Following up on the comments on Martínez Marzoa below, but also on the discussion of nihilism brought up by Guillermo, I just ran into a quotation (from an essay by Adam Sitze I have my hands on but cannot yet share) that might be useful.   What is at stake is the nihilism, or the developing nihilism, in political modernity starting from Hobbes, say.  For Schmitt the imperial complexio oppositorum had kept things in check throughout the Middle Ages, but the necessary renunciation of the body of Christ as morphogenetic power for the res publica creates a brutally unhappy consciousness.  Now I quote: “The impersonal laws of the State can only produce political form and exercise morphogenetic power in an ungrounded manner, by presupposing the complete separation of Power from the Good.  Indeed, the strength of impersonal law (its principled insistence on the formal equality of all persons before the law) is predicated on a displacement of the morphogenetic power of the complex (a hierarchy centered upon the Person of Christ).  In the absence of a felicitous use of morphogenetic power, the State finds that law alone is insufficient for accomplishing the aims it inherits from the complex, and discovers itself to be in need of supplements for its impersonal law (which is to say, the neutralization of conflict through dispositifs of discipline, govern mentality, and security, but also, if necessary, through the use of military and, later, police forces) at the service of repeated sovereign decisions that reproduce a semblance of the unity and integrity of Roman Catholic visibility and publicity by setting aside the impersonality of law (with its insistence on formal equality) in order to fabricate a public enemy, whose schema can then serve as the point of reference for the formation of the unity and integrity of a newly secular public.  In short, the State achieves the aims bequeathed to it by the complex to the extent that it now includes exclusion.”  The latter is a precarious solution that nevertheless held more or less effectively through the times of the nation-state.  Which is now full of holes at every level.   The deep self-undermining of the political was itself the political though modernity, and it still is, but now without the possibility of a return.

(From “Problemas del Leviatán, in Distancias.)

The importance of this piece, to me, is that it gives us the Hobbesian grounds for the constitution of the modern civitas.   Which infrapolitics no longer recognizes as the final constitution of the political.  If we read it in relation to other texts in Marzoa’s work, Hobbes appears as a founding text for modernity, which means as the specific instantiation of modern nihilism.   But this already means—the constitution of the civitas is premised on an absolute abandonment of the social bond.   There is no bond because nothing is binding. There is only the passionate desire to enjoy a time of peace, which only works if it is universal, that is, if it is assumed by one, and the other, and the next, and the other.   There is only a common interest premised on the absence of any bond.  Moving past this state of affairs is not a matter of reestablishing the bond–the bond, “natural” as it may be, is always already under historical erasure.

If Leviathan phenomenologically generates, that is, if it discovers the civil space, this means that the civil is not derivable: it does not come from something else. It is in fact ab-solute, in the sense that it breaks away from all binds, all bonds. Marzoa uses the term “laicidad” to mention civil belonging—not lay as independent from religious bonds, but lay as independent from any communal belonging.   In that sense it is a space of rupture, first of all rupture from the immediate, since immediately we don’t come up against the citizen, rather against the kid, the mother, the priest, the boss, the officer, or the neighbor.

Marzoa proposes a definition of power that has to do with the ability to become independent from the thing—power is being able to do this or that with the thing, x or its opposite. The being of the thing, faced with this notion of power, is sheer serviceability, disposability.

So power is a form of knowledge, or power/knowledge. It relates to the thing as one calculates strategies. Power/knowledge does not determine ends, only how to get to them. As Hobbes said, reason is at the service of the passions. This is Thesis 1.

But passions are singular, not universally shared. So there are no ends that are universally shared. This is Thesis 2.

That elicits a common interest. We all have an investment in being able to make calculations and develop strategies, which means we have to be able to “count on” a ground that will enable us.   This is the Hobbesian “time of peace.” We need the time of peace, during which we can count on things, and we do not inhabit radical precariousness. This is Thesis 3.

Our common interest is therefore that it is guaranteed that there be guarantees, that is, that something be made stable enough so that, if we fulfill some conditions, x will happen.   This is Thesis 4.

A guarantee can only be produced by an overwhelming force—a material and materially overwhelming force, incommensurable with any other force. This is Thesis 5.

In connection with those Theses, Hobbes will name his “laws of nature:” the first is that we must seek the time of peace. The second is that we limit ourselves to willing whatever is compatible with the general willing.   Of course these two laws are only binding provided that everyone else follows them too, otherwise they are not mandatory. That is, they are only binding if we have the overwhelming force described in Thesis 5.

The constitution of a stable overwhelming force, the sovereign, is the result of a pact that never takes place but has always already taken place. It is always already a pact between one, and the other, and the next, and the other—it is not a pact based on communities or natural bonds, but always a pact between natural persons.   It binds everyone.   All natural persons, auctores, delegate into one artificial person, actor. This actor is the civitas.   The civitas is sovereign, or the sovereign is civitas.

We can’t attempt against the sovereign. Whoever does it, does it in the name of civil war, the dissolution of the time of peace. And civil war is, always and in every case, the result of an appeal to some intrinsic legitimacy that the pact has always already excluded.   The pact is always ab-solute, in other words, it is not dependent on anything, it is not derivable.  The pact has no appeal. It has no outside other than war.

