Antonio Gramsci was born in 1891.  He died in 1937—at the age of 46.  I am two years younger than that today as I write these notes on the first section of the Cambridge University Press edition of his Pre-Prison Writings.  That is to say, I will make comments on texts dating from 1914 to 1918, most of them newspaper notes, written when he was between the ages of 23 and 27.  (I finished my dissertation at the age of 29, disowned it, and worked for ten more years on the manuscript which became my first book, hoping no one ever deems it necessary to go back to anything I wrote before then.  So I do not wish to do to a young Gramsci anything I wouldn’t want visited upon myself.)  I want to note some issues or problems that I found worthy of further thought and investigation.  That is, even as I find myself in agreement with many of the criticism raised in the previous blog entries here, what I want to set down, at the moment, are the ways in which I would image a possible, though difficult, tarrying with Gramsci.

I want to suggest a different way of looking at Gramsci’s unabashed endorsement of Idealism in these pages.  In fact, I want to suggest that this is the closest Gramsci got to the existential analytic of dasein—from which he distanced himself, at least according to the general undersatanding of Gramsci today, but which might yet make way for an infrapolitical Gramsci.

Going back to Marx, this would be “to understand that adopting the standpoint of the proletarians in a state of ‘permanent’ insurrection resulted not so much in putting an end to idealism, but in installing the materialism/idealism dilemma—the perennial

question of their difference—at the very heart of the theory of the proletariat and its privileged historical role” (Balibar 27).  I don’t wish to insist on any subject’s privileged role, though.  Only on the idea that in terms of the existential analytic of dasein Idealism has at least one priority: “If what the term idealism amounts to an understanding of the fact that being is never be explicable by beings, but is always already the ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then the sole correct possibility of a philosophical problematic lies in idealism” (Heidegger 200).  In Gramsci this played out in a very specific way. Allow me a digression before I turn to a comment on something that informs my way of looking at the present situation.

In “Socialism and Culture” (1916), Novalis appears as a way to clarify the “supreme problem of culture:” “that of taking charge of one’s transcendental self, of being at the same time oneself and the self of oneself” (8).  In order to know others, we must first be capable of understanding ourselves perfectly, claims Novalis/Gramsci.  Giambattista Vico is adduced to give this notion, to know thyself, a political slant in a gloss on Solon’s maxim: “Vico maintains that, with this phrase, Solon intended to provoke the plebeians, who  believed themselves to be bestial in origin, while the nobles were of divine origin, to reflect on themselves and recognize themselves as  being of the same human nature as the nobles, and therefore to claim  to be made equal with them in civil rights.  And he then identifies this … as the basis and the historical reason for the rise of democracies in antiquity” (8-9; italics in original).  At issue here is “the scope and the principles of a true understanding of the conception of culture, and of culture in its relation to socialism” (9).  Culture is not encyclopedic knowledge—which Gramsci saw as harmful.  We are back to Spirit/History: “Culture is … the organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’s personality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we can come to understand our value and place within history…” (9-10).  All of this spiritual striving, however, is not anything “spontaneous” or “beyond the control of our wills” (10).  That would be nature, unchangeable, within the realm of “ineluctable laws” (10). But we are, on the contrary, creatures “of spirit”—which, in this context, means “a creation of history, rather than nature” (10).  Yet what can we make of all of this if there is no perfectibility, if there is no “sense” and order leading toward the final raid/revolution?  Let us take a step back.  The supreme problem of culture is for all of us to be able to discern that there is no difference between those who have a putative divine line of descent and those who are mere animals.  Rather than put the emphasis on the distinction human/animal, or gods/animals, I want to underscore the way in which the human-animal is here also the knot between a materiality of the spirit and an eventual void piercing through the available knowledge.  We are spiritual-historical creatures to the extent that we can inhabit that void in knowledge that is our ongoing transformation as spirit-history.  Critique is another name for this ability to inhabit that hole in knowledge.  For Gramsci, however, all of this is still moored to the political hopes of a more coherent, logical, ordered and perfect world: “To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to assert one’s own identity, to emerge from chaos and become an agent of order, but of one’s own order, one’s own disciplined dedication to an ideal” (11).  One must know the misery that others have created for us, in order to be able to replace it with a civilization of our own (11).  If for Gramsci history-spirit is a chain of events leading to our liberation of prejudice and idolatry (12), then “civilization” itself must not become either a prejudice or a form of idolatry.  What is the chain of historical-spiritual events if it is not a drive toward the ideal, toward a telos, toward a more perfect order?  I put forward the following: it is the presentation of an abyssal experience that we have systematically refused to face, in which the systematicity in question has been the various ways we have projected a desired order of things.  Words like destiny, order, god, life, and so many others, have organized our collective ways of projecting that there is something covering over the that void.

