The Unfathomable Principle: on Helmuth Plessner’s Political Anthropology (2019). By Gerardo Muñoz

Posted on February 25, 2019 by Gerardo.Muñoz

Joachim Fischer tells us in the epilogue of Helmuth Plessner’s 1931 Power and Human Nature, now translated as Political Anthropology (Northwestern, 2019), that this short book is very much the intellectual product of its time. It is a direct consequence of Plessner’s elaboration of a philosophical anthropology in the wake of the “philosophies of life” that dominated German philosophical discourse during the first decades of the twentieth century. More importantly, it is also a reflection very much tied to the crisis of the political and parliamentary democracy experienced at the outset of the years of the Weimar Republic. Plessner’s own intellectual position, which suffered tremendously due to his unsuccessful major work, The Levels of the Organic and the Human (1928), occupies a sort of third space in the theoretical debates on the political at the time, carving a zone that was neither that of a romantic impolitical position (the George Group, Thomas Mann, and others), nor that of liberal legalism perhaps best expressed by Hans Kelsen.

Curiously, Plessner’s understanding of the political cohabitates quite conformably in Carl Schmitt’s lesson, albeit in a very particular orbit. On his end, Schmitt himself did not miss the opportunity to celebrate Plessner’s defense of the political as grounded on his friend-enemy distinction elaborated just a few years prior. Indeed, for Schmitt, Plessner’s Political Anthropology drafted an epochal validation to his otherwise juristic formulation, going as far as to write that: “Helmuth Plessner, who was the first modern philosophizer in his book dared to advance a political anthropology of a grand style, correctly says that there exists no philosophy and no anthropology which is not politically relevant, just as there is no philosophically irrelevant politics” (Plessner 104).

Schmitt captures the essence of the convergence between the philosophical anthropology project and the nature of the political as a consequence of modern “loss of center” in search of a principle of autorictas (a “new political center” that the Conservative Revolution will soon try to renew) [1]. In this sense, Plessner, like Schmitt but also like Weber, is a thinker of legitimacy as a supplementary principle, although he declined to craft a theory of legitimation. Unlike Weber, Plessner does not defend charisma as the central concept of political vocation. The nature of the political coincides with the nature of the Human insofar as it is a constitutive element of conflict, and univocally, a “human necessity” (Plessner 5). Hence, Plessner’s theory of political was the ultimate test for philosophical anthropology, given that the general historical horizon of the project was meant to provide a practico-existential position within concrete conditions of its own historicity, responding to both the Weimar Republic and the belated nature of the ‘German national spirit’ [2].

We are to do well to read Plessner’s political anthropological elaboration in conjunction with his other book The Belated Nation (1959), in which he draws a lengthy intellectual genealogy of the decline of the German bourgeoisie as a process of spiritual embellishment with impolitical fantasies. In a certain sense, both Political Anthropology and The Belated Nation (still to be translated into English) are a response to the Weimar intellectual atmosphere of the “devaluation of politics”. There is no doubt that Plessner is thinking of Thomas Mann’s unpolitischen here, but also of the poetic fantasies that Furio Jesi later referred to as the mythical fascination with the “secret Germany” [3]. The impolitical repression from political polemos to consensualism always leads to worse politics (Plessner 3). Politics must be taken seriously, and this means, for Plessner, a position that not only goes against the aesthetes, but one that is also critical of the dominant ideological partisanship preparing the battleground for gigantisms, of which classic liberalism, Marxism, and fascism were manifolds of philosophy of history. Plessner wants to locate politics as a consequence of the Enlightenment (Plessner 9). For Plessner, this entails thinking the conditions of philosophy anew in order to escape the dualistic bifurcation of an anthropological analysis grounded in either empiricism or a transcendental a prori. The conventional biologist program of anthropological analysis never moved beyond the scheme of “mental motivation”, which is why it never escaped the limits of a “pure power politicized, predominantly pessimistic, anti-enlightenment and in that respect, conservative” (Plessner 10).

We could call this an archaic anthropology for political shortcuts. Obviously, Plessner places the project of political anthropology beyond the absolutization of the human in its different capacities. This was the problem of Heidegger’s analysis of existence, according to Plessner, since it stopped at “the conditions of the possibility of addressing existence as existence at the same time have the sense of being conditions of the possibility of leading existence as existence” (Plessner 24). This “essentialization of existence” (Plessner dixit) is only possible at the expense of concrete formilizable categories such as life, world, and culture (Plessner 24). It is only with Wilhelm Dilthey’s work that philosophical anthropology was capable of advancing in any serious way. It is only after Dilthey’s position against a ‘nonhistorical apriorism’ that something like the a characterization of the Human as an unfathomable principle was drawn. The battle against a priori absolutism entails the renunciation of philosophy’s “hegemonic position of its own epistemological conditions…to access the world as the embodiment of all zones and forms of beings” (Plessner 28). We are looking at a post-phenomenological opening of historicity that is neither bounded by existence qua existence (Heidegger’s position), nor by the Hegelian’s labor of the negative. For Plessner, the most interesting definition of the political lies here, but this presupposes the principle of unfathomability of the human. Undoubtedly, this is the vortex of Plessner’s political anthropology.

The principle of the unfathomable is neither precritical nor empirical, as it takes the human relation to the world as what “can never be understood completely. They are open questions” (Plessner 43). This schemata applies to the totality of the human sciences in their relation to life in the world as the only immanent force of history. Thus, for Plessner, this entails that “every generation acts back on history and thereby turns history into that incomplete, open, and eternally self-renewing history that can be adequately approach the interpreting penetration of this generation open questioning” (Plessner 45). This materialism subscribes neither Marx’s synthetic historical materialism, nor the empirical history of progress. The unfathomable relates to a historicity that, in its reference and relation to the world, presents an “eternal refigurability or openness” (Plessner 46). This is an interpretation close to the definition of modernity as the self-assertive epoch of irreversibility, later championed by Hans Blumenberg. The irreversible, following the unfathomable principle, assumes the ex-centric positionality of the human. The unfathomable principle is what concretely binds the human to the phenomena of the world by means of a radical originary separation that carries an ever-evolving power for historical sense beyond absolute universality.

Of course, Plessner is thinking here of Max Weber’s important insights in Economy and Society regarding the process of legitimation and the separation of powers. The human of political anthropology becomes nothing but the means to “executive the value-democratic equalization of all cultures”, which is a common denominator of civil society pluralism (Plessner 47). But as life itself becomes indeterminate and unfathomable, power is rediscovered as a self-regulating mechanism of inter-cultural relations among human communities. In other words, insofar as the unfathomable principle drives the openness of the human in relation to the world and others, the human always entails a positing of the question of power as a form of a struggle in relation to what is foreign (Plessner 51). Here Plessner follows Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political transposing it to the human: “As power, the human is necessarily entangled in a struggle for power; i.e, in the opposition of familiarity and foreignness, of friend and enemy” (Plessner 53).

We might recall that Schmitt addressed the definition of the enemy from Daubler’s reference to “our own question” (Der Feind ist unsere eigene Frage als Gestalt), that is, with what is one’s most familiar, a sort of originary primal scene of his subjective caesura. For Plessner, as for Schmitt, the friend-enemy relation is an originary confrontation that makes the political an exercise of “every life-domain serviceable and just as well be made to serve every life-domain’s interests” (Plessner 55). The friend-enemy relation accomplishes two functions simultaneously: it takes power seriously in light of the unfathomable principle, and it dispenses conflict without ever reaching a stage of total annihilation. That is why Plessner emphasizes that the political has primacy in the ex-centric essence of the human (Plessner 60).

In fact, for Plessner there is no philosophical anthropology without a political anthropology. And here we reach a crux moment, which is Plessner’s most coherent definition of the political principle: “Politics is then not just a field and a profession…Politics then is not primarily a field but the state of human life in which it gives itself its constitution and asserts itself against and in the world, not just externally and juridically but from out of its ground and essence. Politics is the horizon in which the human acquires the relation that makes sense of itself and the world, the entire a prori of its saying and doing” (Plessner 61).

Philosophical anthropology is to be understood as a process of historical immanence and radical openness of the human’s ex-centric position in coordination with a metaphysical political principle that guides the caesura between thought and action. In fact, we could say that politics here becomes a hegemonic phantasm (very much in the same as in post-foundatonalist thought) that establishes the conditions for the efficacy of immanence, but only insofar it evacuates itself as its own determination. This is why we call it “phantasmatic”. In fact, Plessner tells us that the political principle has only a primacy because it relates to “the open question or to life itself”.

In other words, the movement that Plessner undertakes to shake the absolutism of philosophy’s abstraction over to anthropology has a prior determination that runs parallel: the fundamental absolutization of the political via the immanence of the principle of unfathomability. Under the cloak of the indetermination of the “philosophy of life”, Plessner ultimately promotes a prote philosophia (first philosophy) of the political even if “in no way subsist absolutely, immovable across history or underneath it” (Plessner 72). There is a paradox here that ultimately runs through Plessner’s anthropological project as whole, and which can be preliminary synthesized in this way: the radical unfathomable principle of the human is, at the same time, established as open and immanent, while it acts as a phantasmatic principle to establish the political. Hence, the political becomes a mechanism of amending originary separation and to provide form to the otherwise multiple becoming of the human. This is why politics, understood as political anthropology, ceases to be an autonomous sphere of action to coincide with the ‘essence of humanness’ in its struggle for the organization of the world. Politics becomes synonymous with the administration of a new legibility of the world and in this way reintroduces hegemony of the political unto existence. Plessner is clear about this:

“Politics is the art of the right moment, of the favorable opportunity. It is the moment that counts…That is why anthropology is possible only if it is politically relevant, that is why philosophy is possible only if it is politically relevant, especially when their insights have been radically liberated from all consideration of purposes and values , considerations that could divert an objective coherent to the last” (Plessner 75).

Fischer is right to remind us that at the heart of Plessner’s Political Anthropology lies an ultimate attempt at combining “spirit” and “power”, a synthesis of Weber and Schmitt for the human sciences inaugurated by Dilthey’s project. But what if the movement towards synthesis and unification of a political theory is the real problem, instead of the solution? Are we to read Plessner’s political anthropology as yet another failed attempt at an political determination in the face of the nihilism of modernity? And what if, as Plessner’s last chapter on politics as a site of the nation for the “human’s possibility that is in each case is own”, is actually something other than political, as Heidegger just a few years later proposed in his readings of Hölderlin’s Hymns? The dialectics between “spirit” and “power”, Weber and Schmitt, the precritical and the humanist empiricism, exclude a third option: a distance from the political beyond the disinterred apolitical thinking and acting, and its secondary partisanship waged around the Political. In this sense, Plessner is fully a product of the Weimar impasse of the political, not yet finding a coherent exodus from Schmitt, and not fully able to confront the ruin of legitimacy. As Wolf Lepenies has reminded us recently, even Weber himself in his last year was uncertain about strong “political determinations”, as Germany started descending into a ‘polar night’ [4].

The oscillation of antithesis – ontology and immanence, predictability and indeterminacy, historicity and the human sciences, politics and existence, nationality and the world – situate Plessner’s essence of the political as a true secular “complex of opposites” that ended up calling for a ‘civilizing ethics’ (Plessner 85). This essence of the political reduces democracy to the psychic latency of drives of the social order, as the unergrundlich (unfathomable) becomes a principle of management in the form of an ethics. This is not to say that the “historical task” of philosophical anthropology remains foreclosed. However, political anthropology does not break away from the conditions of the crisis of the political that was responding to. For Plessner, these conditions pointed to a danger of total depolitisation. Almost a century later, one can say that its opposite has also been integrated in the current technical de-deification of the world.

Notes

Armin Mohler in The Conservative Revolution in Germany 1918-1932 (2018) notes that: “[The Conservative Revolution in 1919]…considered calling themselves the “new Center”. The latter was meant to symbolically represent the need to create a comprehensive political…that would overcome the oppositions of the past”, p.95.
Helmuth Plessner. La nación tardía: sobre la seducción política del espíritu burgués (1935-1959). Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2017.
See, Furio Jesi. Secret Germany: Myth in Twentieth-Century German Culture. Chicago: Seagull Books, 2019.
See, Wolf Lepenies. “Ethos und Pathos”. Welt, February 16, 2019. https://www.welt.de/print/die_welt/debatte/article188905813/Essay-Ethos-und-Pathos.html

The End of the Constitution of the Earth. A review of Samuel Zeitlin’s edition of Tyranny of Values & Other Texts (Telos 2018), by Carl Schmitt. By Gerardo Muñoz.

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Gerardo.Muñoz

Samuel Zeitlin’s edition of Tyranny of Values and Other Texts (Telos Press, 2018) fills an important gap in the English publication of Carl Schmitt’s work, in particular, as it relates to his lesser known essays written during the interwar period. This edition is still meant as an introduction to Schmitt’s political thought and it does not pretend to exhaust all the topics that preoccupied the Catholic jurist, such as the geopolitical transformations of the European legal order, the rise of economicism at a planetary scale, or the ruminations over the early modern theories of sovereignty and its defenders. Indeed, these essays sheds light on the complexity of a thinker as he was coming to terms with the weakening of the ius publicum europeum as the framework of European legality and legitimacy, and of which Schmitt understood himself to be the last concrete representative, as he repeatedly claims in Ex captivate salus.

As David Pan correctly observes in the Preface, the Schmitt that we encounter here is one that is confronting the transformations of political enmity in light of a gloomy and dangerous takeover of a global civil war. In fact, one could most definitely argue that the Schmitt thinking within the Cold War epochality is one that is painstakingly searching for a “Katechon”, that restraining force inherited from Christian theology in order to give form to the ruination of modern legal and political order. The global civil war, cloaked under a sense of acknowledged Humanism, now aimed at the destruction of the enemy social’s order and form of life. This thematizes the existential dilemma of a jurist who was conscious of the dark shadow floating over the efficacy of Western jurisprudence. In other words, the post-war Schmitt is one marked by a profound hamletian condition in the face of the technical neutralization of every effective political theology. This condition puts Schmitt on the defensive, rather than on the offensive, as his later replies to Erik Peterson, Hans Blumenberg, or Jacob Taubes render visible.

The essays in the collection can be divided in three different categories: those on particular political thinkers, some that reflect on political enmity and the concept of war, and two major pieces that deal directly with the crisis of nihilism in the wake of the Cold War (those two essays are “The Tyranny of Values” and “The Order of the World after the Second World War”). Zeitlin includes an early essay on Machiavelli (1927), a brief piece on Hobbes’ three hundred years anniversary (1951), a reflection on his own book Hamlet and Hecuba (1957), and a succinct note on J.J. Rousseau (1962). These are all not necessarily celebratory of each of these figures. Indeed, while in the piece on Hobbes Schmitt celebrates the author of Leviathan as a true political analyst of the English Civil War against Lockean contractualism; the piece on Machiavelli is a clear exposition of his loathe for the Florentine statesman. In fact, to the contemporary student of intellectual history these words might sound unjust: “[Machiavelli] was neither a great statesman nor a great theorist” (Schmitt 46). If politics is understood as the art of reserving an arcanum, as mystery of power against all forces of moral relativism and technical procedures, then, machiavellism’s endgame amounts to a mystified anti-machiavellinism that favors individual pathos over political decisionism. Machiavelli might have said “too much” about politics; and for Schmitt, this excess, points to the flawed human anthropology at the heart of his incapacity for thinking political unity (Schmitt 50).

