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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We could start by assuming that Jacques Derrida´s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (1971) is boring, and laboriously says many things we have come to understand and accept long ago. So it is a text that has grown performatively boring over the years. It is no longer possible, perhaps, to understand its novelty, what could have made it exciting in the first place, and this is the mark of its own success.   So be it.

But is there something in it that might still be properly productive, that might still speak in a defamiliarizing way, that might still incorporate metaphors in action, that may be itself more than white mythology?

The difference between “metaphors in action” and “metaphors that have been effaced” is traced back to Hegel as its more explicit provider: “the movement of metaphorization (the origin and then the effacing of the metaphor, the passing from a proper sensible meaning to a proper spiritual meaning through a figurative detour) is nothing but a movement of idealization. And it is covered by the master category of dialectical idealism, namely sublation (Aufhebung), that is, that memory which produces signs and interiorizes them (Erinnerung) by raising up, suppressing and conserving sensible exteriority” (25).   Derrida says that this procedure describes “the possibility of metaphysics,” since the schema just mentioned will resolve the opposition “between nature and spirit, nature and history, or nature and freedom, an opposition genealogically linked to that between physis and its opposites, and at the same time to that between the sensible and the spiritual, the sensible and the intelligible, the sensible and sense itself” (25).

In a footnote to that passage Derrida says that it “explains Heidegger’s distrust of the concept of metaphor,” and quotes Der Satz vom Grund: “Once the distinction between the sensible and the non-sensible is recognized to be inadequate, metaphysics loses its authoritative role as a mode of thought . . . The metaphorical exists only within the boundaries of metaphysics” (25-26, n. 22).

This is perhaps the general, not so explicit framing of the essay.   If it is a matter of dwelling within the end of metaphysics, what are we to do of metaphor?   Let us take an objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung, as it resolves too much, at great cost, and we are no longer willingly paying the cost.   Then what?   If the metaphorical exists only within the boundaries of metaphysics, can we afford to step out of metaphor? Can we abjure metaphor? Can we demetaphorize terminally?   Would that be our only way of dissolving “this sleep of philosophy”? (29)

It is not until many pages later, in Section V of the essay, that the question gets picked up again, at first under a rhetorical question (we can see from the beginning that the answer is going to be “well, no, forget it”): “Might we not dream . . . of some meta-philosophy, of a more general level of discourse which would still be of a philosophical kind, on ‘primary’ metaphors which open up philosophy?” (61).

The question comes up whether there is necessarily a metaphysical destination of all metaphorology—“the same physis, the same sense (sense of being as presence or, what comes to the same, as presence or absence), the same circle, the same fire of the same light that is manifest or hidden, the same turning of the sun” (68). Well, yes, take Descartes. The tenor of his onto-theology will always return to “the circle of the heliotrope” (69), the dominant metaphor, lumen naturale in his case: “a presence disappearing in its own radiance, a hidden source of light, of truth and of meaning, an obliteration of the face of being—such would be the insistent return of that which subjects metaphysics to metaphor” (70).

And yet sublation occurs, and sublation is the final taming of metaphor, its effacement. “Metaphor is included within metaphysics as that which should penetrate to the horizon or to the depths of the proper, and in the end there regain the origin of its truth. The turning of the sun is then seen as a reflecting circle, returning to itself with no loss of sense, no irreversible expenditure” (71): “This end of metaphor is not understood as a death or dislocation, but as an interiorizing anamnesis, a recollection of meaning, a sublation of living metaphoricality into a living property” (72).

But there is another end of metaphor. Derrida is very brief about it.   It says of it that, in contrast with the previous end, in which “the death of philosophy is the death of a particular philosophical form in which philosophy itself is reflected on and summed up and in which philosophy, reaching its fulfillment, comes face to face with itself” (74), in this second end there is “the death of a philosophy which does not see itself die” (74).

If the first end is associated to Plato or Hegel, the second one is associated to Nietzsche or Bataille.   To their different “heliotropes” (74).   Something breaks down in the second one: “Self-destruction here still has the form of generalization, but in this case it is not a matter of extending and confirming a philosophical notion, but rather of deploying it in such a way, without limit, that the borders of what is proper for it are torn from it; consequently the reassuring dichotomy between the metaphorical and the proper is exploded” (74).

The explosion of the heliotrope—it is hard to see it as a goal of philosophy. It happens when a philosophy “does not see itself die,” Derrida says little else. It is the other end of metaphor in philosophy, the one that will not be sublated into heliotropic reconciliation.

I wonder whether the enterprise of demetaphorization, understood as the attempt to push past metaphor in metaphysics, impossible and unfinishable, ceaseless and necessary as it may be, can only cor-respond to the darker heliotropic activity.   There is no demetaphorizing the circle of the first heliotrope. It would be a waste of time.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0006.013?view=text;rgn=main

Comments Welcome:

Hispanic Studies 640-400: History of Ideas in the Hispanic World. Thinking Infrapolitics: Martínez Marzoa, Sánchez Ferlosio, García Calvo.

Instructor: Alberto Moreiras

Office: 204A Academic Building

Email: moreiras@tamu.edu

Term: Spring 2015

Meeting Days: Wednesdays 5:45-8:35.

Seminar Room: ACAD 224

Office Hours: Wednesdays 2:00-4:00, or by appointment.

Description and Learning Outcomes

The Infrapolitical Deconstruction project, which some of us both at Texas A&M Hispanic Studies and in the field at large launched in the early Spring of 2014, is advancing through social network conversations, blogs, and publication projects.   This seminar, the second one in a projected series, attempts to contribute to it by thematizing the work of three of the most significant Spanish thinkers of the second half of the 20^th century (and into the 21^st): the writer and essayist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, the professor of classical philology, playwright, and committed anarchist Agustín García Calvo, and the Galician philosopher, now retired from the University of Barcelona, Felipe Martínez Marzoa.   This seminar, which does not presuppose knowledge of texts or discussions covered in the previous seminar, will attempt an in-depth familiarization with these thinkers’ main topics of engagement.   The overarching theoretical project for the seminar will be a consideration of the three thinkers’ position vis-à-vis the so-called Principle of General Equivalence at the ontological and political level.   If the Principle of General Equivalence can be said to constitute the most radical ontological foundation of modernity, having come to be understood as a supplement-substitution for the Hegelian dialectics of Absolute Spirit or the Nietzschean Will-To-Power, then it is important to understand how these three thinkers relate to it, and whether they do so from an interior or a destructive position.   Hence, the second overarching question: are these three thinkers engaged in a preparatory thinking for what we could call, following a Heideggerian notion, an Other Beginning of thought?   The questions are large, and we can only hope to embark on their path.   The path is, nevertheless, significant both for contemporary thought and for an understanding of any possible “philosophy of the future.”