Gramsci’s sense of that abyssal experience is also palpable.  In “History” (1916) we find both the abyssal experience and the way that “life” is called upon to lessen the anxiety that experience produces.  “Give up to life your every action, your every ounce of faith,” writes Gramsci (13).  But even that can leave you with the sense that “something is missing”: “You are in the world, but you do not know why you are here. You act, but you do not know why. You are conscious of voids in your life; you desire some justification of your being, of your actions; and it seems to you that human reasons alone do not suffice” (13).  “You are,” he adds: “like a man looking at the sky, who, as he moves further and further back through the space which science has mapped out for us, finds ever greater difficulties in his fantastic wanderings in the infinite until, arriving at the void, and incapable of conceiving of this absolute void, he unconsciously populates it with  divine beings, with supernatural entities, to co-ordinate the vertiginous, and yet logical movement of the universe” (13-14).  According to Gramsci, these are inferior manifestations of the self, “purely instinctive, mere uncontrolled impulses,” and religion is the way that most seek to deal with them (14).  In stark contrast stands “the force of life itself” (14).  One must historicize and draw out the unfolding of religious impulses, for once one can trace a phenomenon back to its origin it will have been overcome: “To make them an object of history is to recognize their emptiness” (14).  But note the key operation in this passage: the void in question has shifted place from the sensation of arriving at a place where the ground is lacking (over which a religious answer is projected as a way to cover it) toward the emptiness of the religious answer itself.  It is history-spirit that will offer “the explanation to our existence” (14).  History-spirit cannot be supernatural.  However, this materialist understanding yields all too quickly to a different kind of faith: “revelation. If something still remains inexplicable, that is due only to our cognitive deficiencies, to the still imperfect grasp of our intellect” (14).  The whole is knowable, even if do not yet know all of it.  The past will be with us no longer as our shadow, but illuminating the way to a better future.  Gramsci is not shy about this secularization of religious categories: “Our religion becomes … history.  Our faith becomes … man, and man’s will and his capacity for action” (14).

What emerges is a fight against two different kinds of knowledge.  On the one hand the encyclopedia of all the fact that contribute to the permanence of the ruling class power; and, on the other, the knowledge that emerges once proper cognition of the historical process is gained.  One jumps over the abyss that opens in the dissolution of the first—which includes not just the narratives that legitimize a certain ruling structure, but also all of the metaphysical certainties that were the diving dictate from on high—to land on the certainties of a capacity for constructing the better world.  Between the first and the second form of history-spirit lies the recuperation of all that had been occluded in the past.  All is now light: “a past which illuminates” (14).  It is important to add that this kind of history is “the richer history which is not written in the history books” (30).  This illuminating past is “the bond of solidarity,” “the bond of shared humanity”—“the light which millions of Italians see by, … which illuminates the world for them…” (30).