If juxtaposed with the essay on Hobbes, it becomes clear that Schmitt’s anxiety against Machiavelli is also the result of the impossibility of extracting a Christian philosophy of history, which only the Leviathan was able to guarantee in the wake of a post-confessional world. Whereas Hobbes provided a political theology based on auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem, Machiavellism stood for an impolitical structure devoid of a concrete political kernel. In such light, the essay on Rousseau is astonishingly curious. For one thing, Schmitt paints a portrait of Rousseau that does not adequately fits the contours of a political theologian of Jacobinism. On the reverse side of this, Schmitt also avoids making the case for The Social Contract as a precursor of totalitarianism. Rather, following Julien Freund, Schmitt polishes a Rousseau that stands for limited freedom and equality; a sort of intra-katechon within Liberalism, and in this sense a mirror image of every potential Hegelianism for the unfolding of world history (Schmitt 173). Finally, the piece “What Have I done?”, a response to a critic of his Hamlet and Hecuba, is aimed not so much at the making of a “political Shakespeare”, but rather at shaking up both the “monopoly of dialectical materialist history of art” as well as the “well-rehearsed division of labor” of the university” (Schmitt 139-41). This is critique has not lost any of its relevance in our present.

Whereas the pieces on political thinkers is an exercise in reactroactive gazing on the tradition, the essays on political enmity and war are direct confrontations on the erosion of the European ius publicum europeum in the wake of the Cold War, dominated by the rise of international political entities (NATO, UN), and anticolonial movements of a new global order. It is in this context that Schmitt’s interest in the figure of the partisan begins to take shape as a way to come to terms with the new forms of mobility, irregularity, and changes in its territorial placement of the enemy. In “Dialogue on the Partisan”, Schmitt revises some of his major claims in Theory of the Partisan, while reminding that “the great error of the pacifists…was to claim that one need simply abolish warfare, then there would be peace” (Schmitt 182).The destitution of the ius publicum europeum, that oriented war making vis-a-vis the recognition of political enmity has, in fact, opened up for a de-contained partisanship in which the destiny of populations now was at the center. This new stage of political conflict intensifies the nihilism where potentially anyone is an enemy to be destroyed (Schmitt 194).

As Schmitt claims in the short piece “On the TV-Democracy”, the question becomes who will hold political power and to what extent, as techno-economical machination becomes the force that directly expresses the Goethean myth of nemo eontra deum nisi dens ipse. With the only difference that the mythic in the essence of technology has no political force, but mere force of mobilization of abstract identities and what Heidegger called “standing reserve”. In this new epoch, the human ceases to have a place on earth, not merely because his political persona cannot be defined, but rather because he can no longer identify himself as human (Schmitt 205). Schmitt’s sibylline maxim from poet Theodor Daubler, “The enemy is our question as Gestalt”, thus loses its capacity for orientation. Already in the 1940s, Schmitt is contemplating a crisis that he does not entirely resolve.

This is one way in which the important essay “The Forming of the French Spirit via the Legists”, from 1941, must be understood. This text on the one hand it is a remarkable sketch of French jurisprudence, grounded on “mesura”, “order”, “rationalism”, and sovereignty. It is no doubt an essay directed against royalist French intellectuals (Henri Massis and Charles Maurras are implicitly alluded to); but also at the concept of state sovereignty. Indeed, the most productive way to read this essay is next to The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1938) written a couple of years prior. The impossibility of crafting a theory of the political in the wake of the exhaustion of the sovereign state form will eminently leave the doors wide open for a global civil war, as he argues in the post-war essay “Amnesty or the Force of Forgetting”. Schmitt’s defense of the a formation of the Reich in the 1940s will be translated in his general theory of a ‘new nomos of the earth’ immediately after the war.

The two most important pieces included in The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts (2018) are “The Tyranny of Values” (1960), and “The Order of the World after the Second World War”. The “actuality” of Schmitt’s political thought has a felicitous grounds on these essays, although by no account should we claim that they adjust themselves to the intensification of nihilism in our current moment. There is much to be said about the weight that Schmitt puts on the “economic question”, a certain pull that comes from the emphasis of the much debated question then concerning “development-underdevelopment”, which does not really capture the metastasis of value in the global form of the general principle of equivalence today. Schmitt also deserves credit in having captured in “The Tyranny of Values”, the ascent of the supremacy of “value” in relation to the philosophies of life (Schmitt 12). Schmitt quotes Heidegger’s analysis, for whom “value and the valuable become the positivistic ersatz for the metaphysical” (Schmitt 29), which we can have only intensified in the twenty-first century. Perhaps with the only difference that “value” is no longer articulated explicitly. But who can deny that identitarian discourse is a mere transposition of the tyranny of values? Who can negate that the cost-benefit analysis, “silent revolution of our times” as one of the most important constitutionalists has called it, now stands as the hegemonic form of contemporary technical rationality? [2].

At one point in the “Tyranny” essay, while commenting on Scheler’s philosophy, Schmitt says something that it has clearly not lost any of its legibility in our times: “Max Scheler, the great master of objective value theory has: the negation of a negation value is a positive value. That is mathematically clear, as a negative times a negative yields a positive. One can see from this that the binding of the thinking of value to its old value-free opposition is not so lightly to be dissolved. This sentence of Max Scheler’s allows evil to be requited with evil and in this way, to transform our earth into a hell, the hell however to be transform into a paradise of values” (Schmitt 38). It is a remarkable conclusion, and one in which the “mystery of evil” (the Pauline mysterium iniquitatis) becomes the primary function of the art of government in our times. It is here where we most clearly see the essence of the techno-political as the last reserve of legal liberalism. Schmitt would have been surprised (or perhaps not) to see that the disappearance of the rhetoric of values also coincides with a new regulation of disorder, whether it takes the name of “security”, “cost and benefits”, or “identity and diversification”. Indeed, now politics even has its own place in the consummation of the race for the “highest values”, since anything can be masked a “political” at the request of the latest demand.

In his 1962 conference “The Order of the World after the Second World War”, delivered in Madrid by invitation of his friend Manuel Fraga, Schmitt still is convinced that he can see through the interregnum. Let me quote him one last time: “I used the word nomos as a characteristic denomination for the concrete division and distribution of the earth. If you now ask me, in this sense of the term nomos, what is, today, the nomos of the earth, I can answer clearly : it is the division of the earth into industrially developed regions or less developed regions, joined with the immediate question of who accepts development f aidrom whom…This distribution is today the true constitution of the earth” (Schmitt 163). It is a sweeping claim, one that seeks to illuminate a specific opaque moment in history.

But I am not convinced that we can say the same thing today. Here I am in agreement with Galli and Williams, who have noted that the disappearance of a Zentralgebiet no longer solicits the force of the Katechon [3]. And it is the Katechon that guarantees an effective philosophy of history for the Christian eon. The Katechon provides for a juridical sense of order against a mere transposition of the theological. Indeed, it is never a matter of theological reduction, which is why Schmitt had to evoke Gentilis’ outcry: Silenti theologi, in munere alieno! I guess the question really amounts to the following: can a constitution of the earth, even if holding potestas spiritualis, regulate the triumph of anomia and the unlimited? Do the bureaucrat and the technician have the last world over the legitimacy of the world? Here the gaze of the jurist turns blank and emits no answer. One only wonders where Schmitt would have looked for new strengths in seeking the revival of a constitution of the earth; or if this entails, once and for all, the closure of the political as we know it.

Notes

Carl Schmitt. The Tyranny of Values and Other Texts, Translated by Samuel Garrett Zeitlit. New York: Telos Publishing Press, 2018.
Cass Sunstein. The Cost Benefit Revolution. Massachusetts: MIT Press 2018.
See Carlo Galli, “Schmitt and the Global Era”, in Janus’s Gaze: Essays on Carl Schmitt. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, p.129. Also, Gareth Williams, “Decontainment: The Collapse of the Katechon and the End of Hegemony”, in The Anomie of the Earth (Duke University Press 2015), p.159-173.

The triumph of res idiotica and communitarianism: on Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. By Gerardo Muñoz.

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Gerardo.Muñoz

Patrick Deneen’s much-awaited book Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2017) is a timely contribution that, in the wake of the Trump presidency, vehemently confirms the epochal crisis of political liberalism, the last standing modern ideology after the demise of state communism and short-lived fascist mass movements of the twentieth century. It is difficult to distinguish whether liberalism is still a viable horizon capable of giving shape to citizenship or if on the contrary, it endures as a residual form deprived of democratic legitimacy and popular sovereignty [1]. In fact, contemporary liberalism seems incapable of attending to social demands that would allow for self-renewal. In a slow course of self-abdication, which Carl Schmitt predicted during the Weimar Republic, liberalism has triumphed along the lines of a logical administration of identity and difference through depolitization that has mutated as a global war in the name of ‘Humanity’ [2]. The catastrophic prospect of liberalism is far from being a schmittian alimony of political exceptionalism. In fact, Mark Lilla in his recent The Once and Future Liberal (2017) claims, quite surprisingly, that the “liberal pedagogy of our time is actually a depolitizing force” [3]. What is at stake at the threshold of liberal politics is the irreducible gap between idealia and realia that stages a moment where old principles wane, no longer accounting for the material needs in our contemporary societies [4].

Deneen confronts the foundation of its idealia. Deneen’s hypothesis on the failure of liberalism does not follow either the track of betrayal or the path of abdication. Rather, Deneen claims that liberalism has failed precisely because it has remained “true to itself” (Deneen 30). In other words, liberalism has triumphed in its own failure, crusading towards liberation as a philosophy of history, while administrating and containing every exception as integral to its own governmentality. If modern liberalism throughout the nineteenth century (an expression of the Enlightenment revolutionary ethos) provided a political referent for self-government, the grounds for the rule of law, and the exercise of liberty against divine absolute powers (the medieval theology of the potentia absoluta dei); contemporary liberalism has found consolidation as a planetary homogeneous state that reintroduces a new absolutism that interrupts modern man’s self-affirmation against divine contingencies [5]. Since its genesis, liberalism was held by two main anthropological assumptions: individualism as the kernel for the foundation of negative liberty and the radical separation of the human from nature, both by way of an economic-political machine that liberates the individual at the same time that it expands the limits of the state. The rise of the securitarian state is the effective execution of this logic, by which politics centers on governing over the effects in a perpetual reproduction of its causes. These ontological premises are the underlying infrastructures of a two-headed apparatus that ensembles the state and the market in the name of the unrestrained conception of liberty. As Deneen argues: “…liberalism establishes a deep and profound connection; its ideal of liberty can be realized only through a powerful state. If the expansion of freedom is secured by law, then the opposite also holds true in practice: increasing freedom requires the expansion of law” (Deneen 49).

But the same holds true for the unlimited market forces that today we tend to associate with late-modern neo-liberal laissez-faire that presupposes the expansion of functional units of state planning as well as the conversion of the citizen as consumer. The duopoly of state-market in liberalism’s planetary triumph spreads the values of individual autonomy, even if this necessarily entails the expansion of surveillance techniques and the ever-increasing pattern of economic inequality within an infinite process of flexible accumulation and charity that maintain mere life. In this sense, globalization becomes less a form of cosmopolitan integration, and more the form of planetarization driven by the general principle of equivalence that metaphorizes events, things, and actions into an abstract process of calculability [6]. This new nomic spatialization, which for Deneen discloses the erosion of local communitarian forms of life as well as the capacity for national destiny, is the epochē of sovereignty as the kernel principle of liberalism. In other words, Liberalism’s sovereigntist traction was always-already exceptio through which the governance of the nomos is only possible as the effective proliferation and rule over its anomic excess.

The substantial difference with early forms of liberalism is that only in the wake of contemporary globalization and the post-industrial reorganization of labor, this exceptionalism no longer functions as a supplement to the normative system, since it is what marks the subsumption of all spheres of action without reminder. In this scenario, liberalism is no longer a political ideology nor is it a horizon that orients a modern movement towards progress; its sole task is to control the imports of identity and difference within the social. One could say that liberalism is a technique for containing, in the way of a thwarted katechon, a society without limits. Paradoxically, liberalism, which once opposed sovereign dictatorship, now endorses a universality that cannot be transmitted, and a principle of democracy that has no people (populus).

In the subsequent chapters of Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen turns to liberalism’s imperial mission in four distinct social paradigms: culture, technology, the Liberal Arts in the university, and the rise of a new aristocracy. The commonality in each of these topoi is that in each and every one of these social forms, liberalism has produced the opposite of what it had intended. Of course, it did so, not by abandoning its core principles, but precisely by remaining faithful to them, while temporalizing the hegemony of the same as eternal. First, in the sphere of culture, Deneen argues that liberalism’s inclination towards an anticultural sentiment is consistent with multiculturalism as the “eviscerated and reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb” (Deneen 89). The culturalism promoted by liberalism is a process of deletion that knows only a fictive transmutation within the logic of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ that seeks to exhaust the cosmos of the singular. The price to be paid for policed inclusion of cultural differences into liberal anticultural norms, aside from leaving the economic accumulation untouched, is that it forces a form of consent that tailors the radically irreducible worldviews to standardized and procedural form of subjective recognition. Although Deneen does not articulate it in these terms, one could say that culturalism – which Deneen prefers to call liberalism anticulturalism-, amounts, in every instance, to a capture that supplies the maintenance of its hegemonic thrust.

Nowhere is this perceived with more force today than in liberal arts colleges and universities across the country, where from both ideological extremes, the Liberal Arts as a commitment to thinking and transmission of institutional knowledge is “now mostly dead on most campuses” (Deneen 113). From the side of the political conservative right, the way to confront the ongoing nihilism in the university, has been to completely abandon the liberal arts, pledging alliance to the regime of calculative valorization (the so called “STEMS” courses) on the basis of their attractive market demand. But the progressive left does not offer any better option, insisting by advancing the abstract “critical thinking” and one-sided ideological politization, it forgets that critique is always-already what feeds nihilism through the negative, which does little to confront the crisis in a democratic manner. The demise of the liberal arts in the contemporary university, depleted by the colonization of the dominance by principle of general equivalence, reduces the positionality of Liberal Arts to two forms of negations (critique and market) for hegemonic appropriation [7]. In one of the great moments of Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen declares that we are in fact moving slowly into the constitution of a res idiotica:

“The classical understanding of liberal arts as aimed at educating the free human being ids displaced by emphasis upon the arts of the private person. An education fitting for a res publica is replaced with an education suited for a res idiotica – in the Greek, a “private” and isolated person. The purported difference between left and right disappears as both concur that the sole legitimate end of education is the advance of power through the displacement of the liberal arts” (Deneen 112).

Liberalism idiotism is invariable, even when our conduct is within the frame of public exposition. One must understand this transformation not merely as a consequence of the external economic privation of the public university (although this adds to the decline of whatever legitimacy remains of the Liberal Arts), but more importantly as a privatization of the modes of the general intellect into a dogmatic and technical instrumentality that “can only show their worth by destroying the thing they studied” (Deneen 121). The movement of liberalization of higher education, both in terms of its economic indexes and flexible epistemic standardization, dispenses the increasing erosion of institutions, whose limits have now become indeterminate within the general mechanics of valorization. The res idiotica is the very exhaustion of the res publica within liberal technicality, where any form of impersonal commonality is replaced by the unlimited expansion of expressive subjectivism. In a total reversal of its own conditions of possibility, the outplay of the res idiotica is satisfied in detriment of any use of public reason and freedom, if by the latter we understand a commitment to the polis as a space in which the bios theoretikos was never something to be administered, but constructed every time [8]. The emergence of res idiotica coincides with the decline of politics as a force of democratization in the public use of reason.

In the economic sphere, the assault of the res publica entails the emergence of a new aristocracy, which as Deneen argues, was already latent in liberalism’s great ideologues’ (Locke, Mill, and Hayek) commitment to a ruling class formation and arbitrary economic distribution. For Deneen, one did not have to wait for Hayek’s experiments in active market liberalism to grasp that what J.S.Mill called “experiments of the living” as the promise of liberation from the social shackles, but only to consecrate an even more stealth system of domination between expert minorities rule and ordinary people. What remains of Liberalism in its material deployment is not much: a res idiotica that fails at constituting a public and civil society devoid of cives, and a state that expands the limits of administration in pursuit of freedom only to perpetuate an aristocratic class. In broad strokes, Deneen’s narrative about liberalism could be well said to be a story about how a “living body” (the People) became an absolute in absentia that only leave us with a practice of idolatry to a supreme and uncontested principle [9].