This does not elicit a religious problem.   The pact regarding the civitas is not a pact against God or a pact with God, but the system of obligations it creates is given to us iure divino, gratia Dei, since Jesus, resurrected, has only left with us his absence and his promise.   If anything is to have divine character, it is the civil, “consisting precisely in the absence of any specific manifestation of the divine, because such an absence is what God himself wants” (130).   My Kingdom is Not of This World means that there is no Kingdom until after the end of time, and no Church can coactively impose anything on civil power.   Religion has become a constitutive absence.

 Civil society, or the modern State, couldn’t care less about “intrinsic legitimacy.”    Behavior is not to be judged, or valued, although it can be enforced coactively.   Civil society enforces only one consensus: that there should be no consensus.   There is only one kind of general agreement which is the conditio sine qua non:  “to create and maintain conditions so that one can live not having to agree on anything or to commune with anything” (“Estado y legitimidad,” 88). 

 This seems unreal, Marzoa anticipates.  No State has ever done that.   But one needs to think, again, by finding a point of contrast: say, State against the Church, or the State against any “natural” community.   The function of the State, in Modernity, is to establish “a sphere within which consensus and communion be dissolved and cease being binding” (89).   At that point, when the State maximally reduces resistance to itself, there may come a point when it is seized by a panic attack—and a rush to “seek reconciliation and synthesis with all the other things” (89).   We are not there yet.  Or perhaps we are.  

 So, that sphere is constituted by the renunciation of any valorization—nothing is binding, except the fact that nothing is binding.  That means, nothing is really mine, everything is alienable.   Everyting is exchangeable for something else, including myself.  I am myself alienable, because I am in principle equivalent to anybody else.  This is the principle of general equivalence, which sets every thing as a commodity, since everything has the value of exchange value.   This is the tendential law of civil society: if not everything is exchangeable, then there is no principle of general equivalence.  The principle of general equivalence is overwhelming and dissolves the binding character of every thing.  There are commodities only if everything is a commodity.   (Nothing is exchangeable in principle for anything else if something is not exchangeable for anything else.)

 This of course draws a non-physical objectivity that we could or should call structure.  That structure is civil society: the system of things as commodities.  It simply exists.   Whenever it goes beyond existing into thinking or saying, then it becomes the State, right, or the laws. 

 And the State, right, or the laws have no choice, since they have given up on any valuation of intrinsic legitimacy, and can only seek to enforce coactive power, but to let every one do as they will or would, which does not mean there are no norms, since it is every one, not some yes but not others, that must be able to do as they wish, that is, I must be able to do as I wish provided everyone is able to proceed likewise.   This is a mere logical conclusion from the principle that says that the State moves into no evaluation of intrinsic legitimacy.   The State, right, the laws, are formal protection of the right of every one to do as they wish, provided that right stays in place for every one. 

 Only the common substance, with money as its manifestation as patent means of exchange (but money is only the common substance, the structure of civil society as such), makes it possible.   And money measures and regulates time as exchange.   Money is the general exploitation of time.   And the condition of my own general exchangeability.   [The condition, therefore, of my mobility, also of my freedom.  Which is everyone else’s.   Civil society is the end of masters and slaves, it is the end of history, according to a certain understanding.] 

 And all of this is the warranty of the State’s legitimacy as well as the warranty of any critique of the State.  I can only critique the State in the name of the system of liberties that the State itself institutes—there is no outside, as there are no binding ties that can constitute such an outside.    I can invent them, I can appeal to them, I can claim communities or naturalness—which means I am having a panic attack and seek a reconciliation and synthesis with that which is not given to me. 

 But then?  Marzoa ends with the following words:  “nihility must by all means avoid self-recognition, must constantly fabricate instances from which to benefit, and that is because precisely the recognition of nihility would be the only non-nihilistic [thing, or possibility]” (100).

If so, then the full assumption of nihilism, the full assumption of total distance and total separation, the full assumption of unboundedness—but is that not infrapolitics?   As the hyperbolic condition of democracy? 

Some of us are about to engage in a systematic rereading of the work of Galician philosopher Felipe Martínez Marzoa over the next several months.   The comments that follow are preliminary, just a first take based on the following readings: “Estado y legitimidad” and “Estado y polis,” from Manuel Cruz ed., Los filósofos y la política, Mexico: FCE, 1999; “Problemas del Leviatán,” from FMM, Distancias, Madrid: Abada, 2011 (and some other pages in that book), and FMM, El concepto de lo civil, Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2008.   Our interest is to explore the relevance of Martínez Marzoa’s thought to the project under discussion in this blog—of course the very fact that we are reading him presupposes (our belief in) that relevance, and we must see where it might take us.

Let me start with a casual remark Marzoa makes in the introduction to Concepto. He says: “el proyecto en su propia consistencia como tal no entiende de ubicaciones específicas del tipo de lo que sería por una parte ‘filosofía política’ o quizá ‘filosofía del derecho’ o algún título emparentado y, por otra parte, otras ‘filosofías’” (5). What is not said in that understated remark is of course that his project does not want to be disciplinarily localized because its very import has to do with a massive delocalization of the totality of contemporary knowledge under the shadow of nihilism.   It is not just politics or right, science and philosophy, art and language—it is all of them that today can be thought only as effects of a massive structure, a “non-physical objectivity” that Marzoa names nihilism, obviously in the wake of Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular.   What is interesting with Marzoa is that he connects the nihilistic structure to Marx´ mature work, that is, to Das Kapital.   One of the obvious results of it is that capitalism comes to be seen as a specifically nihilistic structuration of life. Exploitation, for instance, therefore must be understood in the context of nihilism, and not the other way around. Production must be understood in the horizon of nihilism, and not the other way around. (I recently posted two reviews, one concerning Schmitt and another one concerning Althusser—they are placeholders. Both Schmitt and Althusser, and with the latter Marxism as such, are genealogically relevant for the infrapolitical project, and both must be placed under erasure in order to release their secret form—this is not Marzoa’s vocabulary, but I think it is consistent with what he aims to do.   Interestingly, his highest philosophical referent is Kant, of whose thought Distancias says, in the final page: “the One-All [that is the continuo ilimitado of the age of nihilism] must still deploy some of its internal possibilities, which is something it can only do by ‘overcoming’ (that is, by not understanding, but it is a ‘not-understanding’ different from the trivial one) a certain obstacle: the obstacle is Kant.”   I’ll say a bit more about this in a later entry.))