On a different front, I would like to not that today it is impossible to read these texts without feeling their historical distance.  They are intimately involved in the context of WWI and the Russian Revolution, and they orient themselves therein in a way that is difficult to abide with today.  Gramsci makes clear some of the things that would be unconscionable for us to assume today.  Consider the tangled web of consequences derived from the class struggle.  For us, it has become ever clearer that “the class in power” will never “assume its responsibilities,” will never “carry its premises through to their logical conclusions,” will never “submit to an examination of the way in which it has been preparing for the … present miserable state” (5).  But for Gramsci, such a reckoning was also the only way to restore “the dualism of the classes” (5).  That is, only in the recognition of this failure would the dualism of the classes become clear.  No one today would even imagine to make such a demand of the ruling class in earnest.  The ruling class today simply ploughs through with the construction of its narrative.  It accepts responsibility for naught.  Thus, today, we believe neither in destiny nor in dualisms.  Given Gramsci’s presuppositions, this would make it difficult to sustain a belief in “the passage of civilization from an imperfect form to a more perfect one” (5).  This is also our inability to believe in progress.  But I leave it at that.

Balibar, Étienne. The Philosophy of Marx. Trans. Chris Turner. London; New York: Verso, 2007.

Gramsci, Antonio. Pre-Prison Writings. Trans. Virginia Cox. Ed. Richard Bellamy. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York, 2010.

The possibility to be ‘moved’ against the pitch of “malafede” solicits another symbolization. A “new founding” of the world for an opening of a destiny. In his beautiful The true life (2017), an essay for boys and girls, Alain Badiou writes that: “A thinking of departure, a true thinking of the ever-changing ocean of the world…an exact thinking because it is a nomadic one, a maritime thinking. May everyone be able to say: “I have seen the earth parceled out in vast spaces and my thought is not heedless of the navigator” (49).

Given the obvious maritime metaphor, it is evident that Badiou is suggesting that true life is only possible outside the party of cybernetics (kubernetics) and its half-sister ally, the party of hegemony. This plea for ‘exactitude’ is irreducible to what “I ought to do”; it is on the side of “how I do what I do” in a world disjointed from the whole. To exist outside the whole means that I cut through things. It also means that I have only one life.

The problem of what I am calling the epoch ‘unmoved’ raises the question of the genesis of the species. This is why the lives of boys and girls become crucial. The destruction of the time of youth (an unproductive time, not just a biological stage) announces the corruptio optimi of a world without experience. The world becomes only survival. I take this to be the vortex of the film The Killing of a sacred deer (Dir. Lanthimos, 2017). On the surface a rendition of the tragic legislation of Agamemnon, but more esoterically perhaps a commentary on the loss of inclination in world integrated into value and reproduction of life.

It is no coincidence that the two poles of contemporary life help frame the film: the correctional suburban life of order and civilized legibility (the end of community), on the one hand; and the practice of a surgeon (whose profession is to save “lives”), on the other. These two poles of world administration – the economic (oikonomia) pole and the medical pole (“human life”) – is the mechanism by which the world is reduced to a place, and experience to communication. Hence, when the tragic irrupts “normal time” of life, there is no more decision possible. Rather, there is only exchange, equilibrium, and ius talionis. The Killing of a sacred deer circumvents the nihilism of the epoch precisely in this way: there is no way out, so like Pacman we must go on.

Except for a sequence (into the 20:00-25:00 mins) where the fatherless Martin is sitting with the girls in the room, and they talk cigarettes, and looks, and armpit hair and music. Everything is purposely inconsequential, but this chatter is the only true void of every encounter. Then, they go out for a walk. A clear path meanders the two bodies with no purpose. Pasear is the activity that leads nowhere. Isn’t this what Badiou called a “thought that is not heedless of the navigator”? But how long could it last? In the film, not very much. As confirmed in the last sequence, ius talionis puts everything back in order and the child becomes future-time; an act of magic that has Reality as its theater.

*Imagen: “Lette versato” (2018), de Mónica Ferrando.

