye como tal y si el macrismo logra navegar gradualmente sobre la estatalidad y la reestructuración económica distanciándose de las formas compulsivas que caracterizaron a las derechas neoliberales de los noventa en la región; o si, por el contrario, la nueva derecha será capaz de emprender el incierto camino hacia el “cambio” aprendiendo de sus enemigo y de una larga derrota que ha durado más de una década. El mismo lema de “cambiemos” instala y apropia el horizonte progresista en una nueva jerga de la ciudadanía votante [3]. Si bien no hay elementos contundentes para afirmar uno de los dos derroteros para la derecha, si partimos de la hipótesis de la supervivencia de la cultura del consumo al interior de la era “posnacional”, como la ha designado el historiador Pablo Hupert, entonces es muy probable que la acomodación hacia una postura de nueva derecha no sea un proyecto tan arduo ni voluntarista de construir como parece.

La inclusión por el consumo y la revitalización de un neoliberalismo de baja intensidad – que se repliega y organiza a varios niveles, en la esfera laboral informal, tal y como lo ha estudiado Veronica Gago en La razón neoliberal (Tinta Limón, 2015) – sumado a la devaluación internacional de los precios de los commodities que signa el límite de la matriz de acumulación para la expansión democrática, sería consistente con una agenda de esa new right investida en clausurar el esquema de la gran política en cuanto antagonismo social y reformulación de grandes preguntas triangulantes (entrecruzamientos entre Estado, cultura, subjetividad, símbolos, y retórica). No es casual que el globo amarillo sea el símbolo de PRO, si nos esforzamos a leer en ese signo el pasaje del viejo nacionalismo culto de las banderas fascistas, a una simbología más light, donde el carnaval (notable topos de la cultura de masas) es apropiado por nuevos insumos colectivos sin aquel viejo identitarismo ocultista que sabiamente había estudiado Furio Jesi y que ahora se parecieran estar a la altura cultural del hombre común [4]. El insigne globo macrista es consistente con la esferología contemporánea de la globalización, tan animado como las propias mercancías que circulan por cada urbe. Como en las escalofriantes masas carnavalescas de los relatos anti-peronistas de Rodolfo Wilcock, el macrismo es la perversión de lo nacional-popular, aunque sin el matiz grotesco que caracterizó tradicionalmente al fascismo.

Lo que llama la atención de la novedad macrista es que reinstala ese ‘salgan todos que ahora entramos nosotros’ que apunta no solo al tan discutido ‘continuismo peronista’ de parte del FpV, sino a otro problema de fondo, tal vez un poco menos referido: el presidencialismo hegemónico. No es que Macri sea en este sentido una réplica de Kirchner, sino que ambos se cobijan sobre una misma estructura. A la apuesta de los movimientos sociales no estaría mal suplementarle el tema de la democratización del presidencialismo desde arriba, como pedía Eugenio Zaffaroni recientemente [5]. Una democratización al presidencialismo de facto funcionaría como bastidor en momentos transicionales e incluso como resguardo de los errores del gobierno de turno y sus timonazos inequívocos. Esta es la vieja tensión entre ruptura y conservación en los precarios modelos democráticos latinoamericanos, así como la pregunta que coloca en el centro la posibilidad de la democracia real en América Latina por fuera del ropaje republicano del institucionalismo de derecha (conservacionismo tradicional) y de las “transiciones” (y con lo mismo estoy diciendo una interrupción del orden que siempre ha sido interrumpido, esto es, un orden de excepcionalidad soberana).

Es aquí también donde se impone el dilema del constitucionalismo y la necesidad de su reforma. Buena parte del éxito de gobiernos de la Marea Rosada (particularmente los de Ecuador y Bolivia), se deben a procesos constituyentes capaces de reinscribir constitucionalmente la extensión de derechos plurinacionales o no-humanos al interior del Estado. Está es una tarea que excede la matriz funcionalista del derecho y que profundiza sobre sus condiciones operativas. Es por esta razón que el repetido reclamo ilustrado ‘anti-corrupción’ o ‘legalista’ corre el riesgo de perder de vista la insuficiencia del derecho como organismo imparcial (‘qué no me venga a decir Habermas sentado en una oficina en Alemania que la constitución y la ley es el canal de solución’, escribe Spivak en su reciente Nationalism and the imagination). Tal vez por estar inscrita en la tradición republicana y muy ausente de los modelos de gobernabilidad latinoamericanos, la pregunta constitucionalista, sin embargo, siempre acaba siendo menoscabada o relegada a la opción populista. Es difícil incluso imaginar que significaría un nuevo republicanismo para el debate de la política latinoamericana de cara al agotamiento del ciclo progresista sin repetir esta doble estructuración.

Éste sería un republicanismo como crítica efectiva de eso que el sociólogo boliviano Luis Tapia ha llamado, justamente, la tiranía del derecho. Por eso no estaría mal comenzar a pensarlo no solo en línea con la eventualidad del macrismo, sino como debate crítico sobre el populismo, cuya interpretación de la instucionalidad (como ha observado recientemente José Luis Villacañas) aparejado de su silencio sobre la esfera del derecho (la soberanía) pareciera ser unas de las patas flojas de la teoría de significación equivalencial de Ernesto Laclau [6].

Si el anti-institucionalismo depende de la estructuración (identitaria) de la equivalencia, ¿por qué no pensar y hacerse cargo desde el pensamiento de un republicanismo institucional de la inequvialencia? Traídos al presente, ¿no querrían populistas y neoliberales esa misma flexibilidad institucionalidad para un voluntarismo político cuya fórmula redonda es el anti-institucionalismo de la hegemonía? Es en este punto donde hegemonía equivale a soberanía excepcional de la razón transicional del poder. Las nuevas derechas – y el macrismo como encarnación inmediata – pudiera tomar este camino, sin que esto suponga un retroceso necesario hacia el “mínimo Estado” que caracterizaron a las derechas tipo Sánchez de Lozada, Vargas Llosa, o Fujimori a finales de la pasada centuria [7]. Y esto no implicaría, en modo alguno, la expansión del horizonte democrático, sino todo lo contrario. Será interesante seguir la metamorfosis del macrismo en los próximos meses, pero desde ya pareciera más fascinante pensar un institucionalismo por fuera de la equivalencia del populismo, así como del liberalismo criollo históricamente excluyente y subalternizante.

Notas

Ver la columna de Alejandro Horowicz. “Los precios de la derrota”. http://tiempo.infonews.com/nota/197116/los-precios-de-la-derrota

“No mas venganza”. Editorial del 23 de Noviembre. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1847930-no-mas-venganza

La pérdida de horizonte por parte de la izquierda es tal que pareciera que solo la derecha la que puede hoy enunciar o apenas trazar un plan de la utopía. Esto se comprueba con el hecho que buena parte de los gobiernos de la Marea Rosada en estos tiempos ha estado anclada en lo que Fernando Coronil llamó en uno de sus últimos ensayos una nueva teleología nacional como índice de legitimidad. Ver, “The future in question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)”.

Furio Jesi. Cultura de derechas. Barcelona: Muchnik, 1989.

Eugenio Zaffaroni.” El derecho latinoamericano en la fase superior del colonialismo”. Passagens, Mayo-Agosto, 2014.

José Luis Villacañas. Populismo. Madrid: La Huerta Grande Editorial, 2015.

Veronica Giordano. “¿Qué hay de nuevo en las «nuevas derechas»? Nueva Sociedad, Noviembre-Diciembre de 2014.

Infrapolitical Deconstruction (and Other Issues Related and Unrelated.)

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