Learning outcomes for this seminar are the following: 1) To obtain a contextual understanding of the position of the three thinkers in question within the field of contemporary post-metaphysical thought; 2) To become as familiar as possible with their written work and topics of engagement; 3) To produce significant interventions at a hermeneutic level.   This seminar means to foster publishable work from the students in the context of the ongoing preparation of a monographic journal issue or issues.

Suggested Reading

The oeuvres of the three thinkers under study are vast, and we cannot read it all. Whatever segments of their work we choose to read will inevitably imply some degree of arbitrariness. My proposal is that we take the following list of suggested readings as mere suggestions.   Our discussions will often center on them, after appropriate presentations, but our seminar encourages students’s initiatives for alternative readings and seminar presentations, which should be discussed with the instructor beforehand if they are to be offered as substitutes for suggested readings (no need for consultation if additional readings are above and beyond suggested readings.) We will initiate the seminar with some work by others that should help set the context. NOTE: for Beistegui, Schürmann, Malabou, students will be asked to read only one of them, not all three. The following list follows an approximate order of class discussion:

-Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima. The Equivalence of Catastrophes. Charlotte Mandel transl. New York: Fordham, 2015.

-Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy. Joan Stambaugh transl.   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973.

-Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy. Christine-Marie Gross and Reiner Schürmann transl.   Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

-De Beistegui, Miguel. The New Heidegger. London: Continuum, 2005.

-Cathérine Malabou, The Heidegger Change. On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Peter Skafish transl. Albany: SUNY P, 2011.

-Arturo Leyte, Heidegger. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005.

-Felipe Martínez Marzoa, Heidegger y su tiempo. Madrid: Akal, 1999.

—. Ser y diálogo. Lectura de Platón. Madrid: Istmo, 1996.

—. Filosofía de El Capital, de Marx. Madrid: Taurus, 1983.

-Agustín García Calvo, Sermón de ser y no ser. Madrid: Visor, 1977.

—. Lecturas presocráticas. Madrid: Lucina, 1981.

—. Contra el tiempo. Zamora: Lucina, 1993.

-Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, Vendrán años más malos y nos harán más ciegos. Barcelona: Destino, 1993.

—. Mientras no cambien los dioses, nada habrá cambiado. Barcelona: Destino, 2002.

—. El alma y la vergüenza. Barcelona: Destino, 2000.

Grading Policy

Seminar participation is expected to be ongoing, and based on seminar readings as well as other pertinent readings you may want to bring to bear on course discussions.   You will have a choice between submitting a final paper not to exceed 20 typewritten and double-spaced pages (which must include secondary bibliography consisting of at least ten sources), or producing during the semester three review essays of books authored by the thinkers under study of around 8 typewritten and double-spaced pages each (which must also include secondary bibliography).

Participation: 10%

Final Paper or Three Reviews: 85%

Attendance Policy

The student is granted the right to two unexcused absences. More than two unexcused absences will affect the participation grade in the class at the rate of 3% per missed seminar meeting. More than five unexcused absences will be reported to the Hispanic Studies Director of Graduate Studies for advice on an adequate course of action.

Syllabus

Weeks 1 to 3. Introduction.   Discussion of Nancy, After Fukushima; Heidegger, The End of Philosophy.

Week 4-5: Student Presentations: Beistegui, Schürmann, Malabou.

Week 6-7:  Leyte, Heidegger; Martínez Marzoa, Heidegger.

Week 8-9: Martínez Marzoa, Filosofía de El Capital; Ser y diálogo.

Week 10-11: García Calvo, Sermón; Lecturas presocráticas; Contra el tiempo.

Week 12-14:  Sánchez Ferlosio, Vendrán años; Mientras no cambien; El alma.

Summary Discussion.

NOTE: Given instructor’s professional travel commitments, one or two seminar meetings may need to be rescheduled.

Grading Scale

A: 90-100

B: 80-89

C: 70-79

D: 60-69

F: Below 60

American With Disabilities Act (ADA)

The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal anti-discrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities. If you believe you have a disability requiring an accommodation, please contact Disability Services in Cain Hall, Room B118, or call 845 1637. For additional information visit http://disability.tamu.edu

Academic Integrity

“An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.”

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             Los dos textos que incluye este libro (2014), a saber, “Avouer—l’ impossible. ‘Retours,’ repentir et réconciliation” y “Abraham, l’autre,” son conferencias respectivamente de 1998 y 2000.  El breve prólogo de Jean-Luc Nancy advierte de dos asuntos no triviales.  El primero es la importancia que tuvo para Derrida no ceder a la pretensión de un destino exclusivamente “griego” en su pensar (10), con todo lo que ello implica en su dimensión historial.  El segundo es no aceptar la herencia judía como pretexto para la auto-asimilación subjetiva:  “Rehusó . . . dejarse identificar con ninguna especie de consenso, pertenencia o certidumbre adquirida” (12).

          El envés de rehusarse a la identificación es rehusar la desidentificación.  Lo que queda es el marranismo como figura existencial radical, que emerge por ejemplo en “Abraham” como conciencia intensificada (“juego seriamente y más y más con la figura del marrano” [89]) a propósito de una “ley de apariencia antinómica:” “cuanto menos te muestres judío, más y mejor lo serás” (88, 89).   Pero, en un segundo rizo argumental, conviene complicar tal argumento.  Así, si bien Derrida admite que el rechazo a todo dogmatismo de lugar o de vínculo, a toda pertenencia, crea en su vacío “una responsabilidad sin límite, es decir, hiperética, hiperpolítica, hiperfilosófica” (89), también admite que hay en esa oscilación la posibilidad de una ejemplaridad no buscada, un nuevo recurso a la elección en cuanto tal susceptible de complacencia narcisista del que también es necesario librarse.  