Of biological organisms, bourgeois citizens, and ethical comrades

I found a lot to be scared about in these first 100 pages—as I’m sure others will have. The insistence on the organic character of social life, the biological metaphors about the communal body, the aggregating molecules escaping bourgeois society to form higher-level compounds, and so on and so forth, these are all metaphors worth thinking about, especially in these years, especially after identity politics has become a norm, and especially after the symmetrical backlash that politics has generated—the politics we, or rather people with a stronger stomach than mine, endure every day at 6:00 pm. We may discuss these scary metaphors, but I am not sure we would find a lot to say—I am not sure *I*, at least would find much to say beyond marveling at I once deemed necessary to fight them, at how I thought urgent to reject the hold they seemed to exert.

Of cocaine, moral fiber, and redemption

I find Gramsci’s reflection on cocaine more interesting—perhaps, because they may offer an alternative path through the organicist bric-à-brac that avoids falling off the cliffs of nostalgic reminiscences marking little more than age. There are two passages I have in mind, both from p. 71. Gramsci is commenting about the drug users in Turin and Bologna who will walk free since cocaine consumption is not a crime. They’ll walk away as they should, innocent as they are of actions that are the necessary consequence of bourgeois society, he claims:

“It is quite natural that this kind of putrid scum will be produced: people without ends, without morals, without history. […] Pure animality, the pleasures of the senses, the mechanical action of nerve and muscle. […] I am amazed that so *few* slip down the slope of destructive pleasures.”

The explicit dualism underwriting this statement is remarkable in itself, even though it is not completely clear at which level it is pitched. Ontological, à la Kojève? Or is it purely axiological, à la Kant? But perhaps even more interesting is that last phrase, “destructive pleasures.” (I wish I could find the Italian, btw, but this piece is not included in the publicly available selection of his writings). It is easy to let your eyes skim over a trite clause used and abused when talking of drugs. But let us think about it for a second. Are the pleasures destructive because it is cocaine that triggers them, or are they destructive because they are pleasant? It seems pretty obvious to me that the latter interpretation is much better, otherwise the previous line about pure animality would make no sense. And what is the remedy to these dangerous pleasures whose looming destruction should have felled many more than it did?

“Work is the only thing that confers moral impulses: it is the crucible in which the spiritual essences that can give a meaning to our lives are volatized” [1]

Really, Antonio? I would be tempted to gloss. Really, in 1918, right at the end of the most destructive war in the history of Europe, right in the middle of famine, poverty, and overall sorrow you are extolling redemption through work? Would not have been more courageous, more daring, more in tune with the spirit of the times whose necessary path we are claiming to follow to praise pleasure against work? Shouldn’t the revolution abolish work—and not just meaningless work, but work altogether, as even Marx claimed? (Not always and not very consistently, to tell the truth, but he still claimed it). Should not that be the promise, the great ideal that wold override the petty details of the misguided utopian thinkers?

What if the road across the swamp of the organic society would only go through pleasure—the pleasure of the senses and the mechanical action of nerves and muscle,” as it were? What if it is cocaine that may redeem us from work?

That is a question I think we will want to discuss, or at least keep in mind throughout this Gramscian journey we just started.

[1] The translation here makes little sense and the crucible metaphor, as written, goes obviously against Gramsci’s meaning. I think he must have written something like “l’essenza spirituale si cristallizza” o “si distilla.” It certainly does not evaporate…

Just a few notes around three main interconnected points:

• THE HISTORICAL CONJUNCTURE: WWI and Russian Revolution (1914-1919).

These pages are unquestionably marked by the particular historical conjecture to which they belong. Each article presents itself as a piece responding to a particular occasion, and pays its special tribute to its kairos. Yet, each time it seems as though Gramsci’s most urgent concern is taming the historical juncture in order to bring it back (in the form of exception) within the necessary movement of the supreme reason governing History. What called my attention is the fact the both the two main events that constitute the overarching kairos for many of (if not all) the interventions, that is, WWI and The Russian Revolution, appear in these pages mostly as (related )exceptions to that historical rationality of which the Italian proletariat should become aware in order to be able to accomplish its destiny of establishing a new order.