The idolatrous character of liberal principles is rendered optimal in recent theoretical claims against democracy, where the latter is seen as an obstacle for government rather than as the premise for the legitimacy of popular sovereignty. Hence, democracy is turned into a mechanical arrangement that includes whatever supports liberal assumptions and beliefs, and excludes all forms of life that it sees as a threat to its enterprise. In this way, liberalism today is a standing reserve that administers the proliferation of any expressive differential identities, while scaffolding an internal apparatus for self-reproduction. In one of the most eloquent passages of the book, Deneen evokes the anti-democratic shift of liberalism in the contemporary reflection:

“…the true genius of liberalism was subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizens to equate “democracy” with the ideal of self-made and self-making individuals – expressive individualism – while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a power and distance government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the opportunity and experience of expressive individualism. As long as liberal democracy expands “the empire of liberty”, mainly in the form of expansive rights, power, and wealth, the actual absence of active democratic self-rule is not only an acceptable but a desired end”. Thus liberalism abandons the pervasive challenge of democracy as a regime requiring the cultivation of disciplined self-rule in favor of viewing the government as a separate if beneficent entity that supports limitless provision of material goods and untrammeled expansion of private identity” (Deneen 155-156).

The triumph of the res idiotica works in tandem with the expansion of the administrative state at the level of institutional reserve, and through the presidentialist charismatic populism in covering the void of an absent demos. These two cathetic instances of hegemonic closure maintain the democratic deficit that organizes the polis against any attempt at active dissent against the unlimited forms of commence and war that, according to Deneen, “have increasingly come to define the nation” (Deneen 172). At the very core of its innermost material practices, liberalism amounts to a technical-war machine that, in the name of a homogenous and uprooted ‘humanity’, liquidates the commitment to the res publica as the only political system that can uphold any form of consistent and durable endurance against the imbalanced domination of an unruly and anarchic power. If the political as a modern invention it is said to be a flight from the condition of servitude and slavish subordination, as Quentin Skinner has observed, we are in a position to claim that contemporary liberalism is as much a movement forward in unlimited freedom that articulates a regression to the form of dependence of the slave [10]. Once the singular is dependent on a power that he interiorizes as fully spectral and all encompassing, freedom amounts to a slave restraint over the potentiality of desiring and retreating. In the planetary stage governed by equivalence as the administration of cultural identity formation, the singular comes to occupy the position of the slave that, although is free to exercise his self-command in an unlimited region for self-recognition, any transgression of the normative regime is always-already anticipated by the securitarian apparatus. Politics, as we know it, has come to a close in the liberal paradigm.

Why Liberalism Failed does not shy away from offering a way out, a ‘what is to be done’ to the liberal dominium that puts in crisis the relations between thinking and action, imagination and political ideologies. For some contemporary thinkers (in particular, the post-Heideggerian tradition opened by the work of Reiner Schürmann and Giorgio Agamben) have endorsed a positivization of an-archy as a way for clearing the path beyond the saturation of apolitical liberalism [11]. But if we grant this speculative move, we forget that liberalism is an economy that governs the very excess of foundation that is already well within the anarchy principle. In other words, failure is not an exception or achievement or telos of liberal rationality; it is rather something like its irreducible latent force that gives semblance to the ‘actuality’ of the idolatrous principle. However, if liberalism is only semblance without material substance (barren from popular sovereignty), then it is no longer a constituted principle or archē. Anarchy is thus a false option, although it is not the option that Deneen subscribes. The question remains: what is to be done at the end of liberal politics that have brought to ruin the triad of action, freedom, and even citizenship?

Deneen’s wager is not an endorsement of a new and better theoretical articulation, but the affirmation of a community form that he associates with Tocquevillian ‘schoolhouse of democracy’ as well as with Wendell Berry’s practical communitarianism as a “rich and varied set of personal relations, a complex of practices and traditions drawn from a store of common memory and tradition, and a set go bonds forged between people and place that is not portable, mobile, fungible, or transferable” (Deneen 78). It is at this critical point in the conjuncture, where I see Deneen’s proposal as insufficient on grounds of both his own intellectual premises in his critique of liberalism, as well in relation to what the community form if understood as a locational and identitarian structure.

First, it is not very clear that community as understood here can do the work to retreat from liberal machination. The community form, assumed as a foreclosed and identitarian contained social form, can offer only a thetic instance of what liberalism promotes in its rule through management. The community as a countercultural reaction to liberalism’s promotion of identities leaves intact its own identitarian closure reduced to propriety and consensus [12]. Could one reconcile democracy with a communitarian horizon for a singular that opts for dissent against the communitarian majority? Probably not, because the horizon of communitarization, like that of liberalism, rests on the production of exclusion for anyone that chooses to retreat from the community. The fact that these questions are left unanswered by Deneen’s proposal is a sign the community form does not offer any substantial alternative to atomized identity. Rather, the community form only call to legitimacy is a set of metaphysical niceties such as ‘inheritance’, ‘location’, and ‘practicality’.

By subscribing to organic communitarianism, Deneen postulates a theoretical archē of the community that thrives on what it excludes in order to properly define and constrain itself. In other words, as conceived under the banner of “practical” (not ‘theoretical’) forms of life, the community form becomes an active self-reproductive logic that bars dissent before any threat from the outside. However, there is a second consideration when thinking about community form. Essentially, that it is not convincing that Deneen’s affirmation of the community can claim to be an exception to liberalism’s empire. By retorting that liberalism amounts to a “demolition that comes at the expense of these communities’ settled forms of life”, Deneen immunizes the community as an impolitical form that can be extracted from the logic of real subsumption (Deneen 143). In an ironic endgame, Deneen’s practical communitarianism as a ‘personalized and settled form of life’ recasts contemporary Marxist and current vice-president of Bolivia Alvaro Garcia Linera’s thinking of the community form as organic entelechy that accelerates use value against global transnational capitalism [12]. But whereas for the Bolivian thinker, the task amounts to an actualization of the community form in order to radically transform the state, in the case of Deneen’s proposal, the return to the communitarian patchwork amounts to the fantasy of a radical detachment from the administrative state and national popular structures. These two positions, although from opposing extremes of the ideological spectrum, do not provide an exit from the crisis of politics, but rather the full realization of politics as ongoing nihilism against the negative labor of liberalism. It would seem that the best that either the Left or the Right can offer today is a form of communitarianism.

If community form is always one of theological salvation – as a set of practices that would include care, humility, and modesty at the level of local communities (Deneen 191-192) – then this entails that communitarism works through a theological foundation of faith as the dissuasion of any possible instance of the profane interruption. As Elettra Stimilli has observed, the Christian community of salvation is always already consigns an unknown dimension of freedom, which reintroduces the dependence model of servitude [13]. The factical life of Christian community of faith can only be maintained as an ascetic practice for those that already within the parameters of its beliefs. In short, community form does not only leave unperturbed the functioning of the liberalism’s empire of liberty, and unfortunately can only provide the same broken idealia that fails to confront the interregnum that today names the fracture between theory and practice of the political.

Could it be, rather counter intuitively, that Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is actually an esoteric defense of liberalism? I would like to read the consequences of the book in that direction, by slightly displacing the question of liberalism to that of the anthropological genesis of modernity. This speaks to the book’s admirable tension between the triumphs of liberalism as a failure (or as always failing), while at the same time liberalism’s appeal to realize the admirable ideals that liberalism often only promised (Deneen 184). What if these aporias could allow us to rethink the Enlightenment as a project ‘to come’ that can guarantee open universal conditions for reform and in pursuit of modern man’s self-affirmative counter-communitarian, and institutional durability? What if the Enlightenment could desist on being a triumphalist account of humanist withdrawal, and instead be rendered as a project of radical deficiency, of the crisis of modern science, and the scope of singularity that can never amount to a metaphorization of the idea of liberty, but one that allows for the disturbance of myth (as well the theology) against transcendental action? [14]

The failed triumphalism of liberalism, and here I must agree with Deneen, was confined on its reducibility on subjectivation and subjectivity as an absolute anthropologism. This metaphysical anthropology, in fact, made the psychic life of the singular into identity reproduction between duty and guilt as the dual symptomology of becoming ‘subject’. Liberalism has been a compulsive and failed politics, not because of what it has not achieved by remaining all too faithful to its promises, but because it has substantially realized subjectivity as the uncontested hegemonic principle of the political. Against the servitude of liberalism’s imperial drive, and the communitarian countercultural obligations, the task remains to think the emergence of a universal, marrano, and non-subjective democratic enlightenment that could reinstate the res publica from within the ruins of the res idiotica, only if it is not already too late.

Notes

The retraction of legitimacy in all political systems of the West has been argued by Giorgio Agamben in The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days (2017). Slightly in a different register, what I am arguing here is that the exhaustion of popular sovereignty in liberal hegemony, in part, is due to liberalism’s extreme distance, and at times even explicit rejection, from any transaction with the ‘popular’. At the same time, one could also claim that the emergence of populism in contemporary societies is a latent expression that seeks to ground popular mobilization to readdress the democratic deficit in technocratic governance.
See La Guerra Globale (2002), by Carlo Galli.
Mark Lilla. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017). 137-138.
The epigraph of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th Century, we read: “When the gap between ideal and the real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort beings anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision or order and resumes his search”. The question is whether in the current interregnum the capacity for ‘myth’ can still provide a source to cope with the fissure between a desirable political horizon and a theoretical set of concepts capable of giving form to a new order.
This is the argument for the legitimacy of modernity beyond the theological-political underpinnings in the wake of secularization advanced by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1985).
Although the term general equivalent spans from Marx to Jean Luc Nancy to account for the logic of exchange, for an assessment of the question of equivalence as the logic of nihilistic measurement at a planetary scale, see “Infrapolitical Action The Truth of Democracy at the End of General Equivalence” (2016), by Alberto Moreiras at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0009.004?view=text;rgn=main
The insufficiency of hegemonic politics today has nothing to do with a partisan, theoretical, or ideological inclination. If we say that the theory of hegemony is no longer viable today, it is because it can only work as a collectivization of identity proliferation, whether in the form of the equivalent demand or in through the closure of the community form, failing to provide in either case for a demotic impersonal region. For the crisis of the modern university and the insufficiency of critique, see La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna (1996), by Willy Thayer.
As Arendt writes in her essay “What is Freedom?”: “The way of life chosen by the philosopher was understood in opposition to the bios theoretikos, the political way of life. Freedom, therefore, the very center of politics as the Greeks understood it, was an idea which almost by definition could not enter the framework of Greek philosophy”.
I am thinking here of Adrian Vermeule’s important critique of the idolatrous conception of the separation of powers by legal liberalism in his most recent Law’s abnegation: from Law’s Empire to the administrative state (2017).
Quentin Skinner. “A Genealogy of Liberty”, unpublished lecture read at Stanford University, October 2016.
See, “On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject” (1986), by Reiner Schürmann.
For an important assessment of the limits of the communitarian model, see “Consensus, Sensus Communis, Community” (2016), by Maddalena Cerrato, at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0010.005?view=text;rgn=main
Elettra Stimilli. The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism (2017). 9-10.
This is the moment where Hans Blumenberg, who labeled himself as a disillusioned child of the Enlightenment, took maximum distance from the Kantian unlimited freedom as a necessary presupposition of reason: “However, the danger of using an absolute metaphorics for the idea of freedom can be discerned in Kant himself, and its grave, necessarily misleading consequences can be seen in the introduction of the conception of transcendental action. This makes it natural to regard as freedom anything that can be represented as a transcendental action of understanding”, in Shipwreck with spectator (1997), 101.

The administrative state as second Leviathan. A response to Giacomo Marramao. By Gerardo Muñoz.

Posted on May 25, 2017 by Gerardo.Muñoz

The two day conference “All’ombra del Leviatano: tra biopolitica e postegemonia” in Rome Tre University, was extremely productive and rich for continuing thinking the effectivity of posthegemony as a category for contemporary political reflection. Giacomo Marramao made this very clear in his generous introduction, as well as Mario Tronti, who took up the term several times in light of the crisis of depolitization and neutralization in democratic societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Sadly, at times conferences do not allow more time to reshuffle ingrained beliefs and hardened convictions. Thus, I just want to return to a question that was thrown by Giacomo Marramao regarding my paper on posthegemony, constitutionalism, and the administrative state [1].

I do not have a recording of Giacomo’s commentary, but from my notes, I recall he asked me a question that had two separate parts: a. whether the administrative state was synonymous with the securitarian state, b. why did I refer to the administrative state as a “second order Leviathan”, which I do explicitly in my text without much elaboration. This a central question, which I would like to elaborate in writing a little bit more, as to get me started thinking about a further relation between posthegemony and legality.

So, I will start with the first question: is the administrative state the same as the security state? My gut reaction in the exchange with Marramao was to say no. However, perhaps today the security state is a compartmentalization within the administrative state. In the United States, there is a clear and substantial difference between the rise of the administrative state and the security state in two separate tracks. In the historical development of American legality, we tend to associate the administrative state with the robust state building social policies of the New Deal, that is, with the classic welfare state. In fact, Moreiras argued a few years back that Keynesianism is one of the last figures of modern katechon [2]. Of course, Keynesian economics is somewhat different from the administrative legal development, but I do think that they complement each other. On the other hand, the so called securitarian state, is usually understood in the wake of the the emergency executive power, the torture memos, Guantanamo, and the expansion of other federal agencies to biometrically further deter terrorism after 9/11. At first sight, it seems to me that in Europe the securitarian state has now normalized and conquered the legal paradigm. In the United States, paradoxically, there seems to be a minimal difference between the security and administrative state.

A good example, in fact, is the case of Kris Kobach, a constitutionalist who favors legal securitization against illegal immigration, but not so much in the name of the administrative state. On the contrary, Kobach wants, very much in line with Steve Bannon, to ‘deconstruct the administrative state’. So, my intuition is that whereas in Europe legal developments have led naturally to the securitarian state, in the US the natural development has been towards deference and the delegation principle of administrative law [3]. We have yet to witness a securitarian state as fully hegemonic within the American legal development.

Now, the second question: why do I (should we?) call the administrative state a second order Leviathan? It is true that I should have made clearer that I was implicitly trying to turn around Schmitt’s argument in The Leviathan in The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Everyone remembers that in this book, Schmitt revises the state form in the wake of modern political theology, as already a ‘big machine, a machina machinarum’ within the age of technology [4]. To put it in Gareth Williams’ terms, the katechon was already post-katechontic, unable to fully give form to disorder, and incapable of providing long-lasting authority. In this sense, I agree with Marramao’s paradigmatic thesis that power today lacks authority, and authority lacks power. This seems to me a variation that fully applies to the administrative state. Of course, Schmitt thought administration dispensed anomy. But I think it is quite the opposite. The administrative state has become a great neutralizer of the political as defined by the friend-enemy distinction in the second half of the twentieth century. This is the second katechon.

This administrative katechon withholds the anomy of the full-fleshed market force, as well as the potential force of total politization. This is why both Schmitt from the political sphere, and Hamburger, from the market’s sphere, despise the administrative state. They both seek its destruction, which is an assault against the rule of law. But again, these positions grossly misunderstand the internal development of law’s abnegation, to put it Vermeule’s terms (2016). This katechon has internal legitimacy, but it lacks ex-terior democratic legitimacy of participation and dissent. But the argument of absence of dissent from administration has also been contested (Rodriguez 2014, Williamson 2017). Can one probe the administrative katechon today?