“Something can only be recognized by losing it” (Distancias 139). This is perhaps the most succinct characterization of Marzoa’s method.   A historical insight into something already means the vanishing of that something into history.   Thought does not appropriate, thought can only glimpse a withdrawal, it is the glimpse into a withdrawal. The various forms of the glimpse into vanishing time are structured into the constitutive glimpse of the present, also as vanishing, also in withdrawal. Once you thematize something, that something has already gone—which logically also means, we live in the unthematizable.   Thought is the attempt to dwell in historical time by thematizing the structure of its disappearance.   Now, retroactively, as some kind of enigmatic side-effect, the persistent investigation into the vanishing structures of historical time can throw partial insight into the unthematizable present, which is thereby necessarily also a partial insight into the future (the future of thought can only be the thematization of the structure of the unthematizable present.)   This is the gift of distance, a word that has pride of place in Marzoa’s work, and to which we cannot hope to do full justice here. But distance is, I believe, commensurate to the task of thought—no distance without thought, no thought without distance.

But sometimes it feels as if there is a fundamental distance Marzoa’s work thematizes, and that is the distance from community.   Community is, although not straightforwardly, projected into the origin.   This may be fundamentally unfair, but I will ask the question, tentatively in any case, any way: is history so far the story of a passage from community into nihilism?   Even if the answer were to be yes, it doesn’t of course mean community is the future too. Marzoa is no Hegelian.   But it does mean there is the shadow of an undiluted non-nihilistic origin that is associated with the thought of community. And this matters, even if it only matters because it unsettles us.   What could community be? By definition, we can only glimpse community through the many mediations of our nihilistic worldview, from which community has withdrawn fundamentally.   So my question is, what is the import of the fundamental withdrawal and dissolution of community for our thematization of modern and contemporary nihilism?

In “Estado y polis” Marzoa says: “Civil society is therefore the negation of any community, and, correspondingly, right and the State are the question of how it is possible never to have to commune with anybody on anything” (103).   But Marzoa says, in order to understand what that means, we must find a point of contrast, a comparison, and that point of contrast would be community: “Let us attempt to think . . . a situation where there obtains a certain community; this means, a situation where there would obtain some type of binding thing or content and where, conversely, the statute of commodity, or of civil society, right, and the State, would not obtain” (103).     For that he goes to Herodotus’s History, where he underlines Cyrus’ words on the Greek polis: “I have no fear of men for whom it is character that the center of their cities is constituted by an empty space to which they go to attempt to deceive each other under oath” (quoted in 105). Deceiving each other is buying and selling in the agora, which is the empty space.

The empty space is necessarily the space of a distance, a spatium, a hole in the community. Making that hole patent—this is what Cyrus’ remark, as quoted by Herodotus, does–, that distance, is insolence. But it is a momentous insolence, because it makes something relevant that has always alredy existed, it thematizes the ground on which one treads, the ground that had gone without saying.   And the reflection is: “either the community does not make itself relevant as such in any way, remains opaque to itself, but then in some way we can say that community does not exist, does not take place, because it does not make itself manifest . . . or else the community does not see itself bound to conform to its own opacity, and the binds, that is, the distance, the counterpositions, always already presupposed, are forced to be said, they make themselves relevant, and then the community certainly takes place, it certainly obtains, but it remains to be seen wether then and for that very reason what happens is that the community explodes” (106).

So, we can only thematize something at the moment of its dissolution, at the moment of its vanishing.   And this self-thematization, Marzoa says, is the polis as such. At that very moment.

In any case, this exercise concerning the vanishing community, the community as vanishing, allows us to understand that civil society, the civil society of modernity, can no longer be understood accordingly: that civil society is no polis.   Modern civil society, that is, civil society, since there is no non-modern civil society, cannot be understood through the thematization of an empty space in the middle. Rather, civil society is the thematization of an overpowering empty space understood as an unlimited continuum, where distance prevails absolutely, where no thing and no content is binding, where everything is exchangeable, where the thing has become, overwhelmingly, that is, totally, commodity. If community could be presupposed for the polis, and distance needed to make itself patent, in civil society what is presupposed is distance, that is, the non-binding character of every thing and every content.   And what must make itself patent is nihilism.

Marzoa insists therefore that there is a certain secondariness of civil society or the State, which is an integral part of civil society.   A certain secondariness: negation. Civil society is the absence, the abstention, the renunciation (111) of some other thing that has been lost, that has vanished into time.   Can we call this, as Marx does, the “democratic republic”?