War is the origin of the chaos as is disrupts the “long process of intense critical activity, of new cultural insight and the spread of ideas”(10) that should proceed every revolution. War is what disrupts “the normal course of events,” i.e. “when events are repeated with a certain rhythm. When history is developing through a series of moments, each more complex than the last and richer in meaning and value, but nonetheless similar”(41). “War has modified the conditions of the normal environment for historical action, giving an importance to men’s collective will which it would not have under normal conditions” (45). Under these new conditions that the war brought about – which changed the face of the system of production-, the Russian Revolution is a necessary and welcomed historical anomaly. The Russian Revolution is a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital (39), but “the revolutionaries will themselves create the conditions needed to realize their ideal fully and completely… in far less time than it would have taken a capitalist system” (42).

• COLLECTIVE WILL  -> IDEA and CULTURE -PROPAGANDA-EDUCATION-DISCIPLINE:

Gramsci’s uneasiness with the anomaly of the war (so in a sense also with the Russian Revolution) seems to have to do with Gramsci’s “cultural” and educational concerns that frame his account for the collective revolutionary will. If on the one hand, the occurrences that exceed the normal course of events give an importance to men’s collective will which it would not have under normal conditions, need to be understood as exception to the order of things – which means that they also confirm the historical necessity and rationality of the normal course of events. On the other hand, in the normal course of events, men’s collective will needs to be raised and domesticated into a consensus to serve such an historical necessity.  Here, it’s where Gramsci’s particular understanding culture emerges as inherently entangled with discipline, propaganda, organization, and voluntary submission.

“Culture is quite different. It is the organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’s personality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we can come to understand our value and place within history,  our proper function in life, our rights and duties.”(9)

Culture so understood makes sure that the universal idea (Socialism) becomes the programmatic ideal around which a new social organism can unite and emerge as a well-developed self-aware historical subject. The socialist ideal (concrete universal) is the unifying factor that enables the establishment of those affective ties that constitute the collective will of the nation and enables it to become a fully developed historical subject acting through the consciousness of its universal aim. The creation and transformation of the multiplicity of individuals into a social organism that will be the agent of the new order implies “a long term task of educating and mentally priming its members” (37) to “guarantee the kind of immediate, effective, deep-rooted consensus which provide a solid foundations for action”(37). Only through this process of grass-root education:

“Man is coming to know himself, to know how much his individual will can be worth and how powerful it can become, if by bowing to necessity, by disciplining himself to obey necessity, it can come to dominate necessity itself, by identifying necessity with its own ends. Who is it who really know himself? Not man in. general, but the man the submits to the yoke of necessity.” (56)

“Will in a Marxist sense, means consciousness of ends”(57).

• ORDER -> NATION-CLASS-STATE-PARTY SUTURE:

Finally, in these pages, Gramsci comes across as having settled the problematic National Question that dominated the Marxist debate at the beginning of the century.  The Historical dialectical necessity aims to the establishment of a higher order, that is the concrete universal of socialism. And such an order emerges as depending on the suture Nation-Class-State enacted through the party which is “a State in potential, which is gradually maturing.” The party “depends on the international only for its ultimate aim, and for the essential nature of its struggle, as struggle between classes” (4), but its immediate task is rather national. The party’s specific function and responsibility is to lead the nation to the its self-awareness… so to bring the “millions of individuals scattered throughout Italian territory, each leading his own life, each rooted in his own soil, knowing nothing of Italy…”(28) to form a social and political unity.

The constitution of the nation as collective will around the idea and the program of socialism is the task and the fulfillment of the party universal potential to become the State organizing the superior order that overcomes the chaos of capitalism and bourgeois competition.