Poner el marranismo bajo tacha, en cuanto posible síntoma de una nueva pretensión de elección, arruina a mi juicio la hipérbole de responsabilidad—lo que hasta ese momento podía ser percibido más o menos heroicamente como llamada hiperética, hiperpolítica, e hiperfilosófica muta en infraética, infrapolítica, infrafilosofía.   Derrida no alcanza a decir esto último, para no recaer en el juego del heroísmo antiheroico, pero lo podemos decir por él.  Y no es trivial, pues para Derrida, en reflexión autográfica, se cifra en ello la pulsión deconstructiva:  “a veces me pregunto si el desciframiento del síntoma antisemita y de todo el sistema de connotaciones que lo acompaña indisociablemente no es el primer corpus que yo aprendí a interpretar, como si no supiera leer, y otros dirían ‘deconstruir,’ más que para haber aprendido desde el principio a leer, es decir, a deconstruir el antisemitismo.  Pero el mismo sufrimiento y la misma compulsión a descifrar el síntoma me alertaron también paradójica y simultáneamente contra la comunidad y el comunitarismo en general, comenzando por la solidaridad reactiva, también fusional y a veces no menos gregaria de lo que constituía mi medio judío” (92). 

            El “oscuro sentimiento” (92) de doble exclusión, es decir, de “pertenencia interrumpida o contrariada por ambos lados” (92), es presentado por Derrida como el inicio de “un tipo de filosofía política que comenzó desde entonces a elaborarse salvajemente en [él]” (92).   Este pensamiento salvaje y contracomunitario, salvaje en cuanto contracomunitario, milita por lo tanto contra toda noción de ejemplaridad, contra toda noción de elección, ante las que no cabe sino mantener una posición de retirada (94).   Pero las cosas han de complicarse todavía un poco más. 

            En “Avouer” Derrida cuenta que, si bien la única posibilidad de pertenencia a un “vivir en común” o “vivir juntos” que encontraba soportable de niño o adolescente pasaba por el rechazo de toda pertenencia identitaria, empezó a pensar que en tal separación podría darse el caso de que fuera “más fiel a una cierta vocación judía, hasta el riesgo de quedar como el único y el último de los judíos” (37):  tal sería la autoadscripción a un marranismo “paradójico que corría el riesgo de perder hasta la cultura de su secreto y el secreto de su cultura” (37); a no ser que tal marranismo paradójico pudiera ser domado hacia cierta ejemplaridad post- o pre-griega, en todo caso ya no griega. 

            En la meditación que antecede a propósito del vivir-en-común o vivre ensemble Derrida acababa de hablar de un elemento “impensable, cercano a la imposibilidad” (35) que trasciende los categoremas fundamentales de la conceptualización griega del vínculo social, determinados por las oposiciones physis/nomos, physis/thesis.   Hay un exceso “respecto de las leyes de la naturaleza tanto como respecto de las leyes de la cultura” (34) que condiciona toda posibilidad de un buen vivir común, pero es casi impensable y casi imposible.   Desde lo griego, sin embargo:  “¿Es que un ‘declararse judío,’ bajo cualquier modo que sea (y hay tantos), puede dar un acceso privilegiado a esta justicia, a esta ley por encima de las leyes?” (35).    Es esto lo que, tras la misma invocación autográfica de su experiencia adolescente de discriminación en Argelia que hemos visto en “Abraham,” aparece como “el respeto al extraño,” rasgo fundamental de la cultura judía aquí invocado a través del Emmanuel Levinas del “Envers autrui” (Cuatro lecciones talmúdicas):   “El respeto al extraño, dice, y la santificación del nombre del Eterno forman una rara igualdad.  Y todo el resto es letra muerta.  Todo el resto es literatura . . .  La imagen de Dios está mejor respetada en el derecho dado al extraño que en los símbolos.  El universalismo . . . hace estallar la letra, pues dormía, explosivo, en la letra” (Levinas, citado por Derrida, 38).

            Derrida reivindica aquí un compromiso con lo que podría nombrarse y se nombra, si bien con caveat, “la esencia del judaísmo” (41).   Habría para Derrida una “compasión de justicia y de equidad” que él “reivindicaría, si no como la esencia del judaísmo, al menos como lo que en mí resta inseparable de la memoria sufriente y desarmada del niño judío, allí donde aprendió a nombrar la justicia y aquello que en la justicia a la vez excede y reclama el derecho” (41).    Algo viene o adviene, y puede ser o no algo que llega desde la esencia del judaísmo, o bien desde una situación contextual, histórica, temporal, precisa.   Pero ese algo no es cualquier cosa, no es en sí situacional, contextual, sino que guarda un imperativo al que Derrida no duda en llamar “mandamiento,” commandement (16)–¿se trata por lo tanto de un mandamiento universal y universalizable, un mandamiento para todos y cada uno, o es su escucha, su llamada, audible sólo por el niño judío, el electo en cuanto excluido, el electo que pertenece en y a través de su misma no pertenencia?

            Esta noción de mandamiento, que Derrida vincula a un “primer” mandamiento vinculado a la confesión, un primer mandamiento de confesión (10), y que obliga a la confesión de algo inconfesable (pues para Derrida no hay sino confesión de lo inconfesable, como no hay perdón sino de lo imperdonable), está necesariamente vinculado a una cierta noción de Dios, que es una de las dos “apelaciones,” palabras “que no son ni comunes ni propias”—la otra es “Judío”—de las que dice Derrida que le sobrevinieron inmemorialmente, y con respecto de cuya llegada hay “amnesia inquieta” (83).  Si de lo judío puede decir Derrida que hubo de guardarse siempre, mediante un “silencio obstinado” que era también guardia, cuidado, salvaguardia (77), como si, y esto resume para Derrida “el tormento de [su] vida” (78), necesitara guardarse del judaísmo “para guardar en [sí] algo que provisionalmente llam[a] judeidad” (78), no hay razón clara para no suponer que lo mismo podria decir de Dios.  Dios y lo judío actúan en Derrida como sus secretos, los que debe guardar para que le guarden, pero de forma incierta o indecidible: “una llamada digna de este nombre, una llamada del nombre digno de este nombre no debe dar lugar a certeza alguna, del lado del destinatario.  De lo contrario no es una llamada” (79). 