Interestingly, Mario Tronti wrote an essay on the Leviathan to challenge this question. As a Marxist, he called for a will to resist it. Let me briefly quote Tronti: “Men confront the archaic symbols of evil, and against them, they struggle. When men think that, through some of sort divine grace, they do not longer need to struggle, is when they become even more defeated. If time dispenses the tragic, we end up with just a positive acceptance of the world” [5]. This is what Tronti calls the “red heart of conflict”. I have doubts that a principle of subjective will to power can do the work to deactivate the katechon as it stands for the administrative state. In fact, I wonder whether any ‘willing’ against the katechon is even desirable. At the same time, doing so will not differ much from the libertarian position that in the name of an abstract freedom, forgets the infrahuman base of any social existence.

But I also wonder whether Tronti himself still believes in resistance today, since in the conference he called for a reformist political praxis and revolutionary intellectual ideas. I tend to agree more with this scheme, since the administrative state also stands for a process of rationalization. No subjective practice can emerge as an exception to this new katechon without automatically appearing as a bate for this monstrous apparatus. Perhaps another way of thinking about Marramao’s dual question is whether the security state can dethrone the administrative state. Could it happen? If that happens, I will be willing to accept that it will be the end of the second historical katechon as we know it.

Notes

My essay written for the Roma Tre Conference on posthegemony can be read here: https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/posthegemony-and-the-crisis-of-constitutionalism-in-the-united-states-paper-presented-at-allombra-del-leviatano-tra-biopolitica-e-posegemonia-universita-roma-tre-may-2017-by-gerardo/
Alberto Moreiras. “Keynes y el Katechon”. Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofia, Vol.30, N.1, 2013. 157-168.
This is the central argument in Adrian Vermeule’s important book Law’s abnegation: from law’s empire to the administrative state (Harvard U Press, 2016).
Carl Schmitt. The Leviathan in The State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 44 pp.
Mario Tronti. “Leviathan In Interiore Homine”. La Política Contra la Historia. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueño, 2016.

Pious Humor: on José Luis Villacañas’ Freud lee el Quijote. By Gerardo Muñoz.

Posted on April 17, 2017 by Gerardo.Muñoz

villacanas freud lee The almost banal simplicity of the title of José Luis Villacañas’ most recent book, Freud lee el Quijote (La Huerta Grande, 2017), could incite false expectations. This is not a book about the esoteric references of the Quijote in the father of psychoanalysis, and it is most certainly not a psychoanalytic contribution on Cervantes, the author. Although these principles are at the center of Villacañas’ meditation, they do not exhaust his argument. There are, I think, at least two other important premises that deserve to be noted at the outset: on the one hand, Freud lee el Quijote is a continuation, a sort of minimalist diagram, of Villacañas’ massive Teología Política Imperial (Trotta, 2016); while on the other, it is an exoteric ongoing polemic with Carl Schmitt, who understood Quijote as a Catholic hero of the European destiny in the wake of secularization and the crisis of the Catholic ratio. Although Villacañas does not explicitly cite Schmitt’s early essay on Quijote (preferring to polemicize with the late work Hamlet or Hecuba), Schmitt lingers as an accompanying shadow figure throughout Villacañas’ intervention [1].

It must be said that, at a time of contemporary debates around political theology and the future of Europe, Freud lee el Quijote is a salient exposition of a decisive question on the political and historical defeat. Villacañas’ book is really about an affirmation of defeat as an irreducible condition of the political. It does not come to a surprise that Villacañas is fully honest when he writes in the prologue: “… [este libro] es mi hijo menor, pero en verdad el de más larga gestión, y el más querido de todos mis libros” (Villacañas 9).

The names of Freud and Schmitt work jointly and at opposite ends and they limit the frame of Villacañas’ strong reading of the Quijote. The central idea is that Cervantes wrote neither a work of cruelty or tragedy, nor of comedy. El Quijote for Villacañas is a work of humor. But let us step back from this assertion. Villacañas is generous and attentive to the archival sources (Freud’s letters to Silberstein, among other things), which allows him several factual connections, such as the mimesis between the Academia Española as an antecedent of the Psychoanalytic Association, or even the Coloquio de los perros as a formal precedent of the psychoanalytic session. But more importantly, these juxtaposed scenes pepper the ground for the question that Villacañas is after: how to think the heroic figure of the Quijote, and what relation does it contract with the origin of psychoanalysis?

Villacañas’ thesis is that the Quijote is an eruption beyond the comic and the tragic into the humorous. This is, he tells us at the very end, a process of moral rationalization that Freud understood only after Cervantes’ discovery of the “pious humor” (humor piadoso) (Villacañas 25). To understand the way to Freud’s reading of humor in Cervantes, Villacañas first needs to cross paths with Schmitt. He recalls that in Schmitt’s reading of European secularization, there are three potential mythical representatives. We should bare in mind that the three are intellectual representatives: that of the Catholic Quijote in Spain, the Protestant Faust in Germany, and that of the rational and doubtful Hamlet, pulled by the tragic phantasm of the Law-Father. Throughout the essay, Villacañas wants to correct Schmitt’s perhaps too hasty typology of the first heroic type. It is not that Villacañas wants to dispute Schmitt’s circumscription of Cervantes’ Quijote into the Spanish catholic tradition; the problem is that Quijote only emerges in the ruinous aftermath of the catholic imperial ratio. Quijote in La Mancha is an existential and moral figure of a defeat that confronts reality without resentment or guilt. Hence, Quijote, like the Marranos and the Spanish pícaro, affirms without reserve the time of the interregnum as a profane Post-Reform location. Spain is the land of a double fissure into modern secularization. Villacañas tells us:

“…allí donde dominó el catolicismo nacional posterior, tal proceso fue imposible, pues ese catolicismo se puso al servicio de toda tradición mundana. Entre un catolicismo que ya no podía ser universal y un Estado que nunca sería soberano, don Quijote es el héroe errante en un mundo escindido y roto, sin soberano estatal ni Iglesia universal: el mundo español. Por eso es que es mito existencial y concierne a cualquier español que reflexione sobre su destino histórico” (Villacañas 32).

Cervantes’ profane epoch is that of the newborn Leviathan, which Villacañas reminds us did not need to wait for Hobbes, since the myth was noticed by Juan de Santa María, a Felipe III’ censor, in his Tratado de república y policía cristiana. The mythic Leviathan demolishes the old principles of medieval history based on the absolute potentiality of God in the name subjective freedom protected by the new mechanicist secular state (Villacañas 34). Up to this point, this narrative is very much consistent with Schmitt’s The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. But Villacañas abandons Schmitt when contenting that Quijote cannot amount and should not be reduced to a mythical Spanish katechon. Quijote is, in fact, the very opposite of any positing of time restrainer of terrestrial time. He is, unlike Schmitt, not the last witness of the European ius, but the prima witness of the time of ruin and devastation: “Don Qujiote es un héroe católico, pero su figura emerge de entre las ruinas de Roma y del Imperio” (Villacañas 37). Villacañas seems to place Schmitt, vis-à-vis Quijote, on its head: whereas in Hamlet and Hecuba, Shakespeare’s tragedy inscribed the irruption of history within the work, in Cervantes’ Quijote irrupts the historical end of the roman imperium, and the Catholic Church as form of the gnosis. But how does the humor play out within this configuration?

Quijote represents a turning point of the triumph of the modern gnosis, which in a turn to Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age, equips Villacañas with the possibility of fleeing the stereotype of the reformist and salvific composition of the modern subject. For Villacañas, Don Quijote “es la paranoia del impotente y del solitario, mientras el reformado se entrega a la experiencia entusiasta y sin fisuras del que es consciente de su poder y lo ve compartido por los que confiesan con él” (Villacañas 68-69). Quijote is a marrano figure away from Protestant salvific subjection, but also turning its back to the messianic kingdom of the Catholic fidelitas. The wonder and uniqueness of the Quijote is that he represents a third option that does not run through resentment or will to power, since its compensation is a pious humor in the face of the ruinous and the powerlessness (impotencia). Villacañas summarizes the point in an important moment of his book:

“Lo decisivo está en la forma de interpretar las derrotas. La autoafirmación moderna no trata de culpabilizar a un poder mágico por sus fracasos, ni a una finalidad perversa del mundo, ni a un manipulador chapucero y cruel, sino solo a una falla del principio epistemológico respecto a lo real, lo que constituye un nuevo reto a la curiosidad” (Villacañas 73).

The disheveled Quijote can only compensate the wake of the imperial absolute trauma with humor. This is a complex game, Villacañas notes, since it is done through phantasy as the possibility of exodus for what otherwise could amount to the acceleration of the death drive, the sublimation of the Ideal, and the proximity with the speculative teleology of the genius and the superhuman. This latter was the rubric by which German Romanticism read and appropriated the “Catholic” myth as fetish after the failure of the Protestant bourgeois transformation. The work of humor is the possible thanks to the work of self-affirmation in the face of tragic finitude: “Está diseñado para mostrar la finitud del héroe que un día fuimos, y que todavía somos, y ese el trabajo del humor, el que asegura a pensar de todo el triunfo del yo y su condición narcisista” (Villacañas 88). While the joke and comedy are blind to loss, Villacañas goes as far as to claim that the joke or the prank are always potentially on the side of aggression (Villacañas 92). Not so the humor, which can divide itself in a psychic equilibrium between the Ego and the Super-Ego, between the playfulness of the youngster and the theatrical seriousness of the elder. The joke, as reactive mechanism, does not recoil back to the Ideal. Humor – as in “tiene sentido de humor” – is always a singular form of humility.

This is, at heart, the latent gnosticism of Cervantes as Quijote, and Quijote as Cervantes. The function of comedy, which Giorgio Agamben has elevated in work as a phantasm of Italian culture and of his own potenza, dissolves in the Hispanic Marrano tradition in which Villacañas places Quijote as a humorous figure [2]. The work of compensation of the super-ego makes humor a substrate of the psychotic figure of disbelief, while affirming the narcissist drive of a modern fragile and gracious “I”. It makes sense that Villacañas argues at the end of his book this superego cannot be tyrannical (Villacañas 99). This could open rich and important discussions that we can only register here.

As a treacherous hidalgo, Alonso Quijano is never a psychotic leader, but a humorous madman. And humor is only an aftereffect of an epistemological rupture of the modern, of an unclear and unforgotten defeat that characterizes modern man, and that characterized, no doubt, Cervantes himself in his attempt to find a proper balance to nihilism. But, did he succeed? The book does not say openly, but it is fair to say that the impossible balance to nihilism is also symmetrical to the nihilism of the political.

Notes

Schmitt in his early essay on Quijote notes some of the aspects that he will take up in the late book on Hamlet, such as the “image of the Hispanic heroism”, and the “great sense of humor of the work”. See, “Don Quijote un das Publikum” (1912). There is a Spanish translation of the essay by Isabel Moreno Salamaña (2009).
For Agamben on the comic as a category of Italian thought in the wake of Dante, see “Comedia” in Categorie italiane: Studi di poetica e di letteratura (2010). Most recently, this is also the problem at the heart of his book on the Neapolitan puppetry figure Pulcinella, Pulcinella ovvero divertimento per li regazzi (2016).

Línea de sombra ten years after: introductory remarks | ACLA 2016 Harvard University. (Gerardo Muñoz & Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott)

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Gerardo.Muñoz

Ten years have passed since the publication of Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (Palinodia, 2006). It seems that this seminar received neither the most appropriate of titles, nor the most desirable one. At the end of the day, others are the ones that live by anniversaries, ephemerides, and revivals. In a way, to commemorate is a convoluted and dangerous move that recaps the jacobinist principle ‘down with the King, long live the principle!’

Something radically other is at stake here, or so we wish to propose. To the extent that something is ‘actual’ is so because it allows conditions for thinking and thought; that is, conditions of doing in thought. Then, of course, there are activities and activities. As Lyotard observed, there are some activities that do not really transform anything, since ‘to do’ is no a simple operation (Lyotard 111). So much is needed for this encounter to happen – and the purpose of this encounter with many friends here is Línea de sombra ten years after. This was Alberto’s fourth major book – after Interpretacion y diferencia (1992), Tercer espacio (1999), and The Exhaustion of Difference (2001), and that is without counting his early La escritura política de José Hierro (1987). Línea, we should not forget it, was published in Chile in 2006, under turbulent circumstances. We are referring here of course to Alberto’s exodus to Aberdeen, and in a way his “exile” from the enterprise of Latinamericanism. The drift to suspend the categorial structure of the Latinamericanist reflection was already underway in Tercer espacio and Exhaustion, books that radically altered the total sum of reflections on and about Latin America, in the literary and the cultural levels, and whose consequences were felt, though we are not too sure that they have been fully pursued and taken to its outermost transgressive limits. As Alberto has repeated often, the issues on the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s are still among us, but we have yet been able to deal with them radically, which means, to deal with them without just reproducing the constitutive limited structures and categorical systems that have informed Latinamericanism and Hispanism at large through the twentieth-century.

In this sense, Línea de sombra is an unfinished intervention. In part because it did not produce many interlocutors and readers when published, or perhaps because it was taken (and it is understood as such still today) as a book that transgressed the ‘Latinamericanist reason’, opening itself to a region of thought that was in itself undisciplined, savage, and for the same reason, considered an outlaw intervention (and we should keep in mind this tension between thinking and law). It does not matter. But what really does matter is that we consider the silences around Alberto’s intervention not as a personal affair, but as a particular effect of a certain disposition of hierarchies and prestige within the contemporary university. As if Línea (and the other books) were dammed from the beginning due to the constitutive limitation of Hispanism and due to the lack of interest in theoretical approaches coming form Latinamericanism, a field that was usually identified with the exoticism of political conundrums and the curiosities coming out of Third World countries.

Of course, the reverse side of this underprivileged condition of Spanish language for intellectual reflection is that it (re)produces reactive effects. For example, the decolonial option demands a constant revision of the privilege that Spanish has had in the process of representing Latin American realities. However, the paradox arises when this decolonial turn limits itself to the glorification of native languages as if they carry with them a more authentic access to the real, without questioning the self-limitation that both, Latinoamericanist criollo scholars and decolonial ones, show in restricting themselves to the same ethnographic task, avoiding not an explicit politics of identification, but avoiding the most urgent and radical politics of thinking. This politics of thinking doesn’t belong to disciplines and doesn’t follow University structruration. This is what we call infrapolitics.

In fact, we recently called this self-imposed limitation in Latinamericanism ‘late criollismo’ in relation to the last manifestations (political practices and historical forms of imagination) of a particular tradition of thought that, reactively, is confronting the dark side of modernity and globalization with a dubious re-territorialization of affects, practices and politics: from neo-indigenism to neo-communitarianism to literary New Rights, from neo-progressism to neo-developmentalism and neo-extractivism.

On the other hand, we should not forget it, Spanish was an imperial language, and the current (rhetoric of) privilege for ‘Spanish’ is also at the heart of the neoliberal university. In fact, it is what allows the expansion of the language programs, and by consequence, the expansion of ‘adjunct professors’ and ‘part-time post-PhD students’ that carry departmental duties. An exponential process of subalternization that professors that defend far-away subalterns always seem to forget. One might say, the psychotic decolonial affect is possible by the foreclosure of a minimal distance in favor of the maximization of their subjective drive, in a process of identification that is also a process of libidinal investment and insemination.

Línea de sombra appeared in this context, but we do not think it wants to take part on either the side of defending the underdog or assuming a counter-hegemonic capitulation of Spanish as the master language or even the variations of Spanish as a sort of a new pluralism against Iberian hegemony. Línea renounces what Derrida calls in an essay of Rogues the ‘presbeia kai dunamei’, which is roughly translated as ‘majesty and power’, but it also renounces to the privilege of the predecessor or forbear, the one that commands, the archē (Derrida 138). Alberto’s text is a call for releasement of such a demand as principle of reason into a different relation with thought – now we think it is fair to say that that relation is always an infrapolitical relation – positing the archē of the political parallel to the category of the subject. In the introduction Alberto lays the question:

“El subjetivismo en política es siempre excluyente, siempre particularista, incluso allí donde el sujeto se postula como sujeto comunitario, e incluso ahí donde el sujeto se autopostula como representante de lo universal…el límite de la universalidad en política es siempre lo inhumano. ¿Y el no sujeto? ¿Es inhumano? Pero el no-sujeto no amenaza: solo está, y no excepcionalmente, sino siempre y por todas partes, no como el inconsciente sino como sombra del inconsciente, como, por lo tanto, lo más cercano, y por ello, en cuanto que más cercano, al mismo tiempo como lo ineludible y como lo que más elude” (Moreiras 12-13).