Preliminary Reflections on Antonio Gramsci’s Pre-Prison Writings (p. 0-100) – Michael Portal

Here are my preliminary thoughts and notes on the first 100 pages of Antonio Gramsci’s Pre-Prison Writings. My ignorance (in general, and of Gramsci in particular) means that I have, at the moment, little to contribute to our discussions. Still, I found the reading interesting and exciting – and I eagerly look forward to reading the reflections of others and learning from everyone in the coming days and months.

In my reading, I was struck by how Gramsci addressed the historical. Humanity, Gramsci suggests, is nothing but its history: “Man is primarily a creature of spirit – that is, a creation of history, rather than nature” (10). Elsewhere: “But society, like man himself, always remains an irreducible historical and ideal entity, which develops by continually contradicting itself and surpassing itself” (48). History exists to illuminate the world (we learn who we are as historical beings through our projects within history), but history does not predetermine our world: it is “a past which illuminates and does not overshadow us” (14).

Potentially in tension with this line, however, is Gramsci’s observation that we are intimately involved in crafting history (“History is a product of humanity”) and that history “is not a question of evolution, but of substitution of one thing for another: something which can only be done by a self-conscious and disciplined use of force” (78). For this, the Russian Revolution is exemplary: Russia is “where history is” because, in part, “the Russian Revolution had paid its dues to History” (95).

In the Italian context, as Gramsci hopes to demonstrate, history (or History?) means something particular. “Italian history,” he writes, is clearly distinct from “the history written in the history books” (30). Instead, “the greater, the richer history” remains unwritten and is present as a special “bond of solidarity” between the Italian people. Are these bonds contingent or eternal? Are they a “concrete universal”? (25)

What is interesting (or important) about these thoughts on history is how they allow us to rethink utopias and utopianism. For Gramsci, utopias are not ‘unreal’ in the traditional sense. Instead, they lack a history (they have “no foundation”) because they are founded “on an infinity of details, rather than a single moral principle” (20). History “in the true sense of the word” evades writing, of being restricted to some endless list of details (55). Merely recording information, producing encyclopedias, is not sufficient: “one will not be writing history” (56). Instead, we can (and must?) think of history as an event “entirely composed of practical activity (economic and moral).”

The turn towards practical activity might shed light on the supposed tension I isolated above – between our being both the products and producers of history. Practical activity, living daily life, sits bizarrely in historical writing. It does not contain high drama; it won’t sell books. But it is all that we have and are. Political mobility should, accordingly, be based on this (and our) reality.

(This is the first posting.  The idea is for some of us to read systematically the Gramscian oeuvre.  Those in the reading group who so desire will post 500-word comments, just notes for discussion, with an aim to accurate understanding, and there might be discussion follow-ups in this space, although we mean to have the primary discussions through Zoom every three weeks or so. We begin with the Pre-Prison Writings, which, we understand, do not necessarily represent the mature Gramsci in every respect.)   

The Hegelian ethical state, accomplished through the bourgeois revolution, is not enough.  We must move towards the construction of an organic state, which only the Party, as the shadow government of the proletariat, can prepare.   It is a matter of culture over economics:  culture enables the proletariat to know itself, that is, to accomplish self-consciousness through the “disciplining of one’s inner self,” through the “mastery of one’s own personality,” through the “attainment of higher awareness” that will lead to understanding the place of the proletariat as universal class in history.  That will naturally determine “our function, rights and duties” (9-10).

History is therefore “the supreme reason” (13).  And history teaches us that the unleashing of productive forces, a “greater productive efficiency” that will eliminate all the “artificial factors that limit productivity” (15), will bring about communism.  It is therefore a matter of “exploiting capital more profitably and using it more effectively” (16).  Yes, towards equality and solidarity, love and compassion (90).  This is the truth of history, and “to tell the truth, to reach the truth together is a revolutionary, communist act” (99).  This will be “the final act, the final event, which subsumes them all, with no trace of privilege and exploitation remaining” (48).