            La parábola de Franz Kafka sobre Abraham, con la que Derrida empieza y termina su “Abraham,” refiere a un cierto “otro Abraham” soñado por Kafka, un Abraham incierto e inseguro de haber oído bien, pensando que es posible que la llamada hubiera sido para otro, un mero malentendido, un trastorno del oído que no permite certeza alguna: ¿he sido yo el llamado?  ¿O fue otro, y arriesgo todo en responder?  ¿U oí, quizás, mal, y nadie llamó a nadie?  “Este otro Abraham estaba listo, él, a responder a la llamada o a la prueba de elección, pero no estaba seguro de haber sido, él, llamado” (70).   La parábola de Kafka, al centrarse en el otro Abraham, arruina su ejemplaridad de electo, al suspender la elección misma—crea “electos sin elección” (62) en la proliferación de un posible, incierto “malentendido originario” (125).  “Es posible que no haya sido llamado, yo, e incluso no está excluido que ninguno, ningún Uno, haya jamás llamado a ningún Uno, ningún único” (125).  ¿Será esta, más allá de ejemplaridad alguna, será esta ejemplaridad tachada, trágica o ridícula, “el pensamiento judío más amenazado pero también el más vertiginosa, últimamente judío” (126)?   En cualquier caso, concluye Derrida, “el más judío” es también “más que judío,” “otramente judío,” y “otro que judío” (126), de entrada porque “la posibilidad de un malentendido originario en la destinación no es un mal, es la estructura, quizá la vocación misma de toda llamada digna de ese nombre, de toda nominación, de toda respuesta y de toda responsabilidad” (125).   Y esto ya no es “griego.”

            Hay marranismo paradójico en esa incertidumbre respecto de la llamada, pero está cruzado por su imposibilidad ejemplarizante—si hay elegidos, lo son sin elección, y si hay elección no hay elegidos.   Hay una amnesia inquieta con respecto de la apelación que introduce la mayor disimetría, la falta radical de reciprocidad, la deuda tan infinita como improbable.   Toda experiencia de herencia es “oscura e incierta” (123), espectral, igual que toda promesa mesiánica lo es.   Ese borramiento de fundamento de toda decisión es, por un lado, “la condición para liberarse de todo dogma de la revelación y de la elección” pero, por otro, tal liberación “puede ser interpretada como el contenido mismo de la revelación o de la elección, su misma idea” (123).   Hay una fe “más vieja que todas las religiones” (65) igual que hay un marranismo paradójico (paradójico porque el marranismo arriesga en su secreto la pérdida de su secreto), pero esa fe o ese marranismo no le pertenecen al niño judío de Argelia, o a su versión adulta, sino que los tiene todo el mundo, y no puede no tenerlos.  Sólo cabe negarlos.  Tal negación es marca identitaria. 

            ¿Y el mandamiento?   ¿No es el mandamiento principial la suspensión cabal de toda incertidumbre, la plena asunción de una herencia, el quebrantamiento de la espectralidad mesiánica a favor de un contenido sustancial?   Excepto que el mandamiento derrideano, cuya forma es la de una confesión de lo inconfesable, abandona su principialidad al manifestarse como obligación aporética, forzando a una decisión en el vacío de fundamento, en la indecidibilidad misma.   Su figura es la ficción kierkegaardiana de un Abraham que le pide perdón a Dios “no por haber fallado en su deber absoluto hacia Dios, más bien por haber sido tentado de obedecerlo absoluta y ciegamente, y así de haber preferido su deber incondicional a la vida de los suyos, a su hijo preferido” (62-63).    El elegido sin elección—uno, cualquiera–debe siempre “inventar la regla” para la acción (62), en moralismo salvaje, en ejercicio infrapolítico. 

Tras el extenso y acertado comentario de Alberto Moreiras sobre el opúsculo de Heidegger, se me ocurre resaltar un aspecto quizá inadvertido en general:

En el escrito se vinculan de modo no explícito dos significados o nociones tradicionalmente opuestas, como las de verdad y libertad. La primera, colonizada para la esfera del conocimiento y la ciencia, propia de la razón teórica (según la di-visión kantiana); la segunda, fundamento inmediato de la acción, principio de la voluntad, propia de la razón práctica. En cierto modo, siguiendo la tradición kantiana, se trata del nombre de los dos paradigmas irreconciliables que Heidegger, sin embargo, sin llegar a identificar, vincula ontológicamente o, incluso de modo más potente, los vincula más allá de toda ontología, precisamente porque alcanza más allá de la razón teórica y la razón práctica (responsabilidad de una ontología previa que en un momento se llamó “ontología fundamental”, pero a la que ya no conviene ni siquiera ese título y ni siquiera el de “ontología”). Bien es cierto que ese más allá es en Kant un más acá, pues remite a esa función previa a la sensibilidad y al entendimiento (entendimiento que vale como fundamento idealista de la libertad en su versión fichteana y, por lo tanto, de la razón práctica); función previa en definitiva a la razón teórica y la razón práctica. Se trata, naturalmente, de la imaginación trascendental.
Se podría preguntar si Heidegger no está reiterando el papel de esa imaginación trascendental, pero al margen de la subjetividad, como si retomara el juego y la función de la imaginación más allá de su posición como facultad del conocimiento, es decir, como puro juego del ser (“dejar ser…”). Considerado desde el paradigma kantiano, Heidegger se habría adentrado en esa oscura función más allá de sensibilidad y entendimiento, justo donde tiene lugar esa extraña y misteriosa conjunción – en términos kantianos – del tiempo y las categorías (en un lenguaje más coloquial, se podría decir que ese es el horno donde se cuecen los conceptos, que precisamente por cocerse en ese horno, tienen una constitución temporal, naturalmente en el sentido de la Zeitlichkeit y no de la Temporalität). Ya no se trata, en definitiva, como bien recoge la nota de Alberto remedando a Heidegger, de la esencia de la verdad, sino de la verdad de la esencia, es decir, de la verdad del ser o, más allá todavía, de una verdad que solo puede consistir en ser (= el interno intercambio o diferencia entre encubrir y descubrir – o como se los quiera llamar), en cierto modo, en ser-diferencia. ¿Hay, así pues, diferencia entre verdad y ser o, más bien, verdad es lo mismo que ser, o sea, diferencia? Desde esta perspectiva tiene sentido esa primera determinación de la esencia de la verdad como libertad, que no quiere decir otra cosa que el único comportamiento posible (en el original, ese “comportamiento” se dice “Verhalten”) es justamente la posibilidad de establecer relaciones (a saber, en el original, “Verhältnis”), pero sin regla anterior. Por así decirlo, la regla consistiría justamente en el exclusivo manifestarse de la relación; una relación, en primer lugar, entre sujeto y predicado: lejos de que en la proposición a un sujeto le convenga lógicamente un predicado, esa relación es verdadera solo fenomenológicamente, o lo que es lo mismo, según su manifestarse, que también podría haber sido de otra manera (pues no hay regla, o sea necesidad, previa, de modo que la relación sujeto y predicado no viene prescrita). Si de la lógica está excluido el error –justamente porque la lógica se pone por encima y al margen de la libertad, del ser –, éste forma parte constitutiva de lo fenomenológico, al punto de que esto mismo dejaría de tener sentido sin su “ontológica” vinculación al error. Lo que llamamos “verdad lógica” no dejaría de ser también un hallazgo fenomenológico – en todo caso una producción – al que le atribuimos el carácter de necesario eliminando el factor fenomenológico, es decir, el manifestarse.
Pienso que la diferencia “lógica/fenomenológica” viene jugando un papel decisivo desde Ser y tiempo en adelante, de modo que una forma de entender el opúsculo del que hablamos (“Sobre la esencia de la verdad”), expresado más escolarmente, pasaría por traducir o retrotraer ese independizado y soberano valor lógico a su constitución (no fundamento) fenomenológica, de manera que lo menos importante de eso fenomenológico es que fuera la señal distintiva de una escuela, corriente de pensamiento o teoría, como lo es la Fenomenología. En cierto modo, Heidegger no deja de arrancar a ésta de su posición de teoría constituida para iniciar ese “camino de un pensar que en lugar de proporcionar representaciones y conceptos se experimenta y se pone a prueba como transformación de la relación con el ser” (“De la esencia de la verdad”, en Hitos, Madrid 2000, pag. 171, traducción de H. Cortés y A. Leyte).
¿Cómo es un pensar sin conceptos? En esta pregunta se esconde lo más lúcido a lo que apunta Heidegger y, también, lo más peligroso, en definitiva la relación entre arché y an-arché, sugiriéndose que de alguna manera lo primero depende de lo segundo (a la verdad es consustancial el error, casi como su principio – fenomenológico, claro).