So, el no sujeto is an excess of the political subject, an incalculable and unmanageable rest, since the non-subject of the political just is, without a why. Just like the counter-communitarianism cannot constitute a principial determination, the non-subject does not wish to do so either. Indeed, Línea de sombra unfolds a complex instantiation against every nomic determination that guarantees the truth of the idea or the concept. But the non-subject haunts its violence, its transgression. Following our recent encounter with Schürmann’s work, we can say it confronts the latent forgetting of the tragic condition of being.

Indeed, the political has rarely been thought against the grain of its nomic and decionist principles, and Línea de sombra was (and still is) an invitation to do so. Our impression is that it is a book that does not want to teach or master anything, but thematizes something that has always been already there, even if some prefer to sublimate it into the principle of satisfaction. The price to be paid for that is quite high. Hence the desire to move thought elsewhere: indifferent to legacy, proper name, inheritance, masters, and subjects.

We propose, then, to think collectively these days around the promise, the offer, and the gift of this book, but not necessarily to place it in a central canonical position. Rather we intend to open its questions to interrogate our own historical occasion.

Notes

Alberto Moreiras. Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político. Santiago de Chile: Palinodia, 2006.

Jacques Derrida. Rogues: two essays on reason. Stanford University Press, 2005.

Jean François Lyotard. Why Philosophize? Polity, 2013.

*Image by Camila Moreiras, 2016.

Potencia y deconstrucción. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Gerardo.Muñoz

Sobre Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben, beyond the threshold of deconstruction. New York: Fordham, 2014.

Kevin Attell, quien es también traductor al inglés de varios libros de Giorgio Agamben (The Open 2004, State of Exception 2005, The Signature of all things 2010), ha realizado un gran esfuerzo en su reciente Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (Fordham, 2014) por pensar la obra del italiano a la mano de la llamada “deconstrucción”. De hecho, en las primeras páginas del libro Attell lanza una premisa que articula y organiza el argumento: a saber, que desde su comienzo en la década del sesenta, Agamben no ha hecho otra cosa que medirse en relación con el trabajo de Derrida [1]. Esto pudiera ser más o menos obvio para los trabajan con la obra del italiano, aunque menos obvia es la forma en que Attell desplegará un vínculo – casi pudiéramos llamarlo un “dossier esotérico”, que atraviesa toda la obra filosófica antes y después de Homo Sacer – y muy sensible al desarrollo analítico de la deconstrucción, en donde está en juego no solo la disputa por el nombre de “Heidegger”, sino también una querella por terrenos comunes como la semiología, el judaísmo, o el marxismo.

Pero Attell no se detiene en un movimiento unilateral, sino que lo combina con la operación en reverso, mostrando cómo una vez que la obra de Agamben va generando una relevancia central en su intervención, Derrida va tomando en cuenta preguntas en torno a la biopolitica, la animalidad, o la soberanía como se hace manifiesto en los últimos seminarios sobre la bestia o la pena de muerte. De ahí que donde mayor “efectividad” concentra el plan analítico de Attell, es también el lugar donde encontramos su límite. En la medida en que el pensamiento de Agamben queda atravesado por una “polémica esotérica” con la deconstrucción, esta operación se ve obligada a reducir la analítica a una continua oposición de ambos lados; un pliegue dual de tópicos y conceptos fundamentales del pensamiento de Agamben que quizás no encuentran ensalzarse con “efectividad” en la querella de la deconstrucción (es así que Attell descuida por completo Il regno e la gloria, así como la pregunta por el método tan central en Agamben desde la publicación de Estancias).

Pero sobre estos límites y otros, volveremos hacia la última parte de nuestro comentario. Basta con decir, de entrada, que el libro de Attell, muy a diferencia de otras introducciones tales como Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (de la Durantaye, 2009), o Agamben and politics: a critical Introduction (Prozorov, 2014), es mucho más que una repaso introductorio a un aparato de pensamiento. Ni tampoco se asume como una “reconstrucción de un debate intelectual”, a la manera de la escuela de la historia de las ideas, sino que muestra los núcleos centrales de la que quizás siga siendo la disputa más importante en los últimos años, y cuya consecuencia para el campo de la política y el pensamiento no son menores.

Los dos primeros capítulos “Agamben and Derrida Read Saussure” y “The Human Voice” trazan el desacuerdo entre ambas parte por el estatuto del logos y la naturaleza general de la significación como presencia y principio general de la metafísica occidental. Hay varios elementos en juego, de los cuales no nos podríamos ocupar en el espacio de esta reflexión y que Attell reconstruye en una minuciosa lectura de Saussure de ambos pensadores. Lo central se ubica en torno a la significación general y su aporia en el interior del proyecto de la deconstrucción relativo a desmontar la jerarquía entre escritura y palabra que modula la matriz metafísica de la presencia. Citando varios momentos del temprano Estancias y del tardío Il tempo che resta, Attell explicita la coherencia de la crítica de Agamben en cuanto a la deconstrucción: al intentar “destruir” o “deconstruir” la metafísica epocal, Derrida mantiene una postura de defferal indefinido que si bien ha logrado explicitar el problema central, es incapaz de traspasar ese impasse.

A partir de una relectura de los cuadernos de Saussure- y aquí estaría en juego también la pregunta por la “filología” que Agamben eleva a un nivel de exigencia filosófica – el autor de Estado de excepción argumenta que la deconstrucción asume la saturación irreducible del signo (o del texto), ignorando la propia inestabilidad al interior de la armadura conceptual del lingüista. Por otro lado, para Agamben tampoco se trata de una cuestión meramente filológica en cuanto a los cuadernos últimos de Saussure (que meramente apuntaría a una ignorancia vulgar por parte de Derrida), sino más bien de una asimilación más profunda en cuanto al problema de la significación. Mientras que el modelo lingüístico de la deconstrucción asume una “codificación edipal del lenguaje”, Agamben se posiciona en la fractura del propio “experimento del lenguaje” en tanto problema topológico más allá de la división dicotómica entre significado y significante. Como explica Attell:

“For Agamben, the disjuncture between “S” and “s” is not itself the nonorgionary origin, or the “producer” of signification, but the index of that originary “topological” problem of signification , which remains to be thought – and thought precisely on terrain other than of the semiotic logic of the signifier and the trace….Thus, in response to Derrida deconstruction of the metaphysical logic of the sign, Agamben claims that “To isolate the notion of the sign, understood as positive unity of signans and signatum, form the original and problem Saussurian position on the linguistic fact as a ‘plexus of eternally negative different’ is to push the science of signs back into metaphysics” [3].

Aquí se enuncian varios problemas centrales, que luego derivan en la morfología topológica de la inclusión-exclusión propia de la categoría de excepción soberana, pero también la posibilidad de pensar la metafísica como un problema que excede la matriz semiológica para la cual la deconstrucción sería insuficiente. De ahí, entonces la recopilación de figuras como el “gesto” o la “infancia”, el “silencio” o el “poema”, como lugares que sitúan catacreticamente una archi-escritura en la dicotomía estructural de la presencia, y abriéndose hacia una laguna o caída del lenguaje en el hombre y del hombre en la lengua. Dicho de otra forma más acotada: mientras que la deconstrucción entiende el problema del Ser como presencia que se asume obliterando la condición de ausencia, para Agamben el problema principial de la metafísica es la falta constitutiva signada en la Voz en el devenir de lo humano.

Como sugiere Attell, aquí la discrepancia entre ambos filósofos no podría ser mayor, puesto que si para Derrida la metafísica es reducible a la presencia (“fonocentrismo”) para Agamben es la negatividad entendida como Voz; sitio donde la metafísica estructura no solo su antropología (el pasaje de la animalitas a la humanitas), sino la producción del lenguaje como aparato de subjetivización y división de “vida” en tanto negatividad. En un momento clave Attell resume la aporia que la deconstrucción no pudo asumir al situarse en la gramma como oposición al phone:

“To identify the horizon of metaphysics simply in that supremacy of the phone and then to believe in one’s power to overcome this horizon through the gramma, is to connive of metaphysics without its coexistent negativity. Metaphysics is already grammatology and this is fundamentology in the sense that the gramma (or the Voice) functions as the negative ontological foundation]…In this passage Agamben recasts the Derridean critique of phonocentraism by reading the phone of metaphysics….The Voice thus emerge not as a presence, but precisely as the original negative foundation of metaphysics. It is not the negative breach within the hegemonic metaphysics of presence, but rather the very ground of the hegemonic metaphysics of negativity” [4].

El trabajo posterior de Agamben desarrolla una respuesta al problema de la negatividad como fundamentación ontológica de la metafísica. En este sentido, el concepto de potencia (dunamis / adunamis) pasa a ser central en todo el desenvolvimiento del pensamiento de que descoloca la oposición phone / gramma del territorio de la semiología, y devuelve la saturación metafísica hacia un problema primario de la filosofía desde Aristóteles hasta Heidegger. De esta manera, Agamben construye lo que Attell se aventura a llamar una “potenciologia“, donde la cuestión obviamente no es dicotomizar una vez más dunamis vs. energeia, sino mostrar como en el libro Theta de la Metafísica de Aristóteles encontramos algo así como una valencia en donde la dunamis (potencia) no solo no conlleva a la energeia (la realización o actualización), sino que escapa la negatividad al inscribirse como modalidad de “impotencia” (potencia). Este segundo registro es realmente lo que signa el “gesto” fundamental de Agamben, puesto que de esta manera pareciera afirmarse una forma que no opera a partir de la negatividad (dunamis no es energeia, pero la adunamia es dunamis sin realización, esto es, como puro acto que acontece). En uno de los momentos de mayor claridad expositiva del capítulo 3, Attell nos dice:

“At stake in Agamben’s impotential reading is his broader critique of the primacy of actuality in the philosophical tradition, which we already saw an element of his more or less heideggerian affirmation of potentiality over actuality….for Agamben, in energeia, it is not only potentiality but also and above all impotentiality that as such passes wholly over into act, and if this the case, then actuality must be seen not as the condition of impotential and the fulfillment of potentiality, but rather as the precipitate of the self-suspension of impotentiality, which produces he act in the far more obscure mode of privation or steresis. It produces the at not in the fusion of a positive or negative ground, but in a paradoxical structure of privation that is not negation” [5].

La adunamis como impotencia no es una mera negación de la potencia, sino algo así como su devenir en donde forma y acto coinciden sin la negación de una estructura principial (en el sentido en que Reiner Schurmann discute arche y telos en función del cálculo y la exploración de la causalidad y la praxis desde Aristóteles) [6]. La [im]potencia es, como lo ejemplifica el ensayo sobre “el contemporáneo”, la im-potencia-de-no-ver en la oscuridad, donde no es que estemos no viendo (privados de la luz), sino que vemos al ver la oscuridad [7].

Esta apuesta que pareciera meramente filológica en lo que respecta a la obra de Aristóteles, le permite a Agamben hacer varios movimientos a la vez, de los cuales podríamos enumerar sin querer ser exhaustivos al menos cuatro:

encontrar una salida de la “máquina semiológica” mostrando que la “represión cuasi-originaria” de la metafísica no es la supresión de la gramma, sino de la potencia que es también des-obra inoperante de la ontología. Este espacio es determinado por una lectura de Aristóteles a contrapelo de la deconstrucción, y volviendo al Heidegger de la dunamis y la pregunta por lo “animal”. Aquí pudiéramos decir que Agamben insemina la filosofía desde dentro (y no desde la lengua o la literatura, aunque como bien señala Attell esto desde ya genera la pregunta por el “apego filosófico” de Agamben. Este debate en torno a la “anti-filosofía” requeriría muchísima más atención).

Al ampliar el campo general de referencia de la crítica de la metafísica (de un modo análogo como lo hizo con la “Voz”) ahora sitúa la gramma en subordinación a la potencia. Es aquí que cobra sentido la frase que Agamben recoge de Cassiodorus, quien nos dice: “Aristóteles mojó su pluma en el pensamiento”. El acontecer de la (im)potencia como intelecto es condición de inscribir de la gramma. De modo que el gesto de Agamben es ampliar el marco de problematización, y ver que el problema de la escritura en Derrida no es negado, sino recogido al interior del espacio de la potencia.

Agamben de esta manea sitúa la imaginación al centro de un debate por “salvar la razón” (pregunta que también es central para el último Derrida). De ahí la importancia del averroísmo, así como cierto interés en la teoría de la imagen que recorre la virtualidad y el montaje en los libros de cine de Deleuze, centrales para el desarrollo de la teoría del mesianismo de Agamben en el libro de San Pablo.

Pudiéramos decir que la potencia es lo clave en virtud de que abre una zona topológica para comprender el movimiento inclusivo-exclusivo de la soberanía, dejando atrás la dicotomía “poder constituido / poder constituyente” de Negri que, vista de esta forma, no sería más que la reificación onto-teologica que reproduce la metafísica de una nueva soberanía política.

Los próximos dos capítulos en torno a la lógica de la soberanía y la animalidad, Attell recorre el intercambio y desencuentro entre ambos pensadores. Por un lado, la pobre distinción que Derrida atiende entre zoe y bios en el pensamiento de Agamben, pero también el poco cuidado que Agamben le otorga la espectralidad como forma potencial de la naturaleza policial de una democracia arruinada por la estructura principial de autoridad. Asimismo, es sumamente productivo notar una serie de matices que introduce Attell para comenzar a pensar la crucial división del homo sacer en Agamben: primero que la zoe no está plegada a una “zona natural” de la vida “animal”, sino que conforma un duplo, junto a la bios, de una misma máquina biopolitica. Segundo, que no hay anfibología alguna entre biopolitica y política, sino toda una biopolitica estructural que recorre las épocas de la historia de la metafísica desde Aristóteles como arcanum de la consumación nihilista de la política. Y finalmente, la inserción de la “máquina antropológica” en cuanto a la división taxonómica de la vida animal y la vida humana que explicitan, quizás mejor que cualquier otro aparato de la metafísica, la estructura del aban-donamiento continuo de la vida ante un cierto principio aleatorio epocal.

Todo esto complica y problematiza la propia noción de “potencia”, ya que podemos ver de esta manera que el funcionamiento de la soberanía no es, en modo alguna, el poder de decisión a la manera del soberano schmittiano, sino más bien el lugar en donde se explota la negatividad (o la potencia) que ha sido asumida desde siempre en función de la actualización, o sea como realización de un orden establecido fáctico de la esfera del derecho. El pasaje se establece de la soberanía política estatal de Hobbes a la indecisión barroca de Shakespeare y el teatro barroco alemán que estudiase Walter Benjamin.