Thinking is being, and being is history.  There is an “identification of philosophy with history” (50).  This is why Marxism is “the advent of intelligence into human history” (56), which is equal to “identifying [historical] necessity with [man’s] own ends” (56).  This is the task of the Party.  “Voluntarism” is the task of the Party, and it is “about the class becoming distinct and individuated, with a political life independent, disciplined, without deviations or hesitations” (57).  Until it can, not conquer the State, but “replace it” (62).

The Party is all, but it is only the vanguard of the all.  “Most people do not exist outside some organization, whether it calls itself the Church or the Party, and morality does not exist without some specific, spontaneous organ within which it is realized.  The bourgeoisie is a moment of chaos not simply where production is concerned, but where the spirit is concerned” (72).

When Gramsci discusses the Italian liberal Constitution existing in 1919 he notes that Italians have been living under a state of exception for several years.  The exception reveals the rule, he says, and the rule is the rule of domination by bourgeois interests as expressed by liberalism.  The situation post-state of exception, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, might enable the unleashing of true history.  “The proletariat is born out of a protest on the part of the historical process against anything which attempts to bog down or to strait-jacket the dynamism of social development” (88-89).

The Party will lead, by submitting to history and its unleashing, the people in order to create, through “ceaseless work of propaganda and persuasion,” an “all-encompassing and highly organized system” (99).  Freedom is party discipline (26).

No es que tenga un gusto especial por la polémica. Pero ya que estamos en esto, quisiera advertir que escribo estas notas como reacción, sin rabia ni segundas intenciones, tanto a la serie de intervenciones de Giorgio Agamben en periódicos de dudosa proveniencia en la península itálica, como a la serie de respuestas que sus textos no dejan de producir en un público que si bien ya no responde a la noción kantiana de publicidad burguesa, existe patentemente en la virtualidad no menos real de las llamadas redes sociales. En este sentido, basta que el italiano publique unas cuantas opiniones para que estas tengan una interesante resonancia a nivel de las redes, permitiendo demarcar las posiciones en un confuso universo virtual. Como un Moisés paranoico frente a la sofisticación infinita del biopoder, Agamben parte las aguas del Facebook para dividir a filisteos de creyentes, invitándonos a una travesía que pasa por la apodíctica confirmación de sus tesis centrales.

Según él, estaríamos encallados en un estado de excepción ya pre-figurado desde los orígenes mismos de la política occidental. La pandemia del Covid-19 no sería sino un dispositivo, como el teléfono, orientado a controlar la existencia, suprimiendo la condición inanticipable de la experiencia. Con un tono oportuno y grave, Agamben pareciera restarle pertinencia a las medidas tomadas por los Estados nacionales, denunciando su oscura vocación totalitaria. Por supuesto, más allá de su insólita coincidencia con la agenda libertaria de un neoliberalismo desesperado frente a la desaceleración de sus procesos de acumulación, habría que preguntarse no por la pertinencia de sus ensayos acotados a la pandemia actual, sino por las tesis fundantes que lo llevan a concebir esta situación en el horizonte inmunitario de un orden biopolítico que parece no tener fisuras.

Sin embargo, lo que impresiona no es solo la resonancia de sus juicios y pronósticos, sino el rechazo que estos generan. Es como si mucha gente hubiese estado esperando el momento preciso para encararle su inmerecido prestigio, sus lecturas tendenciosas, su protagonismo sin sentido. En vez de confrontar el problema en el don de su complejidad, hoy en día puede leerse fácilmente una serie de descalificaciones que pasan por desacreditar los medios en los que el italiano publica, su uso sospechoso de las estadísticas, su dudoso prestigio en la academia norteamericana, su condición de filósofo mediático, y una serie bastante interesantes de argumentos ad-hominem.

¿Qué se puede hacer frente a esto? Si no hubiese nada en juego, tal vez lo mejor sería unirse a la alegría ebria del consenso mediático y crucificar a Agamben por su paranoica lectura del presente. Después de todo, en la perfección del negocio mediático, todo sirve, mientras más duro le demos, más capitaliza su “signature” y aumenta la rentabilidad de sus acciones.