There is also a belatedness of the very concept of democracy in the Greek polis.   The first struggle was not for democracy, whatever that may have meant for the Greeks in terms of demos or krátos.   The first struggle was for isonomía. Isonomía does not refer to a kind of polis, rather it is constitutive of the polis as such, it is the event itself of the polis.   Isonomía does not name authority, it rather names “something anterior and conditioning of all authority,” the very ground of authority.   Demokratia, however, is the belated naming of that ground, in favor of the demos, and this passage, from isonomía to demokratia, is already the decline and withdrawal of the polis as such—it says too much, it unbalances things into a situation where a conflict between isonomía and democratía was bound to prevail.   And it did. Socrates exemplifies it. Modern democracy finds a solution to that problem by dictating the necessary universality of the reach of the system of liberties, that is, the utter emptying out and degrounding of any binding, the absolute absence of community. Democracy in modernity is nihilistic democracy.   In the same way demokratia, by prevailing, brought about the historical end of the polis, in the same way, by prevailing the empty universality of nihilistic, civil democracy must open the way to something else. But first it needs to come into its own.

In the title for this entry I used the expression “the unthematizable haunting.”   I want to let the ambiguity of the word haunting resonate, all the way marking one of its meanings as abode or guarida or madriguera or first and most basic inhabitation, which happens to be the reconstructible first usage of ethos in the Homeric text as we said below in one of the comments to Jorge’s recent entry.   Presumably, if we are to make infrapolitics appear in the context of the discussion of Martínez Marzoa’s thought, it will be somewhere around the consideration of whatever remains unthematizable in our nihilistic history.

Quiero detenerme sucintamente en algunos aspectos de la obra de Martínez Marzoa y conectarlo con una pregunta que se hizo (creo que fue Ludmila) en la sesión sobre el libro de Zivin acerca de la relación entre democracia y marranismo. En la obra de Marzoa no se trata la cuestión de lo marrano, pero creo que a partir del concepto de lo civil se puede establecer una conexión entre marranismo y democracia.

Para Marzoa, con el concepto de lo civil se accede a algo “nuevo”, que “no se da por sentado” a partir de autores como Hobbes, Spinoza y otros, lo que supone en estos autores un proceso de separación o distancia respecto de la tradición anterior (en lo cual será clave la distancia de la comunidad); pero otra de las claves, quizá no tan explícita, es la consciencia tardomoderna desde donde se habla (esto es, en distancia también respecto de la modernidad, quizá no como rechazo de sus presupuestos sino como radicalización de los mismos). Esto produce que la textualidad, por caso la de Hobbes, y en especial lo que tradicionalmente ha podido significar, se nos presente en disonancia o desajuste con lo que apunta Marzoa; por ello no hay que perder de vista el enfoque formal con el que hace sus lecturas (formal como opuesto a materia en Kant, no como “forma” como los manuales de lógica).

La clave en esta cuestión, según lo entiendo yo, es la negación de todo contenido vinculante (esto es, contenido que refiera a una identidad, comunidad o jerarquía material de valores) en lo político, como condición fundamental de la democracia. Precisamente pensar una democracia desde la desligación, lo cual no niega trazas de identidad, comunidad, etc., sólo que estas no pueden ser el objeto de la política. Un rechazo de la lógica de la identidad (pero también de la reivindicación y afloración de múltiples diferencias como otra cara de la misma lógica), como condición de posibilidad de un pensar la política de modo garantista, esto es, sin distingo por quién sea uno. O lo que es lo mismo, la descualificación radical como condición de la trabazón social en democracia. La disolución de la lógica de la identidad en una política donde el secreto queda a resguardo.

He dudado si colgar esta nota como comentario a la nota previa de Jorge Alvarez Yágüez, pero al final he decidido en contra de esa posibilidad por razones que tienen que ver con el carácter propositivo de lo que sigue.   Jorge nos ofrece una magnífica contribución a lo que voy a llamar infrapolítica 2, y aquí me interesa distinguir de la infrapolítica 2 lo que llamo infrapolítica 1.   Por mi parte sanciono positivamente lo que ha dicho Jorge, que creo que recoge de una manera admirablemente sucinta—no completa, pero eso no estaba en juego—la dimensión patente y activa de la práctica infrapolítica como programa.

Digamos que infrapolítica 2 pone el énfasis en –política, mientras infrapolítica 1 pone el énfasis en infra-. (El blog no admite subrayados, me temo, pero sería más fácil imaginar la palabra con el prefijo subrayado o con el sustantivo subrayado.)   Y pienso que ambos énfasis responden, precisamente, y no por casualidad, a dos conceptos diferentes de la palabra ética. El segundo es el concepto al que, en la modernidad, dio carta de naturaleza Kant, aunque tiene viejas raíces precristianas y cristianas, naturalmente, y con respecto del cual Jorge nos dice que puede resaltar o exigir un tipo de comportamiento “absoluto y categórico . . , volcado hacia dentro, hacia la propia interioridad y perfección . . . pueden no importarle las consecuencias . . . solo puede actuar por convicción.”   La palabra griega ethikos recoge eso aunque sólo parcialmente, en la medida en que deriva de un sentido de ethos que refiere, ya en Hesíodo y Herodoto, a la disposición o carácter del ser humano concreto.   Es discutible, quizás indecidible para nosotros, que el fragmento de Heráclito ethos daimon recoja también de forma dominante esa acepción.   Walter Benjamin, por ejemplo, haciéndose eco de muy larga tradición, traduce el ethos daimon como carácter es destino. Hace muchos años yo propuse una traducción diversa, en inglés, canny is uncanny, homely is unhomely, en español, lo familiar es lo infamiliar, o lo habitual es lo siniestro. En fin, esa traducción alternativa se fijaba en la primera acepción de ethos que resalta, por ejemplo, el léxico de Liddell-Scott, citando a Homero y Heródoto, según la cual el ethos es “an accustomed place,” y en plural “the haunts or abodes of animals.”   El ethos es la casa antes de la casa, el habitamiento en su sentido más desnudo y por lo tanto más definitivo.   Y para mí ese sería el sentido de ética con el que tiene relación dominante lo que llamo infrapolítica 1.  Dada, sin embargo, la fuerte prevalencia en nuestra cultura de la otra noción de ética, yo insistiría en que conviene entender que la ética se relaciona con infrapolítica 2 mucho más que con infrapolítica 1. O incluso, que infrapolítica 1 no tiene relación particular alguna con la ética en el sentido aristotélico (que no es originalmente aristotélico, claro, sino que en Aristóteles ya es derivado, por ejemplo, de Sócrates, cuya oposición a los sofistas, por ejemplo, puede entenderse como oposición ética en ese sentido, luego cristiano, y luego kantiano.)