Aunque varios son los ejemplos que podrían aclarar la diferencia entre Agamben y Derrida en cuanto a la naturaleza del derecho, el ejemplo de la alegoría de “Ante la ley” de Kafka es quizás central, ya que si para el autor de Gramatología, estar ante la ley demuestra la asimetría diferida que explicita el no-origen o el juego de la différance de la ley, para el autor de Estado de excepción, la parábola de Kafka es el ejemplo de la estructura misma del “abandono” (ban, siguiendo el término de Jean Luc Nancy que Attell señala) en su función topológica de exclusión-inclusiva. Esa es la forma en que la potencia de la soberanía ejecuta su decisión, aun cuando sea en modalidad pasiva, aunque regulada dentro del aparato de la jurisdicción. Es así que, como bien señala Attell, mientras que para la deconstrucción se trata de mostrar una serie de aporías de un mecanismo “ilegitimo” de la Ley en su continua contaminación; para Agamben quien sigue muy de cerca la lección de Schmitt, todo principio rector de legitimidad tiene como estructura una forma de exacerbada división interna. Pero es quizás en la lectura sobre Walter Benjamin y su “Crítica de la violencia”, donde Attell mejor inscribe el desacuerdo de Agamben y Derrida en cuanto a la naturaleza dual de la soberanía. Ya que el método de Derrida es mostrar la promiscuidad entre violencia “fundadora de derecho” y violencia “conservadora de derecho”, y la noción de “violencia pura” o “divina” como una violencia sin fin capaz de desarticular la operación fáctica de la esfera del derecho (a la que interpreta bajo el signo de “origen”). Para Agamben la violencia pura de Benjamin es una zona que asegura una salida entre las dicotomías de poder constituyente y constituido, entre legalidad y legitimidad, entre energeia y dunamis. La “violencia divina” es aquí otro nombre para la impotencia (adunamis).

La tensión en el diferendo “potencia / deconstrucción” encuentra su grado de mayor tensión en el último capítulo sobre el mesianismo, donde Attell muestra cómo para Agamben el proyecto de Derrida no solo ha quedado límite en sus autolimitaciones metafísicas ya aludidas, sino que también encarna un falso mesías que apenas ha sustituido la noción schmittiana de katechon por différance. La lógica es la siguiente: si el katechon para Schmitt es aquello que frena y difiere el tiempo del fin; la différance en su postergación a venir no es posibilidad “mesiánica” real (del tiempo del ahora, ya ocurriendo, para decirlo en términos de la modalidad del tiempo operacional), sino un “falso profeta” en la culminación de la metafísica. En uno de los pasajes más duros de Agamben contra Derrida, Attell escribe:

“Agamben’s virtual charge here is the harshest that can be leveled: that Derrida, or rather deconstruction (there is nothing personal in any of this), is the false Messiah. The “elsewhere” to which Thurschwell refers here is the 1992 essay “The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin,” where Agamben characterizes deconstruction as a “petrified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, ‘the “state of exception” in which we live…[…] Schmitt’s katechonitic time is a thwarted messianism: but is thwarted messianism shows itself to be the theological paradigm of the time in which we live, the structure of which is none other than the Derridean différance. Christian eschatology had introduced sense and a direction in time: katechon and différance, suspension delaying this sense, render it undecidable” [8].

Aunque injustamente agresiva, queda claro que la movida conceptual de Agamben es mostrar como tanto Schmitt como Derrida no superan la negatividad de la anomie, puesto que han quedado ajenos a la adunamia, y por lo tanto capturados en una movimiento de desplazamiento cohabitados por la zona de indeterminación de la indexación del acto traducible al movimiento mismo de dunamis y energeia [9]. Desde luego, los pasos que Agamben se toma para desarrollar esta proximidad entre Schmitt y Derrida son inmensos, y pasan justamente por toda una lectura minuciosa a varios niveles del “mesianismo apostólico” de Pablo contra las interpretaciones vulgares del mesianismo como futurología (para Agamben basadas en una sustitución de apóstol por profeta), o la homologación con la escatología que apuntan a una crítica implícita, aunque sin nombrarlos, a Jacob Taubes y a toda la tradición marxista atrapada en una homogeneidad del tiempo vulgar del desarrollo.

Si el mesianismo sin Mesías de Derrida solo acontece en una postulación diferida de momentos en el tiempo de interrupción; para Agamben no se trata de un tiempo futuro ni del fin del tiempo, sino de un tiempo de fin que marca el ya constituido devenir entre lo que podemos concebir ese tiempo basado en nuestra concepción de la representación de esa temporalidad final. La concepción del mesianismo como “temporalidad operacional” del ahora-aconteciendo se distancia de manera fundamental de posiciones como la John Caputo (Paul and the philosophers), Michael Theodore Jennings Jr. (Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul), o Harold Coward (Derrida and Negative Theology), quienes en su momento intentaron homologar la lógica de la democracia a venir con el “tiempo mesiánico” de Pablo de Tarso.

Las diferencias son ahora muy claras: si Derrida ofrece la “trace” como catacresis de un origen, Agamben insiste que esa posición asume una concepción semiológica de la metafísica, y que ahora se inscribe en el suspenso de la negatividad (que ahora se ha insertado en la modernidad bajo la aufhebung hegeliana), pero sin posibilidad de pleroma [9]. La trace es escatológica, al igual que en su reverso el katechon, en la medida en que apunta a una anomie de primer grado – llamémosle una excepción 1 – que no logra suspender la lógica inclusiva-exclusiva del mismo movimiento de la excepcionalidad. Aunque nunca dicho en estos términos, Agamben para Attell sería quien hace posible una excepción 2 (una excepción a la excepción de la anomia via la dunamis), en donde se hace posible no una postergación del tiempo cronológico, sino una katargesis (des-obra, inoperancia) haciendo posible un vínculo existencial de representación del tiempo “operacional” mesiánico como algo que ocurrirá o que ha ocurrido , sino como algo que va ocurriendo. La noción de tiempo “operacional”, como el énfasis en los deícticos como índice del lenguaje-que-tiene-lugar, es retomado por Agamben de la escuela de Benveniste, y en este caso especifico de Gustave Guillaume para pensar la temporalidad no como chronos, sino como duración que antecede a la significación y que marca el tiempo de la formacion de una imagen-en-el-tiempo [10]. Esta maniobra le permite a Agamben seguir tomando distancia del signo y moverse hacia una significación general escapando el paradigma de la semiología y de la lengua como división residual que ahora ocurre a partir de imágenes via Aby Warburg, W. Benjamin, o Gilles Deleuze [11].

La katargesis es también la desvinculación radical en nombre de un mesianismo sin ergon, en disposición del fin de la ‘actividad como trabajo’, esto es, dada a la plenitud de la adunamia. Escribe Attell en lo que podríamos llamar una tematización de la “suspensión de la excepción 1” en cuanto a derecho:

“For Agamben, who has his critique of the Derridean katechon very much in mind here, the point of Kafka (and Benjamin) imagery of a defunct, idling, operative law is not a matter of a “transitional phase that sever archives its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the the bottom of it. The decisive point here that the law – no longer practiced, but studied – is not justice, only the gate that leads to it…another use of the law” [12].

La diferencia sustancial entre la excepción 1 y la 2 es que mientras la 1 mantiene una “negociación perpetua” con la Ley, la 2 imagina una posibilidad del fin de excepcionalidad soberana del derecho sin remitirá al nihilismo, es decir, a su suspensión fáctica absoluta. La noción de “uso” como “juego” que introduce a Attell en su “Coda” queda limitada a desentenderse del más reciente L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014), donde la cuestión del uso ya no queda cifrada en una práctica ni a un dispositivo tal cual, sino más bien a una forma aleatoria de existencia – el “ritmo” o la “rima” serían incluso mejores figuras para describirla – que tematizan la irreducible distancia entre la vida y el derecho, o entre la forma-de-vida y el fin de la soberanía. Todo esto pareciera ser sospechoso, y hasta cierto punto de vista una resolución clarividente. Pero Agamben es consciente que la superación de la soberanía o del arche es una tarea en curso, y no implica que llegue a su culminación en su pensamiento. Lo que parece ocurrir es un abandono de la matriz de significación de la crítica-onto-teologica (la deconstrucción) hacia una “modalidad” que, sin vitalismo ni humanismo alguno, busca pensar la porosidad de la vida como forma an-arquica en vía de una distinta concepción de la política.

Pero habría que notar que el pensamiento de Agamben no comienza ni termina en el mesianismo, como lo demuestra ahora el reciente L’uso dei corpi, donde Agamben pareciera repetir la misma modulación de su argumento filológico sobre San Pablo, pero esta vez a través de un conjunto de “ejemplos” que incluyen la pregunta por el estilo, la ontología modal, el paisaje, el mito de Er, el concepto de virtud, o el poder destituyente en Walter Benjamin. En cualquier caso, una futura investigación crítica sobre el corpus Agamben tendría que reparar no solo en la tematización del mesianismo como un “punto de culminación de un pensamiento”, sino más bien pensar lo que yo me aventuraría a llamar la indiferenciación modular del estatuto de la glosa o del ejemplum [13]. En la forma de la glosa, así como en el ejemplo, donde pudiéramos a comenzar a pensar el desplazamiento que estructura la misma “forma de vida” en cuanto propuesta conceptual de obra que compartimentaría via ‘ejemplos singulares’ (como en La comunidad que viene) sin inscribirlos en una teoría general de pensamiento o mucho menos “teoría”. Este registro es completamente ignorado por Attell.

En efecto, una de las tensiones que solapan el libro de Attell es la poca problematización sobre el orden de la “política” o lo “político” a partir de la katargesis o de la potencia. ¿Por qué sostener una “política que viene” sin más? ¿No es eso, acaso, una forma de falso mesianismo katechontico? Es cierto que Attell alude en varios momentos a la “estructuración metafísica” de la política moderna, pero su libro, y quizás el pensamiento mismo de Agamben, nos deja una tarea para lo que aquí llamamos infrapolítica, y que de manera similar podemos pensar como una fractura de la politización con la vida más allá de una temporalidad vulgar asumida de la filosofía de la historia del capital (Villalobos-Ruminott), o como proceso continuo de metaforización (Moreiras) [14]. Es ahí donde el libro de Attell, más allá del diferendo deconstrucción-potencia, puede ser productivo para seguir pensando tras la ruina categorial de la política moderna. Tal y como dice Agamben en Homo Sacer, y que Attell es incapaz de tematizar sus consecuencias estrictamente políticas: “Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized” [15].

La política es inescapable a la labor de la negatividad de la actualización nihilista. Por lo que la pregunta central en torno al uso que coloca Agamben como tarea a sus contemporáneos es, en buena medida, también la pregunta por los usos que le demos a Agamben. Usos que, más allá de estar marcados por conceptos o el circunloquio viciosos de una exigencia retórica, pregunta por la creación de una multiplicación de estilos, una capacidad de habitar sin regla ni condición al interior del intersticio entre la imaginación y el lenguaje.

Notas

Kevin Attell. Giorgio Agamben: beyond the threshold of deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. p.3

Refiero aquí “Persecución y el arte de la escritura” de Leo Strauss. Habría que pensar en que medida muchos libros de reconstrucción intelectual o “pensamiento” plantean un esquema similar asumiendo de esta manera la “crisis del pensamiento”.

Kevin Attell. p.37

Ibid. p.82

Attell. p.97

Ver la discussion sobre el arche de Reiner Schurmann en Heidegger: on being and acting: from principles to anarchy (Indiana, 1990). p.97-105.

Giorgio Agamben. “What is the contemporary?”. What is an apparatus and other essays. Stanford University Press, 2009.

Kevin Attell. p.215.

Quizás esto ahora hace legible lo que parecía un insulto infantil en Introduction to civil war de Tiqqun: “57. The only thought compatible with Empire—when it is not sanctioned as its official thought—is deconstruction“.

Si tomamos la metafísica más allá del problema del Ser, ¿no se abre otra historia que ya no pasa por el anclaje epocal que sugiere la tradición de la destrucción de la metafísica? ¿No es el “averroísmo”, una tradición de pensamiento que, al ser sepultada, queda fuera de los límites de la máquina onto-teologica de la metafísica? Para una excelente reconstrucción del averroísmo y su actualidad, ver “La Potencia de Averroes: Para una Genealogía del Pensamiento de lo Común en la Modernidad”, Revista Pleyade, N.12, 2013, de Rodrigo Karmy.

Como en el capítulo sobre la “ontología modal” en L’uso dei corpi, habría que detenerse en un futuro en el nexo entre la noción de “tiempo operacional” a partir de imágenes que constituye el “tiempo del fin” en San Pablo via Guillaume, y lo que Deleuze llamó “la imagen-tiempo“. En efecto, Deleuze reconocería la centralidad de Guillaume en Time-Image: “…habría en las imágenes otro contenido, de otra naturaleza. Esto sería lo que Hjelmslev llama lo non-lingüístico…o bien, lo primero signado, anterior al sentido (significante), que Gustave Guillaume lo doto de condición de la lingüística” (262).

Kevin Attell. p.253.

Para pensar la noción de “ejemplo” como modalidad del método en Agamben, ver La comunidad que viene. Habría que pensar hasta que punto la oposición ejemplo y paradigma, establecen una singularización del método que no se restituya a una teoría general de lo político. Esto estaría también muy cercano de la “hacceity” que Gilles Deleuze adopta de John Duns Scotus. Le agradezco a Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott un breve intercambio sobre este tema.

Ver Soberanías en suspenso: imaginación y violencia en América Latina (La Cebra, 2013), de Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott. Sobre des-metaforizacion, véase los apuntes de Moreiras al seminario de Derrida de 1964 en http://www.infrapolitica.wordpress.com.

Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998. p.7-8.

Hiperneoliberalismo y los restos de Leviatán. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Gerardo.Muñoz

1. Leviatán fue el símbolo marítimo de la máquina estatal, como nos ha enseñando Carl Schmitt en su tratado sobre el « dios mortal » que tematizó Thomas Hobbes para la temprana modernidad. Es solo con el neoliberalismo que presenciamos su relativa desaparición o transformación, así como su plena descomposición contemporánea. En las playas frías del báltico solo queda su esqueleto como remanente que atestigua que alguna vez esa especie existió como jeroglífico soberano. Uno pudiera imaginar cómo, en las próximas décadas el Estado será imaginado como una forma tan bizantina como la propia iconología eclesiástica de Oriente.

2. El filme de Zviagíntsev trata, efectivamente, sobre el ascenso de un nuevo tipo de Estado (Segundo Estado mafioso, como diría Segato) que ya no es reducible a la simbología del Leviatán. Y aunque para esa novedad aún no tenemos nombre, si constamos con una economía de su fe: ahí donde se proyecta el despliegue del poder en la fase avanzada de la an-arquía del capital neoliberal. Esta fe da luz de futuro a nuevas grandezas que aparecen en boca del pope vestido en su túnica negra en el filme diciendo: « Rusia, ahora, regresa a su verdadero ser » [1].

Es el discurso de una nueva esperanzada retribución nómica-imperial del Este posterior al derrumbe comunista y a la entrada en la llamada « fin de la historia » planetaria. Este imperialismo – al menos en el film –no es nuevo. No se trata de explicitar la grandeza militar o tecnológica, sino de una trama triunfalista del cálculo; una soberanía capaz de atar los cabos entre el modelo secutirario, la flexibilidad del capital, la acumulación, y la derrota sobre los cuerpos. La nueva liturgia de la ley nunca aparece como misión bélica, sino como un dispositivo que florece lentamente sobre el interior mismo de la « casa » como última reapropiación de la intimidad y las formas de vida.

3. En su libro sobre el símbolo del Leviatán, Schmitt recoge una litografía del manuscrito Hortus deliciarum del siglo XII. Aparece ahí la imagen que reproduce la parábola del Cristo pescando con un anzuelo de su fe al gigante monstro marítimo (Leviatán). La imagen recuperada por Schmitt intentaba decir al menos dos cosas: a. que el Estado había sido siempre un animal subordinado a la fe (al complexio oppositorum, y verdadera legitimidad del poder mítico), y b. que solo desde la fe es posible re invitar un nuevo mito no-mecanicista, y por lo tanto ajeno a la valorización epocal del cálculo económico burgués.