Sin embargo, tengo la impresión de que lo que está en juego acá es algo sustantivo y merece la pena detenernos aquí. Procedo a señalar algunas dimensiones que bajo ningún punto de vista quieren ser argumentativas, sino solo indicativas de lo que estaría realmente en juego el affaire Agamben:

1) Una confrontación sostenida con Agamben no tiene que ser, necesariamente, una refutación o una denegación, sino una “solicitación” sistemática, rigurosa, de lo que éste nos ha venido diciendo desde hace años. De su lectura schmittiana de Benjamin, de su singular reducción de la deconstrucción a una hermenéutica apolítica, de su re-teologización de la política, de su reflotamiento del franciscanismo como altísima pobreza, etc. pero no para indicar algún error (cuestión propia del discurso filosófico universitario) sino para estremecer sus decisiones y conclusiones. Tan importante como el desarrollo mismo de esta interrogación es entender que ella no puede ser, simplemente, una crítica en sentido moderno universitario.

2) A la vez, también resultaría interesante preguntarse por el carácter sintomático no solo de sus intervenciones acotadas a la crisis del Covid-19, sino de las respuestas, casi compulsivas, que intentan refutarle, desbancarle, desprestigiarle, y disputarle un supuesto lugar de saber, una cierta posicionalidad discursiva que sigue totalmente atrapada en una estructuración principial del sentido, para la cual el problema con la filosofía de Agamben no es su intento de sobre-determinar la experiencia (desde un dispositivo infalible por abstracto), sino el hecho de que “su” filosofía no sería la más indicada para permitirnos comprender el presente, como si el problema se resolviera al dar con la filosofía adecuada para nuestro tiempo, sin cuestionar su misma posicionalidad principial, arcóntica, archeo-teleológica. Después de todo, sin este cuestionamiento an-árquico, las disputas se reducen a peleas partisanas, a nuevas políticas de la amistad.

3) Pareciera entonces que una confrontación reflexiva con Agamben no podría limitarse a la impertinencia de sus textos acotados al Covid-19, ni a la denuncia de los medios escritos en que dichos textos han aparecido. Me atrevería a decir que todo esto es secundario, casi irrelevante, a menos que seamos capaces de mostrarlos como consecuencia de decisiones complejas acaecidas en un momento en que su pensamiento alcanzó su mayor fulgor y, por lo mismo, su mayor ceguera. Y es allí, me parece, donde habría que llevar el asunto, a la cuestión misma de la soberanía, del poder y de la experiencia, que Jacques Derrida señaló como instancia central donde pensar la operación agambeniana. Precisamente porque lo que está en juego en esta confrontación no es la mera formulación paranoica de una hipótesis policial basada en el resentimiento de Agamben con Derrida o del supuesto desdén u odio de Derrida hacia Agamben, sino la cuestión misma de la soberanía, de la violencia y de la política.

4) Mi hipótesis de lectura entonces indica que en la tensión entre las formas de pensar la cuestión de la soberanía, la violencia y el poder, en Derrida y Agamben, se juega la recepción, crítica o no, del pensamiento heideggeriano y la misma cuestión benjaminiana de la violencia divina. Pero lo que se juega en este juego, si así puede decirse, no es tanto la legitimidad hermenéutica o filológica de un pensamiento basado en la recuperación-traición de sus antecedentes inmediatos, sino la posibilidad de elaborar un pensamiento crítico de la facticidad que no se satisfaga con su popularidad mediática ni con su posicionalidad arcóntica, auratizada y autorizante. Me inclino a pensar que, de lo contrario, solo lograremos habitar en la estela aurática de una publicidad virtual y partisana.

Por supuesto, no sería menos irónico descubrir que el mismo Agamben se ha contagiado, sin saberlo, con el virus.