Por cierto podríamos discutir aquí las misterioras páginas del final de la Carta sobre el humanismo en las que Heidegger habla de ética, y remite al ethos daimon heraclíteo, en un sentido que yo creo que remite más a infrapolítica 1 que a infrapolítica 2. Pero eso queda para otro día, aunque me interesa marcarlo.

Y pienso que, aunque cada quien ha de tener sus preferencias, su estilo (y esa palabra, estilo, para mí ya de entrada está más relacionada con infrapolitica 1 que con infrapolítica 2), no es posible pensar propiamente infrapolítica 2 sin retrotraerla a la incomodidad fundamental de infrapolítica 1, que es lo que motiva todos los trastornos de comprensión de lo que se está proponiendo.   Infrapolítica 1, para decirlo quizá demasiado burdamente, está siempre de antemano más allá del bien y del mal, y es refractaria en cuanto tal no sólo a toda política sino también a toda ética (salvo a la ética que entiende el ethos como madriguera o habitamiento desnudo).   Cómo pensar esa dimensión, quizá en una frontera no particularmente accesible en cuanto frontera del lenguaje, quizá en una frontera no particularmente accesible de lo humano, y así en cuanto tal remitiendo también a lo animal, ese es, yo pienso, el problema fundamental o la tarea fundamental de este proyecto, el lugar donde la ontología se junta con lo refractario a la ontología, el lugar de un “de otro modo” o incluso de un “epekeina” (más allá) que también hemos de pensar en relación con la temática de la historia del ser, es decir, de la historia en cuanto ser, aunque estoy con Jorge en que, si esa es la tarea de pensamiento fundamental, en realidad no puede distinguirse de su intento (del intento de Jorge) por asociarla decisivamente con la infrapolítica 2 que él propone.

Sobre la diferencia entre Ética e Infrapolítica.

Hay que partir de que ética y política así como no son lo mismo ni pueden serlo, tampoco son ajenas, ni pueden serlo. El principio griego de que no es posible una politeía justa sin individuos con un determinado ethos, ni un ethos pleno sin aquella, que no cabe una separación de esas dos esferas, sigue siendo un principio básico de referencia categorial a pesar de la modernidad política. El ideal de la ciencia política moderna, de lo que Kant alguna vez (seguido por el Marzoa de El concepto de lo civil) formuló como una constitución perfecta para un “pueblo de demonios”, es imposible. No hay manera de construir una comunidad democrática sobre la base de la desconfianza respecto de sus integrantes, a lo que conduce es a una sociedad de controles panópticos, o conductistas, en que el reconocimiento a todos de los derechos es doblado por el sometimiento de cada uno al ojo amenazante de un Estado omnipresente. No es posible una ley que se sostenga tan sólo por el poder que la ampara, sin que acredite validez por parte de quienes la siguen. Puede que valga en el taller o en el mundo de la burocracia, pero en la sociedad política no cabe “máquina sin espíritu” (Weber).

El nexo ética-política no es, pues, tan solo un principio básico de la política establecido desde los griegos al que cabe retornar por momentos como fuente eterna de inspiración, es requerido por el más elemental realismo político, sin él la comunidad no es posible. Pero además, este principio es, si cabe, más pertinente hoy que en otro tiempo, pues no podemos por menos que extraer a este respecto las consecuencias del fin del Estado-nación al que han estado ligadas hasta ahora las categorías políticas modernas. El Estado-nación intensificaba el choque de la política con la ética al contraponer la universalidad de la ética a la particularidad de la política, pues fuera del ámbito nacional cada Estado impera en un medio en el que solo rige la ley de la naturaleza (estado de naturaleza). Hoy esto ha de entenderse como el medio en que los mercados imperan desbocados sin rienda política que los sujete. El Estado, como bien Hegel puso de manifiesto, no podía admitir ningún principio ético por encima de sí. Todo eso ha sido trastocado, y hoy el individuo en un incipiente mundo cosmopolita puede exigir un amparo de sus derechos, por encima del Estado, a la comunidad internacional, que al Estado mismo ha de someter. La necesidad de una comunidad política transnacional hace que la política pueda limar al máximo su particularidad acercándose a la universalidad que reclama la ética. La demanda ética de universalidad adquiere, entonces, una dimensión política. Sin llegar nunca a superponerse el sujeto universal de la ética se acerca al sujeto particular, marcado por su pertenencia de la política. Curiosamente, en un mundo en que la política desaparece, el nexo entre ética y política se vuelve más urgente.