En Leviatán ocurre lo opuesto: en plano neoliberalismo que todo arrastra en su disposición sobre el mundo y la tierra, el anzuelo de la fe es lo que termina destituyendo al Estado y a la unidad de vida. Quizás la secuencia más directa en torno a esta capacidad demostrativa de la fe, se materializa cuando vemos cómo la buldócer destruye la casa en un plano que se nos muestra desde el interior. Como una especie de anzuelo mecánico, la excavadora « Volvo » no « salva » sino que destruye, y en lugar de « instalar orden » solo crea superficies sedimentadas en un proceso que pudiéramos llamar una « geología de la destrucción y la producción de restos » (reformulamos aquí una variante muy próxima a lo que Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott ha propuesto recientemente en « La edad de los cadáveres ») [2]. El nuevo poder, por lo tanto, se desmarca de la oposición schmittiana entre la fe redentora del Christos y la « masacre kosher del Leviatán ». La buldócer-anzuelo es el symbolon de un proceso de neo-liberalización en tanto apropiación de mundo que no ofrece futuro o redención; tan solo un suelo abstraído de la memoria y sus huellas.

4. La destrucción en Leviatán, asimismo, no deja rastros. En varios momentos del argumento, el poder opera no a partir de una « expresividad sobre los cuerpos » de la escritura del terror, sino como simple desaparición (como notó Pablo Domínguez Galbraith). Un trazo que borran a los personajes para siempre del plano: no aparecen ante sus amigos, pero tampoco aparecen en celdas oscuras de un ultramundo que pudiera orientar cierta división fáctica entre « legalidad » e « ilegalidad », « orden / excepción » o « norma / tortura ». Los cuerpos aparecen y luego ya no son visto en ninguna de sus formas sustraídas de su ser (la ceniza, la fosa común, o el basurero). La producción de muerte, por lo tanto, alcanza por momentos un matiz que excede la producción de muerte de Ciudad Juárez (si pensamos con 2666, o la obra de Sergio González Rodríguez), o de los procesos de violencia expresiva de la narco-acumulación contemporánea en México.

Leviatán da cuenta de una nueva metamorfosis hacia un hiperneoliberalismo que ha logrado asumir en el interior de su racionalidad el secreto fundamental de la vida y la muerte en el movimiento compulsivo de la legalidad. Tanto Lelia (la esposa y amante) como Dimitri (el abogado) más que “asesinados o dados de baja”, son desaparecidos sin huellas ; cuerpos arrojados a la intemperie de un territorio que no los reconoce, puesto que la vida ha sido reintegrada, ahora sin costo político alguno, en los mecanismos de un siniestro totalitarismo social (en este sentido, los esqueletos de la ballena en la playa es crucial, puesto que en tanto Leviatán ya no « representa » al pueblo ni entra en juego con la multitud. Es un cadáver autorreferencial y post-dramático, en la medida en que no hay ni siquiera conflicto entre polis y multitud).

5. La trama del filme no es solo ilustrativa de los tiempos que corren en Rusia (para-legalidad, corrupción policial, mafias, dualidad de Estados), sino una proyección de la ontología política de nuestro presente. No es casual que los espectadores, siempre a la espera de la violencia afectiva y expresiva, queden desilusionados por el mensaje de Zviagíntsev, esto es, que la violencia hoy se encuentra en otra parte.

El filme apunta a una nueva legalidad constitutiva del orden del poder, donde priman los “procesos de Justicia” en un redoble de la antigua liturgia cotidiana que gobernaba el misterio de la vida antes del paso hacia la secularización de Occidente. En línea con los procesos de Kafka, Leviatán entiende que la nueva apertura se da a través de una espacialización litúrgica de la ley, de un infinito proceso que siempre te alcanzará, y para la cual no hay negociación del culpable. La operación del misterio se construye, así, como un nuevo brazo armado de las fuerzas oscuras de lo político.

Si por un lado pueden coexistir y trabajar en concierto organismos violentos y represores de la sociedad (el llamado “modelo secutirario” es su explicitación más visible), este pliegue esclarece el refuerzo de la legalidad por someter a los cuerpos, resistencias, y formas de vida. Si acaso nuestro presente vive en tiempos del fin de la contención katechontica, esto no implica realmente una entrada hacia la liberación anómica del mundo, sino más bien una nueva factoría de producción infinita de la esfera del derecho. Una legalidad que, al igual que la flexibilización del capital, opera a partir de eso que Salvatore Satta llama el “misterio del proceso”: la invención y reproducción originaria que encausa a todo aquel que busque desactivar el movimiento del progreso [3].

6. La película tiene muchos ecos de la trama del clásico Michael Kohlhaas, de Henrich Von Kleist. Aunque con una enorme diferencia: en la novela de Kleist, es Kohlhaas quien lleva adelante una revolución anárquica cometida contra una municipalidad y una ley que no alcanza a rendir justicia a su persona. En Leviatán, al contrario, la revolución permanente la lleva adelante el poder, en un despliegue de economías de la fuerza que intentan derrotar al enemigo ya no solo físicamente sino también desde la esfera jurídica y la “verdad”.

Leviatán nos ofrece una imagen impecable de una de las formas de la guerra civil global que continua más allá del deshielo post-comunista y la homogenización neoliberal del planeta. El neoliberalismo aparece aquí, entonces, como una nueva vanguardia revolucionaria (Lenin en toda la película solo aparece una vez, mientas la cámara se va alejando y perdiéndolo de foco y contrasta con el close-up del Jesucristo en el encuentro entre el pope y el alcalde) liderada por al esfera del derecho y sus dispositivos de control. Ya no es posible la resistencia – a la Kohlhaas – por lo que no es posible una política de la subjetividad llamada a transformar el presente político [4].

No queda nada claro si el último sermón del pope sobre el estatuto de la verdad y la mentira, vía el mensaje de San Pablo, funcionaría como una subversión de este nuevo poder tiránico o como la usurpación última de la forma diabólica en el espacio mismo de la potencia mesiánica. La pregunta por esta nueva forma de plasticidad infinita de eso que llamamos hiperneoliberalismo reactualiza la pregunta por la soberanía en sus diversas transformaciones contemporáneas sobre los terriotorios. Una pregunta que, sin temores ni entusiasmos, la pensadora Catherine Malabou ha buscado instalar en el campo de nuestras problematizaciones: ¿es posible hoy deconstruir la soberanía?

Notes.

1. Escribe José Luís Villacañas en su artículo “Leviatán”: “Si alguien quiere conocer la índole de los poderes emergentes en Rusia debería ver Leviatán, el filme de Andréi Zviagíntsev, candidato al Oscar a la mejor película extranjera. Atravesado por el mítico simbolismo de la poderosa bestia bíblica, la película muestra la estructura de la férrea maquinaria mafiosa gobernante que se extiende desde Moscú hasta la costa báltica, a través de una inmensa red de capilares en la que están implicados los restos del viejo aparato del Estado, sobre todo la policía resentida, corrupta y servil. Esta jerarquía es alentada en sus crímenes infames por la paralela legión de popes, que entrega sus servicios de limpieza de conciencia a cambio de poderosos beneficios materiales. No sólo fortalece la frágil e insegura mente del criminal ante su acción plagada de consecuencias inciertas, sino que refuerza la conciencia nacional rusa, representada de forma esencial con la fe ortodoxa. «Ahora Rusia vuelve a su verdadero ser», dice el pope revestido de gloria en el triunfante discurso final. Y ese verdadero ser es el nuevo leviatán que, poco a poco, hace resucitar al que, reducido a huesos, ha quedado varado en la playa del comunismo”. (http://www.levante-emv.com/opinion/2015/02/10/leviatan/1223735.html.

2. Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott. “Las edades del cadáver: dictadura, guerra, desaparición”. (Ponencia leída en el marco del congreso “Crossing Mexico”, Princeton University, Marzo 2015).

3. Salvatore Satta. Il mistero del proceso. Adelphi: Milán, 1994.

4. Podemos leer el accionar de Kohlhaas como alegoría del militante del siglo XX en la búsqueda de la trascendencia de la justicia retributiva. Es curioso cómo Lutero, quien también pertenece al momento del nihilismo moderno en cuanto subjetividad, aparece en la novela como pacificador del orden nómico alemán. Para ver un análisis contemporáneo sobre Kohlhaas, ver Dimistris Vardoulakis, Sovereignty and its other (Fordham Press, 2013).

‘Un pinche infierno’: sobre La fila india. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Gerardo.Muñoz

La más reciente novela del escritor mexicano Antonio Ortuño, La filia india (Océano, 2013) nos coloca al interior infernal de nuestro presente. Al decir “infernal” no recurrimos a un uso fácil de una metáfora, ni remitimos a la innumerable tropología que la literatura le ha dado a esa estación imaginaria desde La divina comedia hasta Libro del cielo y del infierno (Sur, 1960). El infierno que relata Ortuño a lo largo de su novela tiene un nombre: Santa Rita.

Este el nombre de un pueblo al sureste del territorio mexicano, pero podría ser cualquier territorio de los que hoy, en América Latina (de Guerrero al Conurbano), atraviesa y dibuja sobre el mapa un nuevo conflicto social. Santa Rita es tierra de nadie y desocupados, de maleantes y bandas criminales, de migrantes centroamericanos y burócratas de la Conami (Comisión Nacional de Migración). Pero ninguno se identifican con quienes aparentan ser, y por lo tanto ya nada es reducible a la analítica de la subjetividad. Atravesados por distintas fuerzas que imponen sus propias “razones” o “leyes”; esta vecindad descompuesta como el desierto del aburrimiento que tematiza 2666, es una región que lejos de ser “transparente” se caracteriza por nuevas gramáticas de la violencia.

Santa Rita (o La fila india, como máquina de narrar el horror) es una cartografía de los procesos an-arquicos que atraviesa la frontera sureña de México, desde la cual la porosidad entre cuerpos, capital, y muerte van dando la clave del fin de lo político en una guerra que se va desatando transversalmente. Surge la pregunta: ¿cómo narrar esa anarquía sin recurrir a la artificialidad de un nuevo intimismo o a la vieja “totalidad” caída hacia una nueva filosofía (global) de la historia?

La fila india no resuelve esa pregunta, pero si apunta a una sintomatología. En la cartografía que se traza sobre el territorio de Santa Rita – y sus espacios periféricos que emergen como espectros: las ciudades fronterizas de Estados Unidos, la frontera sur, Centroamérica – abunda en un conflicto multivalencial plegado a varios actores y circuitos que van tramando lo que Diego Sztulwark, vía Rita Segato, ha querido llamar recientemente una nueva política de la opacidad [1].

Desde luego, no se trata de sugerir aquí que el desplazamiento hacia un nuevo exceso (y subceso) de la política pasa meramente por la una política de la oscuridad entendida como un mero “no-saber”, sino que la batalla sobre los territorios hoy son complejas matrices de guerra donde no hay demanda que pueda suplir con claridad y certeza la oscuridad a la cual es constantemente arrojada. De ahí que La filia india, que arranca con la investigación de una matanza en un albergue del pueblo, no se detenga ahí o se limite a esa experiencia como excepción. La matanza, nos van dando señales las múltiples voces de la novela, es moneda corriente de vidas que solo cuentan bajo un nuevo estatuto zoológico. Así, no hay “mapa cognitivo” ni “cartografía de lo absoluto” que valga en el interior de este nuevo desierto que diagrama la guerra global en su máxima expresión: solo hay cadáveres y la putrefacción de una afterlife de la tierra. En un momento en cual Ortuño abunda sobre la naturaleza de Santa Rita se nos da un alegato de esta condición anómica.

“…la Conami de Santa Rita florecía como los basureros con las lluvias. Me hundí en el agua, de noche, imagine la zanja, la peste a mierda y tierra, la boca llenándose de gusanos y piedras, la planta, remandado a que se movieran los que en el lindero de la muerte se agitan, como insectos, pese a tener la cabeza rota. […] En otros países se habrían quedado sentados hasta que llegara la ONU. Pero, bueno, supongo que en otros países no hubieran rematado a los niños a machetazos o a sus madres a tiros ni hubieran puesto a los hombres a pelear entre ellos para ejercer el premio de vivir unas horas más” [2].

La filia india, sin embargo, no solo nos arrastra hacia su interior el exceso del cuerpo sin redención (ese producto para el fuego y la ceniza; un infra-nivel del resto, tal y como lo ha venido pensando Pablo Domínguez Galbraith). El otro registro del infierno se nos da en la fachada misma de la burocracia de la Conami, abundante en todo tipo de gestos del aburrimiento: bostezos, miradas al vacío, silencios, susurros, voluntad de hacer y no hacer. La ‘fila india’ es el último gesto que reinstala la lógica de la amo-esclavo en el momento de la consumación burocrática del Mundo. Y así la repetición: una reiteración de los comunicados (‘una circular eterna’, cuatro en total en la novela) van dando el ritmo de una liturgia burocrática en la transformación de la política hacia la administración de los infiernos.

Como ha visto Giorgio Agamben en Il regno e la gloria, el infierno en realidad no es más que una forma penitenciaria una vez que los Ángeles han abandonado el quehacer de la política, y que al quedar desocupados de su jerarquías, la distribución de la justicia divina deviene en manos de los demonios que ejecutan una pena eterna [3]. Ante la condena demoníaca de toda forma de vida sobre los territorios, la burocracia como anomia en la tierra solo puede operar a través de una relación promiscua con la esfera del derecho que pone en suspenso y crisis el estatuto mismo de la ética. Y por consecuencia también de lo forense y de la vida social. Así nos dice la funcionaria:

“Los periodistas solidarios también comían, necesitaban premios y becas y algunos temas iban a desarrollos y otros no….La ética de hacer lo que se pueda hasta donde se pueda, identidad punto por punto a la del resto de nosotros. Cruzaban por la frontera los pollos porque podían, los robaban, golpeaban, y violaban por lo mismo pero, a cambio, nadie intervenía porque no, porno como iba a ser. Eso no”. [4]

Las instituciones burocráticas que administran la nueva condición infernal del mundo tan solo encarnan una ética de “hacer tan solo nos permita nuestro poder” (que siempre, claro, termina siendo poco). Y solo queda la voluntad de voluntades como última extracción de lo humano, puesto que su potencia ha sido destruida y finalizada. Un humanismo ínfimo como puesta en escena de la praxis. Hacer y dejar ser, lo cual supone a lo largo de la novela, dejar morir.

Como en Los migrantes que no importan (Sur+, 2010), esa notable crónica del periodista Oscar Martínez sobre las vidas en la “bestia” (marca del ángel caído, además), la zona que ocupa Santa Rita es un campo de guerra donde la astucia del poder encuentra su mayor grado de concreción en los cuerpos vejados y marcados por violaciones, torturas, y extorsiones. La presencia de lo demoniaco ya no aparece en forma figural de una bestia, sino sobre el curso bélico que instala una serie de huéspedes extraños (así le llamó Carl Schmitt a Hitler) como apóstatas de un nuevo reino sin forma (katechon) [5]. Es esa la condición post-formal que Luna brutalmente le relata a la burócrata de la Conami como si fuese una pintura de Grunewald:

“le narró historias sobre migrantes crucificadas en postes de luz, cuerpos sin cabeza, cabezas sin lengua y dedos sin falanges, mujeres a las que les habían sacado para afuera todo lo que tuvieron dentro y hombre as lo que les habían metido todo lo que tuvieron fuera” [5 152].

La llamada violencia expresiva que estudia la sociología hoy en la región (pensemos aquí en los importantes trabajos de Rita Segato, Rossana Reguillo, o Pilar Calveiro) apunta a un nuevo tipo de escritura corporal más allá de lo propio, y por lo tanto inconsecuente con la división entre víctimas y asesinos de la política moderna, ya que esto supondría la naturalización de una forma (gestalt) puesta en crisis en el interior mismo de la guerra encarnada como exceso sobre los cuerpos mutilados y vaciados en la oscuridad del paisaje global [6].