Según una interpretación más malévola, se podría decir que Heidegger desactiva el significado político de la libertad, justo cuando la ontologiza radicalmente y la remite al origen (esencia) misma de la verdad. Pero en última instancia, incluso esa perspectiva no tiene que velar la posibilidad, políticamente más rica, de que rescatando esa “libertad” de su enclaustrada posición lógico-política se vislumbra una más potente: ¿esa a la que Alberto se refiere en su nota como “an experience of errancy is infrapolitical”? Pienso que bien puede ser, siempre que no se pierda de vista que “experiencing errancy itself” también se puede caer en una proyección mítica – justamente elevando a categoría el propio errar (o el error como fundamento) – pues no hay posición que se encuentre permanentemente libre de incurrir en la proyección mítica, una proyección de la que ciertamente tendría que cuidarse la infrapolítica. Después de todo, desde la posición de Heidegger, hasta la lógica fue proyectada míticamente a la culminante posición que se define como “la que no resulta de una proyección mítica”. Heidegger no deja de denunciar, como ya anticipó Nietzsche, al concepto como expresión del error, pero se trata de que en ese errar “lo opuesto al concepto” – por cierto, ¿en qué consiste esto? – no reemplace sin más a “la verdad”. El asunto es más complicado y el opúsculo de Heidegger constituye un reto permanente.

Sometimes it is possible to grasp absolutely basic intuitions that unleash a way of thinking, a life of thought. I do believe that we only have one idea in us (because when we relate to one thing we relate to all things), and that some of us choose to make it our business to play with it (it is a bitter play, some times) through the end of our life. Except that, for the most part, we don’t know what the idea is, and we die before we find out. That is just the way it is, it may be rather pathetic, but the important thing, after all, is the fierce fight, the seeking. Sometimes, perhaps by chance, or dubious luck, the idea is expressed–recognizing it as such is another matter. I think what follows is Heidegger’s fundamental experience. I wonder whether we, today, can even understand it: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings–and not nothing. . . . The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before [the being of] beings as such” (“What is Metaphysics?,” in Pathmarks, 90.) I think this quote accounts for all of Heidegger’s thought, including all the stupidities in it. My question here is whether a similar experience can account for infrapolitics—whether infrapolitics is also contained in an experience of anxiety, political anxiety in this case, that produces a withdrawal of, and from, politics (the Heideggerian “wholly repelling gesture,” 90), and interrogates its other side, its nihilating side.   And wants to explicitate what it might be.   And dwell on it. Because it must. No other choice.

The final “Note” that is added to the 1967 edition of the essay in Pathmarks (Wegmarken) (Cambridge UP, 1998; translated by John Sallis) says that in the phrase “the truth of essence” (from which the essence of truth would arise), “remaining still within metaphysical presentation, Beying is thought as the difference that holds sway between Being and beings” (153).   But truth, as fundamental trait of Being, is lichtendes Bergen, or a sheltering that clears.   Heidegger then says that this is the first “saying of a turning” (Sage einer Kehre) within the history of Beying. Beying is concealing withdrawal, or aletheia (154).

The claim Heidegger introduces is that the presentation of Beying as withdrawing concealment, which also means, as errancy, “accomplishes a change in the questioning that belongs to the overcoming of metaphysics” (154).   This means that “every kind of anthropology and all subjectivity of the human being as subject” is left behind and that “the truth of Being” is “sought as the ground of a transformed historical position” (154).   It is a large claim. It is also the claim that the ontico-ontological difference, that is, Seyn, must give way to errancy.   And that errancy is already postmetaphysical thought.  No matter what one thinks of the Heideggerian jargon as such, it is perhaps clear that Heidegger assigns a great deal of importance to this particular manifestation of it.   It needs to be thought out.

So this note is an attempt to grasp the notion of errancy in the essay. Preliminary and inexpert, as it were. And for discussion.  I should say that I intend this as a contribution to a dialogue with Arturo Leyte, with whom I started discussing “On the Essence of Truth” ten days ago, in Gondomar. If, as we in this group have discussed in the past, the destruction of Hegelianism is the destruction of any historical myth, and of mythical history, or history as myth, the infrapolitical insistence on un-mythic politics that we call posthegemony appeals to an errant democracy, that is, to a political space liberated from metaphor.   Errancy might just be the early Heideggerian attempt (only three years after Being and Time) to move tenuously away from a politics of Being, from the overwhelming metaphorization of Being as oblivion—all the more remarkable to the extent that, only a few years later, Heidegger would enter quintaessentially mythical antisemitic and Nazi paths.  It is arguable that Heidegger came to think of a truer than true national-socialism as the only legitimate politics of Being commensurate with the sway of technological calculation in modern times.   Such a move would not be authorized, would rather be preempted by the position taken in this 1930 essay.