Carl Schmitt era muy consciente de este punto. Toda su oposición a un avance en esa línea resulta, sin embargo, ideológica. Consideraba un absurdo una política de la humanidad, basada en los derechos humanos, de la universalidad, etc, pues la política es escisión, división amigo/enemigo. Pero dar lo que es un ideal por un factum para oponerse a él es una falsedad. Nunca se llegará a la política de la universalidad, a la fusión, en esta dimensión, entre sujeto ético y sujeto político, pero la lucha por ello supone escisión y conflicto, política, pues, en ese mismo sentido; que nunca veremos plamarse, tan sólo es una aproximación asintótica a ese objetivo.

El campo de la política y el de la ética permanecerán siempre en tensión por su misma naturaleza, mientras uno es el dominio de lo absoluto y categórico, el otro es campo de lo relativo y condicional; una está volcada hacia dentro, hacia la propia interioridad y perfección, la otra hacia fuera, es estricto campo de la apariencia y exterioridad; a la primera pueden no importarle las consecuencias, en ningún caso dejará de apreciarlas la segunda; la primera solo puede actuar por convicción, a la segunda le basta el cumplimiento de la norma, la primera admite nexos estratégicos, no así la segunda, etc.

Precisamente porque a la infrapolítica le importan las consecuencias no quiere ser una especie de ética trasladada sin más a la esfera pública, traducida, entonces, en una singular fuerza mesiánica para la que ni siquiera la violencia es tal, pues no se mide con patrones terrenales; no pretende tampoco ser trasunto de historia del ser alguna esperando el gran Ereignis final que repita el comienzo olvidado, no es Metapolítica, no juega a una logomaquia de la historia, no es megapolítica, que es en lo que suele convertirse aquella, es infra, asume responsabilidades, hacia el futuro, para con el presente y cara el pasado que observa con ojos aterrados proponiéndose que su acción al no repetirlo lo redima. Es muy consciente de la desmesura, de la carencia de límites del actuar humano, de la erección fácil de lo contingente en principio absoluto, de que toda decisión es injusta aun cuando acierta y hace bien, por lo que no puede sino interrogarse por lo sacrificado en cada movimiento. Eso es lo que le demanda también su criterio central de piedad por las cosas.

La infrapolítica no puede sino asumir con lucidez , pues, esa diferencia entre ética y política, esa tensión y, ciertamente, ese nexo. La política moderna a partir de Hobbes y una vez que asumiera hasta la médula una sola parte de la lección maquiaveliana, cercenándola de la parte republicana, rompe con el lazo ética-política, y aspira a una especie de dominación funcional, una máquina sin alma, una hegemonía pasiva. La política moderna por fuerza no puede ir más allá, y para sus designios le es suficiente.

La infrapolítica, al combatir radicalmente ese dominio, y aun todo lo que de él se refleje en su propia oposición, inevitablemente aparecerá más cercana a la ética por cuanto que es extraordinariamente exigente respecto de las fuerzas del individuo, demanda de él un ejercicio de ruptura, de disentimiento, de esfuerzo intelectual y vital que es propio de lo ético; y así aparecererá a los demás. Pero esto no es sino un efecto de la situación, del contexto en que se mueve. Dado que su vocación es abrir paso a la posibilidad de una verdadera política, su alma mira, sin embargo, a este otro lado, el colectivo, el exterior, el de la mundanidad, no el de la interioridad, no el ético.

No es sin más “política” porque se mueve en un arrière-plan, detrás de ella, intentando en todo momento que sus condiciones se restaruren, no se malogren. En pureza, si se diese una política auténtica, y se da en ocasiones, pues por momentos, y en determinados espacios, se logra el libre actuar juntos, el libre deliberar para la acción, en ese preciso momento y lugar, entonces, no hay infrapolítica, sino política stricto sensu. La infrapolítica solo existe cuando la política falla, cuando están en peligro sus condiciones de posibilidad, cuando se están introduciendo elementos que la deterioran o amenazan con su liquidación. Es una fuerza crítica que se mueve en un plano, se diría, casi-transcendental (relativo a las condiciones de posibilidad) si bien inmanente e histórico, contingente; en un espacio necesitado de intervención para convertirse en más netamente político. Por tanto, ese espacio no es del todo político ya que le es casi- previo.