There is an openness of comportment, a freedom proper to Dasein that first grants the possibility of truth as letting beings be. This happens in an active sense (that is, not as letting be in the sense of leaving alone). Letting beings be means engaging with beings by and in letting them be, in the form of a withdrawing engagement.   Comportment is therefore a relation with the open region where things, beings, may be let be. The ancient name of that open region is, Heidegger says, ta alethea, the unconcealed.

Dasein’s withdrawing engagement is ek-sistent, it exposes.   Once articulated in language, as the explicit question of philosophy, the question about Being as the unconcealment of beings as such as a whole means the birth of Western history, the beginning of historical time. It is not, however, that Dasein possesses freedom, or history; it is rather that freedom, as ek-sistence, possesses the human being, and holds history.   But this also means that historical human beings can choose, “in letting beings be, also not letting beings be” (146). This untruth is no more a property of the human subject than truth is. Untruth also derives from freedom, from unconcealment, that is, from truth as such.   And it is so “because letting-be always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them” (148).   The attunement, the specific mood of every comportment towards beings, “conceals beings as a whole” (148). “Letting-be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing. In the ek-sistent freedom of Da-sein a concealing of beings as a whole comes to pass” (148).

Concealment is untruth. To the extent that every disclosedness happens, it happens from out of concealment. Untruth is “older than letting be itself” (148).   Heidegger calls this “the mystery” (148).   This mystery is the fact that concealment is what is first concealed, hence that truth happens first of all as untruth.   This untruth, as “the originary non-essence of truth,” points to “the still unexperienced domain of the truth of Being” (149).

Forgetting sets in, as a factical determination of Dasein.   Through forgetting of the untruth of concealment “the mystery leaves historical human beings in the sphere of what is readily available to them, leaves them to their own resources” (149). “The inordinate forgetfulness of humanity persists in securing itself by means of what is readily available and always accessible. This persistence has its unwitting support in that bearing by which Dasein not only ek-sists, but also in-sists, that is, holds fast to what is offered by beings, as if they were open of and in themselves” (150). “Insistent existence” is the name of a life in which the forgotten essence of truth-untruth holds sway.

Erring is the characterization of the life of insistence existence—the German irren refers of course both to errancy and error.   But it doesn’t just happen, it is not optional or accidental.  It belongs in the “inner constitution of the Da-sein” (150).   “The concealing of concealed beings as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy” (150).

There is only one thing to be done, which is key to any possible political projection, and for me a crucial thought for the very possibility of both infrapolitical reflection and posthegemonic democracy, which means, of democratic invention today: “By leading them astray, errancy dominates human beings through and through. But, as leading astray, errancy at the same time contributes to a possibility that humans are capable of drawing up from their ek-sistence—the possibility that, by experiencing errancy itself and by not mistaking the mystery of Da-sein, they not let themselves be led astray” (151).   “Experiencing errancy itself,” that is, as errancy, against every mythical projection, in the nakedness of traumatic awakening—this is the passage to the act in posthegemonic democracy and infrapolitical awareness: the political act that alone decides on the difference. Heidegger—this Heidegger of the 1930 essay—will call it “freedom” (151).

An experience of errancy is infrapolitical—it happens below the threshold. But, as experience, it is sustained into political life, as withdrawing engagement, as letting beings be.  Awakening from errancy must be sustained, as errancy: as the demotic errancy of the one whose only qualification is to know no one qualifies as a subject of/to truth.

(Notes for lecture at University of Saint Andrews, Scotland, November 6, 2009)

[From Life’s Vertigo:]

1. Against Subjectivation.  The thinker Esposito invokes as the first radical proponent of a philosophy of the impersonal is of course Simone Weil, whose work in the 1930’s already rose against the personalist ideology that many segments of the European liberal (and Catholic) intelligentsia were proposing as an alternative to fascism. For Weil the person depends on the collective and right depends on might. From this perspective, for Weil both the category of the person and the notion of rights are complementary factors in what Esposito calls an “immunitary drift” whose end is the protection of privilege against the excluded. Weil looks at the notion of person from the perspective of what it excludes, even as she also looks at rights from the perspective of what they steal. In other words, right is designed to protect the person against the non-person, which is always the non-person that has been defined as such from the very perspective of the right: this is the immunitarian drift.   There can be no “universal right” of the person, since right is the mark of a communitarian privilege which is always had against the community’s outside. The category of the person is for Weil, accordingly, a category of subordination and separation that must be fought through a radical appeal to the impersonal. “What is sacred, far from being the person, is that which, in a human being, is impersonal. All that is impersonal in the human is sacred, and only that” (Weil quoted by Esposito, Terza 124).

The passage to the impersonal: this is Weil’s political demand. It is a passage beyond the I and the we, and therefore a passage into the third person, into the nameless or anonymous. The radically republican question is indeed of a pronominal nature. Is political justice, and also political freedom, to be accomplished through the constitution of a we, or through the passage to the impersonal they? If my freedom is the freedom of all, is all to be encompassed by a first person plural or by a third person plural? Is political freedom a question of community or is political freedom a question of the multitude?  Or neither?

Right around the time that Weil was dealing with these ideas she spent a few months in civil-war Aragon, close to the front. Had she been able to look beyond the trenches, into the other or anti-Republican side, she might have seen a few women with Y’s patched onto their blue shirts. They would have been members of the Sección femenina, the Spanish Falangist organization for women, created and developed by Pilar Primo de Rivera. In Paul Preston’s words:

The symbol of the Sección Femenina was the letter Y, and its principal decoration was a medal forged in the form of a Y, in gold, silver, or red enamel according to the degree of heroism or sacrifice being rewarded. The Y was the first letter of the name of Isabel of Castille, as written in the fifteenth century, and also the first letter of the word yugo (yoke) which was part of the Falangist emblem of the yoke and arrows. With specific connotations of a glorious imperial past and more generalized ones of servitude, as well as of unity, it was a significant choice of symbol. (Preston 129)

So you are a woman, but have subjectivized yourself as a person in an affirmation of love to the Falange. Your choice for the Falange is your personal freedom, but that freedom is, first of all, imperial freedom, as it commits you to a path of domination of others, the non-Falangists; secondarily, it is also imperial freedom to the extent that you sign up for your own domination, for your own servitude.   You choose a collectivity that will not take its eyes away from you. As a member of the Sección Femenina, it was your duty to serve the man, the men of the Fatherland, those fascists that you loved. Is Pilar Primo de Rivera and, with her, all the colleagues who thought up the Y symbol to sum up the free presence of Spanish women in the National Movement giving us the conditions of possibility of all political subjectivation? How does one become a person, politically speaking?