Estas expresiones precedidas advervialmente del “casi” pueden irritar, – je suis desolé-, pero así es la cosa. No es rigurosamente transcendental por dos razones: es de carácter inmanente, no se sustrae a la historia, pero se sitúa en un distinto estrato de esta, como se sitúa una estructura respecto de los hechos que la acomodan; y una segunda razón, más importante, la infrapolítica es relativa a las “condiciones de posibilidad”, decimos, pero no son exactamente las condiciones de posibilidad, pues éstas quedan fuera o al borde del espacio político; una contienda militar está fuera de ese espacio, pero puede ser un medio para crear unas condiciones en que la política pueda darse, y aquella contienda, entonces, cese. Esas acciones que buscan crear condiciones de posibilidad, dado que la política no existe, requieren acciones no políticas, a menudo instrumentales, de fuerte formación de sujetos unificados, etc. La infrapolítica no se mueve en ese espacio, ni con este tipo de acción. Está allí donde hay política, pero en una situación amenazada de extinción, es en ese mundo necesitado de reparación, de restauración, de depuración, no de creatio ex nihilo, en el que se da su acción. No olvidemos que definimos la infrapolítica como “política” si bien “infra”, por tanto se da en un espacio en el que de algún modo la política no ha desaparecido del todo, y en el que la infrapolítica actúa como una fuerza regeneradora, revitalizadora, la que comporta su capacidad de crítica. Por todo esto no es exactamente transcendental sino quasi-transcendental. Y por esa misma razón decimos casi-previo, pues si fuera estrictamente previo se situaría fuera, como fuera está el plano transcendental. No es anterior sino simultáneo, actúa sobre la política pero en un plano que no se le superpone, sino que está como en retirada respecto del de la política, que se le sustrae. Permitidme el juego: en otro lugar dijimos que la infrapolítica es la política de la no-política, pues rechazaba todos los rasgos con los que convencionalmente la política se presentaba. Pues bien, ahora decimos, en perfecta complementariedad, que es política de la política, pues se propone que haya realmente política, es su fuerza facilitadora, su continuo intento de restauración.

Evidentemente, no puede, entonces, decirse que tal sea un plano ético, por mucho que lo distingamos como arrière-plan de la política, e indiquemos que en el contexto actual se aproxima al gesto ético, pues, al fin, la infrapolítica a la política está volcada, y, en consecuencia, no es ética por las mismas razones señaladas que distinguían la naturaleza de la política de la de la ética. Es un espacio entre, un entre-deux, un ni -ni, ese es el espacio de la infrapolítica. Dicho esto, inmediatamente hay que añadir, para más irritación, que esta expresión no es del todo exacta, pues si bien no es ética tiene mucho de ella, si bien no es política, a ella se refiere, y sólo no lo es porque a lo que pasa por política se opone; por consiguiente, y aquí está lo irritante, no es lo uno ni es lo otro, pero tampoco no es “no-es-lo-uno-ni-lo-otro”, esto es, no se puede decir sin más que no lo sea, pues algo sí lo es, de aquí que al ni-ni, habría que añadirle un tercer ni, “ni «ni-ni»”. Bueno, así es la rosa.

I will eventually get to the question of the frame in Latin American Studies and in my own work, but first let me attempt to say something regarding the critique that we have not been able to thematize exploitation.

Sauri and Di Stefano (see below) say:  “while infrapolitics offers a compelling means for a critique of domination that foregrounds the failure of every hegemonic articulation . . . by taking into account the excluded nonsubject, how might it lead to a transformation of a mode of production defined, above all, by exploitation?”   Well, that is the one-million dollar question, as they say–which unfortunately can only have a trivial answer.  It amounts to asking, for instance, how it would be possible for feminism, or for the civil rights movement, to put an end to capitalism.  They continue: “How might we map the movement from the infrapolitical to politics itself.”

So, just to clear up a possible initial misunderstanding, the infrapolitical is always already in a relation to politics.  That`s why they call it infrapolitics.  Now, if we combine this latter question with the first, as we presumably are meant to do, the real question is not about mapping the movement from the infrapolitical to politics, but rather about mapping the movement from the infrapolitical to a revolution that would signal the end of exploitation.   And, again, this is a question that can only have a trivial answer, as not even Marxism has an answer on its own terms (“how can we map the movement from Marxism to the end of exploitation?”  “Well, it is for history to decide, it will only happen where there are mature global conditions, political voluntarism will not work, there cannot be socialism in one country, and so forth.”)

But perhaps, in the spirit of free discussion, just to continue to develop the idea, we could say that, if infrapolitics in general allows (if it is the name for the form of thought that can only allow) for reflection on the non-political underside of any political irruption, then not only is infrapolitics the very condition of any thematization of exploitation (as well as of exclusion), but it is also the condition of their reduction and tendential elimination (just as it can also be the condition of their intensification).

If politics is in every case, and necessarily, an enactment of the sacrificial structuration of history, as María Zambrano liked to say, then infrapolitics is the dimension of life where the end of sacrifice can be experienced liminally, potentially.  To that precise extent infrapolitics is the hyperbolic condition of democracy.  No democracy without infrapolitics, no infrapolitics without democracy!

I think infrapolitics has no problem with producing and, in fact, actively welcomes every critique of exploitation, every critique of exclusion.  Its task is, furthermore, not to stop there, but also to examine the conditions of such critiques in order to radicalize them towards non-sacrificial structurations of political life.   Which, on the other hand, we know will never obtain.   This is, as far as I can see, the necessarily aporetic dimension of  the relation infrapolitics-politics.

Over the last several days, in other forums, there has been talk about something like a tradition of infrapolitical thought.  This is important on several counts, and we are only just beginning to discuss it.   But it is also important not to push too hard, not to invent a gallery of characters forced into the dubious position of predecessors or founding fathers.  We are not into developing a doctrine here, only into tracing a style.

Part of the discussion had to do with the issue of logics, and whether binary logics can ever hold as infrapolitical.   And perhaps the obvious thing to say here, the point to be made, is that infrapolitics is neither an attempt to institute a new polarity (infrapolitics vs. heliopoliitcs) nor an attempt to claim some tertiary logical space beyond binarisms.  In Erin Graff Zivin’s formulation: “what if marranismo, illiteracy, posthegemony, infrapolitics were to be thought *not* as concepts that oppose or critique Inquisitional logic, literacy, hegemony, politics, but rather as principles of anarchy always already at work *within* these concepts, and as such inseparable from them?”

I might want to use an expression alternative to “principles of anarchy,” to elude the ambiguity there, and talk about “an-archic displacements,” for instance, but otherwise I think Zivin’s formulation holds.

Another way to think about it, perhaps the same way after a number of historical mediations, is to say that, once Hegelian dialectics announce the advent of Absolute Knowledge, there is no longer a way of opposing masters and slaves, natural life and historical life, self-relation and spirit.   Mauro Senatore said:  “there is no concept left [no archic principle] to transit into,” so that the slave is not looking to become a master, and the naked life no longer aspires to historical existence.

So, is there a way to claim infrapolitical reflection prior to post-Hegelianism, or to the end-of-history radicalization of Hegelianism in French thought from the 1930’s through 1950’s?    Or is infrapolitics directly a type of reflection that finds its primal scene in that context?

I think the answer is: yes and no to both.  It all depends on the focus.  On the one hand, infrapolitics is free thought, that is, thought that connects to life as self-relation as opposed to calculative-representational thought that follows a program or seeks the development  and implementation of a truth, and that has gone on forever, since thought is thought.  On the other hand, infrapolitics has specific contexts of appearance.

French existentialism is one of the latter, which doesn’t mean every aspect of French existentialism is infrapolitical.   Melville’s filmography is infrapolitical, and Raúl Ruiz’s filmography is infrapolitical–and those are two filmmakers directly influenced by French existentialism at an early moment of their trajectories.  There are others.

But there is, for instance, an infrapolitical Benjamin, not the messianic-teleological Benjamin committed to redeemed humanity, but the Benjamin of the destructive character, whose formalization is an early depiction of infrapolitical life.

As in the previous entry, I would like to call for conversation on these issues here, as the blog can hardly be sustained without explicit interaction.

I am taking advantage of the fact that I have had early access, courtesy of Emilio and Eugenio, to a text that will be published over the next few days in nonsite. I will post the link here once it happens. I should wait to post my reaction, but I have never waited well, so I am starting something here with my apologies included. This entry treads lightly, therefore, and is meant to be only the beginning of a conversation that I hope will be long and intense.

Their essay, entitled Making It Visible. Latinamericanist Criticism, Literature, and the Question of Exploitation Today, engages with the recent work of Josefina Ludmer on “postautonomous literatures,” with John Beverley´s particular take on cultural studies up until his postsubalternismo book, with Jon Beasley-Murray´s posthegemony, and with my own work through Exhaustion of Difference but with specific mention of infrapolitics, which is a word I have been using since I did preparatory work for Linea de sombra, then dropped for a while, and I recently took up again.

The essay is good and fair, at least regarding my work, but I think in general. It is actually enormously useful. Through some very smart observations on the problem of the frame, the need for a frame, and what they consider our collective abandonment of proper reflection on the frame, they make a double argument for the specificity of aesthetic, hence also literary, autonomy, and for the need to thematize exploitation rather than exclusion in politically-intended or politically-inflected work. They link the absence of frame to the inability to think about exploitation.

So what I want to say here to start with is that I find the issue of the frame very provocative and interesting, and, while I am not entirely sure I myself omit the frame from my reflection entirely, I am more than willing to concede the criticism is quite valid. Since I am not entirely sure of its absence, that probably means I am not entirely sure of its presence either. This is something I will have to think about for a while.

But the second thing I want to say is that, in my conception of what infrapolitics could mean, exploitation is by no means absent. On the contrary, first, it starts off by thematising the politico-ethical exploitation of the entire field of practical reason at the cost of suppressing every other possibility of thought and experience, and, second, it continues by focusing upon conditions of everyday life and labor, where the Marxist-based theme of exploitation has of course pride of place. Or let me put it this way: even biographically, infrapolitics shows up in my critical reflection as a concrete reaction to the extreme Fordist-Taylorization of middle-class intellectual life as I have experienced it. Now, it is true there has been no expansion of this line, there has been no particular engagement with it in connection with infrapolitics, or not a published one yet. But it will come. My interest here is to hold open the place of exploitation as an absolutely essential resource for infrapolitical thought. I could even say: no infrapolitics without exploitation, no exploitation without infrapolitics. We have a pending discussion here on Frederic Lordon´s book Willing Slaves of Capital, which I think should include Simon Head´s Mindless. And some of us have a pending commitment to write on Tronti and Lazzarato´s work, as part of a book on Italian political philosophy,precisely along the same lines. I have also pùblished a recent essay, “We Have Good Reasons Too, and They Keep Coming: Revolutionary Drives and Democratic Desire,” where I discuss exploitation already, although, true, in a preliminary and insufficient way.

The latter is not to be defensive, or to preempt further critique. I think the critique is accurate and fair at this stage of things, and it will work as a spur to get on with it.

Beyond all of that, the third thing I wanted to say is that I find Sauri and DiStefano´s reflection on cultural studies and its effects on work produced during the last decade very fascinating and appropriate. Along the way of their critique there show up many issues, which they treat only marginally in order to keep their focus on the double issue of frame and exploitation, but which deserve further dwelling and radicalisation.

As I said, I hope this will the beginning of a long conversation. The blog can hardly subsist without interaction of that kind.