The community of the we is always the Y on your shoulder. The passage to the impersonal is the refusal of the Y. The uncanny choice for the freedom of all, for the freedom of the third person plural, is a choice to be made outside and even against political subjectivation. It is adrift, as it refuses every orientation beyond itself, beyond its own gesture. It embodies no calculation, no teleology, no program. It is rare—rarer than the emergence of the subject itself, which happens every time there is a free choice for community. It stands outside every moralism (as it never seeks personal advantage). It is time to retun the impersonal to the heart of the political. Everywhere we hear definitions of politics that presuppose political subjectivation as the goal. There is no doubt that political subjectivation is ongoing in every political process. But political subjectivation is in every case a function of the history of domination. The passage to the impersonal is the attempt to produce politics as the countercommunitarian history of the neuter.

——-

[Comment on following quotations from On Human Personality—select.]

So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else. 54

the impersonal and the anonymous 55

Two errors: the idolatry of collectivity, and the deceit of personality. Germany and France. 56

the human being can only escape from the collective by raising himself above the personal and entering into the impersonal. The moment he does this, there is something in him, a small portion of his soul, upon which nothing of the collective can get a hold. 57

Every man who has once touched the level of the impersonal is charged with a responsibility towards all human beings; to safeguard, not their persons, but whatever frail potentialities are hidden within them for passing over to the impersonal. 57-58

Forceful critique of rights in 60-61.

Writing in the middle of the Second World War, and writing against Personalism, understood as the most that liberal democracy can provide (against nazism and sovietism, against americanism, etc.)

Against, therefore, the notion of Human Rights, or of the Rights of the Person, staples of liberal democracy.

There is something sacred in every man, but it is not the person. 50

Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry which Christ himself could not restrain, Why am I being hurt?, then there is certainly injustice. 52.

The cry is for the most part silent, inarticulate. Being able to hear it and act on it is the task of democracy. Nothing else. Usually what goes under the task of democracy is directly contrary to it. A politics of privilege, based upon the person, upon the subject, etc.

Affliction is by its nature inarticulate. 65

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. 51

If politics were taken seriously, finding a remedy for this would be one of its more urgent problems. 64

[This is, simply, I think, an absolutely important, novel understanding of the function of democracy, against the liberal paradigm.]

Thought revolts from contemplating affliction. 65

[This is the problem. So a politics to remedy affliction is always already a politics of the impossible. Problem of political theology. Problem of the supernatural.]

There is no fear of its being impossible. 66

In all the crucial problems of human existence the only choice is between supernatural good on the one hand and evil on the other. 66

Subaltern politics. 67

Genius against talent. Two screens: the screen of talent, and the screen of the collective. 68

Neither a personality nor a party is ever responsive either to truth or to affliction. 68

References to Plato’s cave and also to Descartes’s capacity for the infinite, and Levinas. 69.

The only way into truth is through one’s own annhilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation. 70

Only then does one understand affliction. By letting oneself be shattered by it. Affliction as a way to freedom. 70

To be aware of this [the possibility of total loss] in the depth of one’s sould is to experience non-being. It is the state of extreme and total humiliation which is also the condition for passing over into truth. It is a death of the soul. 70-71.

Difficulties of listening to affliction, 71.

Need for grace, 71

Spirit of justice and spirit of truth are one. 72

Connection with beauty 72

Dangerous words, out of a providential arrangement. 76-77

there is no guarantee for democracy, or for the protection of the person against the collectivity, without a disposition of public life relating it to the higher good which is impersonal and unrelated to any political form. 77

Justice, truth and beauty are the image in our world of this impersonal and divine order of the universe. 78

[And then perhaps end with more from “Life’s Vertigo”–select, summarize]

Countercommunity

The significance of Benveniste´s essay on the third person is crucial, to the extent that Benveniste, in Esposito’s interpretation, has given us the grammatical conditions of possibility for the development of a sustained thought of the non-subject as the (logically) only possible thought of alterity: “Notwithstanding all the rhetoric about the other’s excess, in the confrontation between two terms, [alterity] can be conceivable only and always in relationship to the I—its other side and its shadow” (Esposito, Terza 129). If the I, confronting it, depersonalizes the you, it only does so to the extent that it awaits its own depersonalization in the reversal of the positions: the you always responds. The third person breaks away from the relationship between a “subjective person” and a “non-subjective person” by creating the possibility of a non-person: “The ‘third person’ is not a person; it is rather the verbal form that has the function of expressing the non-person” (Benveniste, quoted by Esposito, Terza 131). The third person, beyond the I and the you, always refers to the absence of the subject, even if it can simultaneously refer to potential subjects. It is constitutively impersonal, and it is because of it that it can have a plural: “Only the ‘third person,’ as non-person, admits a true plural” (Benveniste, quoted by Esposito, Terza 132).

It is from this position that a reading of Levinas opens up, not as a thinker of the third person, but rather as the thinker who could not bring himself to the exposition of his own radicality. We are used to thinking of the Levinasian face-to-face as the epitome of Levinas’s philosophical or antiphilosophical position. What Esposito’s reading brings out, accurately, is the fundamental impossibility of the second-person suture in Levinasian thought—something that Levinas himself recognized, of course, and at the same time left undeveloped.   Esposito says that the question of the third person is for Levinas both “the theoretical vortex and the point of internal crisis” of his thought (146).   But, far from neutralizing it into the I-you encounter, Levinas recognizes the very originarity of the face as the trace of a field of signification that breaks every binary relationship: “the beyond from which the face comes is the third person” (Levinas quoted by Esposito, Terza 146). The beyond, which for Levinas means beyond being, also therefore means beyond transcendence, or beside transcendence. But this is the key problem. In the recognition of the third person as the beyond of the face Levinas’s thought opens itself to an unthinkability whose key position at the limit of twentieth-century thought makes it all the more urgent for us.

It is the problem, not of the impersonal, but of the impersonal’s political import: the point or limit at which politics should no longer be thought of as contained in a dialogical structure is also the point at which politics abandons its all-too-human face in favor of a dimension able to affect, beyond and beside the third person and their infinite plurality, what Blanchot came to call the neuter for lack of a better term. Just like language “is spoken where a community between the terms of the relationship is missing” (Levinas quoted by Esposito, Terza 147), a countercommunitarian politics is a politics no longer structured in terms of friendship or enmity, no longer structured in terms of the interhuman relation.   Biopolitics finds its limit in the fallen dialogics of the subject/object relationship: it is the tendential application of technique to life (it is hence a technopolitics, but not the only possible one), for the purposes of an administration of life where life occupies the place of the object.   Biopolitical practice, always modelled on the person’s dispositif, is a practice of the master subject over against an object that constitutes it, and that by constituting it occupies the position of internal interlocutor. If the purpose of biopolitics is to make life, both organic and animal, sing to the tune of the subject, then it should be clear that no positive or affirmative biopolitics—all biopolitics is affirmative, even the Nazi kind: thanatopolitics is never but the dark side of an essential affirmation—will suffice (and this is something that Esposito may not be willing to concede). A radical politics of the third person, hence beyond or beside the person, hence anti-biopolitical, finds its point of departure in Levinas’s problem, his theoretical vortex and his point of crisis, which we can here only gloss following Esposito’s indications. If the other is to command radical priority, there can be no common ground between the I and the you—the face comes up from a region of radical separation, or the you would become just another aspect of the I. The other is not just a fold in a communitarian continuum, but the signal mark of an essential lack of community, and therefore the opening of and to a radical disymmetry. If the subject suffers expropriation in Levinasian thought, it is because the demand of the other presses upon it from a region incommensurate to community.   The experience of the you, when the you is not to be handled according to everyday linguistic convention but comes to us in the form of the face, radically, is then precisely at the same time the experience of that which can never be reduced to a you: an experience of the “third person,” or of what Levinas calls “illeity.”   Sensing the beyond of the face of the other is at the same time encountering the third person. But the third person recedes, and only seems to come in the form of its absence. It marks, in the first Levinas, a negative experience that might be referred to God as the Unreachable. But Levinas will later say: “Proximity is troubled and becomes a problem with the entry of the third” (Levinas quoted by Esposito, Terza 149).   The third is a problem: recession breaks proximity, and proximity can no longer suffice.   What is often ignored by Levinas’s critics is that troubled proximity, and not the ethical relation, is the site of politics, which means that politics is the region that opens up in and through the very impossibility of community, in the rupture of the immediate ethical relation.   It is through the very tension between proximity and its rupture (which is also at the very same time the rapture of proximity), or through the resistance to that tension (as the subject remains hostage to the other), that justice appears as the horizon of the political in the wake of the failure of the ethical relation to constitute itself as closed or unique horizon.   This is what organizes the political as an insurmountable contradiction between the infinite ethical responsibility for the unique other, which introduces a radical limitation in the universality of law, and the equally infinite demand for justice, which is a limitation of ethical responsibility.   Politics is for Levinas, to start with, this unstable field of relation created in virtue of the theoretical vortex that makes justice, as a demand that originates in the troubles of proximity, and ethics, as a demand imposed by the face of the other, equally unconditional. Esposito calls it a conflict between “partiality and equality,” which, he says, reverses “the language of the person . . . into the form of the impersonal” (152). The entry of the impersonal remains a problem because, with it, the subject is liquidated: not even as a hostage can it remain the source of agency. And this is something about which Levinas left but few indications.

Esposito claims that it was Blanchot who made it his business to develop the Levinasian point of crisis into the insight of the neuter, “against the hostility, or at least the incomprehension, of the entire philosophical tradition” (156-57).   Blanchot mentions a “relationship of the third kind” which is precisely the disaster of every dialectics, of every dialogics, as the relationship that interrupts reciprocity and that therefore opens the non-relationship. The neuter is a non-personal alterity for which Blanchot rejects the name of “impersonal” as still insufficient (since “impersonal” is grammatically still dependend on a notion of person). Blanchot is looking for a break of the semantic field that will not allow it to reconfigure itself around the usual categories: being and nothing, presence and absence, internal and external.   The third kind is the kind that enters no kind: and the neuter a word too much, which Esposito will link to the Levinasian notion of the il y a as it was developed in De l’evasion and De l’existence a l’existant. But for Blanchot the neuter is not primarily a site of existential horror; as the inevitable and destined site of existence, it is rather the “extreme possibility” of thought (159). What would be its political manifestation? A politics of the neuter is a politics of the third person in the sense already specified: an impersonal politics of the singular plural, a countercommunitarian politics of the they. Esposito’s contention is that only Foucault and Deleuze were able to advance Blanchot’s project. This is something that Giorgio Agamben has also sustained. As explained above, for Agamben the active category in the program for a philosophy of the future is the category of “life.” Esposito connects the development of the category of life in the later thought of Foucault and Deleuze to a basic Nietzscheanism in both thinkers—to their emphasis on the notion of “force,” which will be linked to an irreducible and untamable outside that is, however, and in virtue of its radical univocity, also our most intimate inside. “What is it that we are—beyond or before our persons—without ever taking possession of? What crosses and works us to the point of turning itself inside out if not life itself?” (168). Power, also constituted by life, and to the extent that it turns itself against the human, never has enough with the person as subject of rights, but must go beyond the person and its end, beyond death therefore, towards the capture of life itself. Life captures itself as power, but at the same time life exceeds itself as force beyond power. This is for Esposito the very possibility of an “affirmative biopolitics” (170) that he identifies with a new possibility of community, beyond the person, “singular and impersonal” (171).   “Life itself . . . constitutes the term on which the totality of the theory of the impersonal seems to be summed up and projected towards a still undetermined configuration, but because of that loaded with unexpressed potentiality” (179). A politics of the neuter is expressed in Esposito through his notion of a politics of impersonal life, even a biopolitics of impersonal life, that must lead, through the tapping of its unexpressed potentiality, not just beyond “the entire conceptual apparatus of modern political philosophy” (179), but towards a new community, impersonal and singular: a community of beatitude which is, finally, the beatitude of the animal, the goal of the Deleuzian “animal belonging” that receives full recognition in the last pages of Esposito’s book.   While fully endorsing Esposito’s deconstructive analysis of the person’s dispositif, I have already expressed my objection in the form of a reserve regarding the possibility of an “affirmative” biopolitics that would finally render the metaphysical separation between homo and persona, which also means, between person and animal, null.   Agamben’s The Open unquestioningly shares many of Esposito’s insights and advances the argument towards a more nuanced understanding of the political task at least at the theoretical level.

[Conclude]