Esta violencia desborda los parámetros de la crueldad establecidos en la co-pertenencia entre injuria y castigo – tal y como lo ha problematizado Jacques Derrida en su seminario The Dealth Penalty (University of Chicago, 2014) para entender las tramas entre violencia y soberanía. Santa Rita en La filia india, como Santa Teresa en 2666, es una nueva localización hiperbólica de un ‘pinche infierno’ que atraviesa, desde ya, el vasto habitar del mundo. Un mundo desnudo de su capacidad de horizonte y forma.

–

Notas

Diego Sztulwark. “La opacidad del presente político”. (Clinamen, Radio La Mar en Coche, Marzo de 2015). http://ciudadclinamen.blogspot.com/2015/03/la-opacidad-del-presente-politico.html

Antonio Ortuño. La fila india. 121.

Giorgio Agamben. Il Regno e la Gloria. Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo. Neri Pozza, 2007.

Antonio Ortuño. La fila india. 128

Carl Schmitt en Glossarium sugiere que Hitler fue un ‘huésped extraño’ que, desde el corazón de la era de era de Holderlin, terminó ocupado el interior de la forma (gestalt) de la cultura alemana, dotándola de una “forma extraña” o fin de la forma.

Alberto Moreiras ha sugerido que este nuevo tipo exceso de violencia y crueldad marca una región externa a la forma clásica de lo político. Ver su “An example of infrapolitics”, una glosa sobre Cruel Modernity (Duke, 2013) de Jean Franco. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/an-example-of-infrapolitics-by-alberto-moreiras/

Hugo Ball y la ratio teológica-política. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Gerardo.Muñoz

En los últimos años han sido publicadas casi simultáneamente dos traducciones (al castellano y al inglés) fundamentales de Hugo Ball. No se trata de obras de su trabajo mejor conocido; aquella escritura ligada a los años del Cabaret Voltaire y a la efervescencia de la vanguardia DADA, sino más bien de ensayos políticos y culturales, en los cuales se da cuenta de una figura cardinal de lo que Michael Hollerich ha llamado el espíritu del «catolicismo anti-liberal de la República de Weimar» [1]. Tanto Dios tras dada (Berenice, 2013) como el número 146 (Otoño 2013) de la revista October recogen la extensa reseña que hiciera Ball del pensamiento de Carl Schmitt hacia la década del veinte.

Para ser más exacto, se trata de una reseña publicada en la importante publicación católica Hochland sobre el mes de Abril de 1924. Fuera de un interés propiamente filológico, la recuperación de esta extensa nota de Ball es fundamental, como intentaremos apuntar, por varias razones que explicitan no solo la unidad teórica del pensamiento de Schmitt en contexto, sino algo más sobre la discusión en torno a la teología política. En este sentido, este comentario sigue una recomendación hecha recientemente por José Luís Villacañas, para quien el pensamiento político contemporáneo pareciera aún gravitar sobre el horizonte de Schmitt. En su reverso, también pudiéramos afirmar que el pensamiento político a-principial (y la infrapolítica en la medida en que ésta constituye una respuesta en común a la crisis del nihilismo epocal) merita una comprensión detenida y laboriosa sobre las múltiples formas en que se despliega el schmittianismo a través de sus críticos y compañeros de ruta.

La reseña de Ball es, claramente, más que una reseña, ya que logra poner en diálogo distintos momentos del pensamiento de Schmitt, y de esta forma dar coherencia entre los pasadizos de Romanticismo Político a La Dictadura, de Teología Política a Catolicismo y forma política. Si bien Ball ignora los primeros textos de Schmitt – aquellos que versan sobre el problema de la culpa y el individuo en el derecho – su analítica parte del momento en que Schmitt trabaja sobre el espacio del pensamiento político tout court. Esta no es una cuestión unidimensional, puesto que inteligentemente Ball ya nota cómo dentro de ese campo referencial del “pensamiento político”, Schmitt se posiciona como un “jurista” (es decir, sus consecuencias son estrictamente jurídicas), y el principio de razón se inserta directamente en la tradición católica.

Toda crítica al schmittianismo, por lo tanto, tiene que atender muy detenidamente los desplazamientos y vericuetos por lo que Schmitt se mueve entre esas tres esferas de articulación reflexiva. No por azar, Leo Strauss en su conocido comentario sobre El concepto de lo político, también se percatara de la división de las esferas propia del pensamiento de Schmitt, hasta llegar a decir que su pensamiento aun se encontraba bajo el signo de la modernidad liberal [2]. Ball, a diferencia de Strauss, es mucho más generoso, aunque no apele a la discusión de la división de las esferas de Schmitt. Para Ball, curiosamente, el pensamiento de Schmitt tiene como confrontación no la modernidad in toto, en tanto problema abstracto europeo, sino la cuestión del Romanticismo. De ahí que ponga el Politische Romantik (1919) como condición a toda elaboración posterior en torno al decisionismo y el soberano, la dictadura y la autoridad axiomática del derecho. Ball lee esa primera monografía de Schmitt, crítica del pensamiento “teología sin decisión” de Adam Muller y al espíritu alemán del diecinueve, como la puesta en escena de la “bancarrota culturalista del culto extravagante del genio” [3].

Los románticos, para Schmitt, encarnaban una nueva religión basada en el evangelio personalista del “genio”. Un genio que aun cuando queriendo hablar de política (pensemos aquí en “La necesidad de la fundación teología de toda política”, de Muller), no logra ofrecer más que un lirismo filosófico sin la decisión concreta que exigen los nuevos tiempos de la mecanización estatal. Digamos que, en la versión revisionista (aunque esta sería la fundacional) sobre Schmitt, la caída hacia el nihilismo epocal no estaría ceñida en un momento ligado a la simple “liberalización del mundo” – aunque cierto es que el romanticismo alemán no era ajeno al liberalismo en su esencia – sino a una poetización (dichtung) que el romanticismo aportaba a través de la fabricación del vaciamiento de una actividad subjetiva encarnada en la figura del demiurgo individualista.

El espíritu del genialismus para Schmitt, a diferencia de Heidegger, estaba íntimamente arraigado al nombre de Hölderlin. Pero si para Heidegger, el dichter representaba la esencia del Ser en el poema alemán (la proximidad de la lengua alemana al “olvido griego”); para Schmitt lo alemán había que encontrarlo en la lengua de Theodor Daubler y Konrad Weiss, esto es, en la lengua católica post-expresionista. El problema con el “genio romántico”, por lo tanto, no es que carezca de “teología” en el pasaje hacia la modernización secular, sino que su teología permanece vaciada de todo decisionismo, co-implicada en el momento de la ironía que había quedado plegada a la gran “Era de Goethe”, aunque también al momento del 900 vienés, tal y como lo ha estudiado Cacciari en Dallo Steinhof :prospettive viennesi del primo Novecento (1980).

La “teología romántica alemana”, por lo tanto, no fue más que un paisajismo iluminado y superficial que idealizaba la belleza de la Edad Media suprimiendo la concreción del presente político. De ahí que, como nos dice Ball, el trabajo posterior a Romanticismo Político Schmitt se dedicara estrictamente a responder a la “teología del genio alemán” leyendo el pensamiento ultramontano de Bonald, Donoso Cortés, y De Maistre. A diferencia de un retorno bucólico a la Edad Media, lo que busca Schmitt en las figuras de la “contra-revolución” es la entrada de la soberanía o del dictador, una vez que la Iglesia ya ha dejado de constituir “concretamente” su poder katechontico en el mundo. En este punto, encontramos un doble movimiento en el pensamiento teológico-político de Schmitt, puesto que su intento analítico es reconciliar la “fuerza irracional” de la Iglesia con el “racionalismo” de la autoridad soberana. De ahí que, como matiza el propio Ball, Schmitt se mueve entre el racionalismo y el irracionalismo, desmarcándose tanto del romanticismo del “genio”, así como del nuevo mito “irracional” que propagaba Georges Sorel desde la izquierda en esos años.

Contra la “clase discutidora” del parlamentarismo democrático y el genio (subjetivización), Schmitt propone la decisión dictatorial. Si bien se trata, como distingue con la figura de Oliver Cromwell, de una decisión que en tanto tal aparece legitimidad desde la esfera del derecho y de la autoridad de la Iglesia. Dicho de otra forma: no puede haber dictador que no sea católico, y no puede haber catolicismo que no esté arraigado en el derecho. Esa transferencia es el origen del decisionismo legalista schmittiano. Solo a partir de esas dos condiciones es que podemos comprender cómo la mutante morfología dictatorial radica en la esfera del derecho.

Ha sido José Luís Villacañas quien, en un estudio reciente ha notado cómo el Schmitt posterior a 1945, en Glossarium, reposiciona críticamente su obra como producto de cierta cultura del genio (genialismus) alemán del 900, y no en la genealogía de la metafísica de la soberanía de la época del barroco (de Bodin a Hobbes). José Luís ha escrito sobre la entrada de la época del genio:

« ¿Pero cómo fue posible que esta época se impusiera? Como fue posible alcanzar mediante el Estado este simulacro de la Iglesia. ¿Cómo fue posible interpretar la mera visibilidad como unidad de ser, idea y poder? ¿Cómo se dotó a lo visible de tal naturaleza? Más allá de aquellos héroes del siglo XIX, iniciadores de esta corriente, Schmitt dejó constancia de que el verdadero fundador del Genialismus alemán había sido Hölderlin. Su descubrimiento fue una revolución cultural que acabó transformando las categorías de la política. Ese paso se dio alrededor de 1900 y significó ante todo dejar atrás la edad dominada por Goethe. Este hecho transformó toda la gramática de la vida cultural » [4]

No sé hasta qué punto pudiéramos decir que la época del 900 de la “Alemania Secreta” encarnada en el grupo de George fuera una continuación de lo que Ball alerta como la hegemonía de la cultural del genio del romanticismo alemán. Más importante es notar, me parece, cómo el pasaje del “sujeto del genio romántico” al personalismo decisionista de Schmitt es constitutivo de un mismo momento del “genialismus” en la medida en que genera la visibilidad y la excepción de un mecanicismo sin fin (como el cine que Villacañas llama la atención bajo la “Welfoffentichkeit”, la co-pertenencia entre la mentira y lo diabólico). Me interesa notar, como hipótesis, que el genio romántico es lo que deviene en la cultura del 900, y más precisamente en el pensamiento de Schmitt, bajo el concepto de “persona” que explicita Ball. Y como nos dice el autor de Flametti, no hay decisión si no hay ya un concepto de persona:

« El concepto de personalidad en la obra de Schmitt cobra un interés mayor en cada uno de sus libros. Es una actitud escatológica católica, para cuya comprensión recomiendo un breve libro del español Miguel de Unamuno. La relación entre persona y realidad, o estado y forma de la ley, es prácticamente la esencia de Teología Política. Una dictadura es impensable sin una personalidad e igualmente impersonal sin una representación digna de valor. Así como no hay forma sin decisión, no es posible la decisión sin una persona que decida. Según Schmitt, la persona no puede pensar fuera de la forma absolutista de la jurisdicción: en el sentido propio del sujeto encontramos el problema de la forma jurídica » [5].

Si la ‘persona en concreto’ es la condición de toda decisión soberana, esto implica la necesidad de homologar derecho (jurisprudencia) y teología (católica) como principio unitario de la ratio formal del derecho. En efecto, el matiz más interesante del texto de Ball radica justamente en ese momento en donde se muestra que la “razón de Iglesia” se encuentra por encima de la razón de Estado. Una ratio teológica-política que es, antes que nada, una razón fáctica e inmanente de la esfera del derecho. Escribe Ball:

« Ratio en Latin, significa no solo razón” (Vernunft) sino también explicación, “medida”, “derecho”, y “método”. Ratio es, en buena medida, la explicación de la naturaleza de un fenómeno, así como el sentido general de su organización (Einrichtung). Dicho esto, la ratio por naturaleza presupone el concepto de reprsentatio que denota el hacer presente (Vergegenwartigung) a través de su figuración…» [6].

La ratio es el núcleo secreto de la decisión que hace visible el cuerpo místico de la iglesia, y para Ball, quien por estos años ya había escrito su libro sobre los íconos bizantinos Byzantinisches Christentum. Drei Heiligenleben (1923), la invisibilidad de los santos y ángeles que acompañan la santa comunidad. La ratio se opone a la representatio del cálculo moderno, pero aun depende y ejecuta su poder a partir de la “persona”; invención del derecho jurídico romano, como bien supo ver Simon Weil en su conocido “La persona y lo sagrado”. El fenómeno de la persona funciona de esta manera en el pensamiento dictatorial de Schmitt en dos registros:

1. como aplicación o transformación de la teoría del genio alemán romántica, a la vez que intenta superarla via la cancelación de toda subjetividad abstracta o idealista.

2. como suelo “legal” por donde legitimar la excepción soberana más allá del principio anárquico del poder o la fuerza dogmática de la iglesia (más bien el dogma si entra pero solo en la medida en que es posterior a la ley).

Es fundamental entender aquí que la esencia de la Iglesia Católica para Schmitt no es culturalista ni moral, sino el aparato de la consumación de la jurisprudencia romana. Y es a través la persona que la mediación concreta (Vergegenwartigung) de su legítima razón (ratio) puede ocurrir. Así, la esfera del derecho y la legitimidad eclesiástica constituyen un círculo hermenéutico en el centro del pensamiento schmittiano.

Si esta lectura vis-a-vis Hugo Ball es correcta, lo que se nos exige es la profundización de una crítica de la operación efectiva del derecho, para tomar el concepto de Villalobos-Ruminott, y deshacer la relación entre derecho y persona, haciendo posible la pregunta por la “vida” más allá de las categorías principiales de lo político.

Schmitt fue muy consciente de la importancia de la interpretación de Ball a su primera etapa intelectual, a tal punto de reconocer que, junto a Leo Strauss o Ernst Junger, el poeta de DADA había acertado en colocar Romanticismo Político en el centro de sus preocupaciones y haber captado su esencia. En un congreso que tuvo lugar en Plettenberg en 1970, Schmitt recordaba aquella reseña de 1924 junto a una fraseología de Ball sobre el “Ser” como “forma de la consciencia en el tiempo”.

Es, otra vez, la cuestión de la ratio y la persona, como dos conceptos que Schmitt interpretó a su manera cuando se describió hacia la década del 50 como un “Epimeteo Cristiano”. Pero es muy probable que haya sido Ball quien acentuara la imagen del último Schmitt sobre sí mismo:

« Dunque, che cosa rimane? Non mi va di criticarlo, vorrei capirlo, e a dire il vero proprio per un autentico amore, non solo per amicizia e stima nei suoi confronti. Puo anche aver fatto della mia persona cio che voleva, questo non cambia nulla. Ora sono vecchio abbastanza per saper valutare in certa misura il significato di Ball per noi tutti. E stato proprio lui, del resto, a dire di me la cosa piu bella che sia mai stata detta in segno di lode e riconoscimento. Ha detto di me: «Nella forma di coscienza [Gewissensform] della sua attitudine vive il proprio tempo » Una frase meravigliosa in ogni dettaglio, forse non lo si nota a prima vista. « Nella forma di coscienza della sua attitudine vive il proprio tempo »: prendo questa frase come riconoscimento nei miei confronti. La forza significante di questa frase e ancora pi grande della bellezza stilistica che si sente quando la si legge o anche quando la si ascolta » [7]

_
Notas

1. Michael Hollrich. « Catholic Anti-Liberalism in Weimar: Political Theology and its Critics”, en The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law (ed. Leonard V. Kaplan). Lexington Books, 2012. 17-47

2. Leo Strauss. “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political”, en Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: the hidden dialogue, University of Chicago Press, 1995. p.90-120.

3. Hugo Ball. “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology”. October, 146, Fall 2013. (La traducción al castellano es mía).

4. José Luís Villacañas. “Carl Schmitt: una autocrítica”. (ponencia inédita). Leída en el marco de Infrapolítica / Poshegemonía/ Literatura, Universidad Complutense, Verano 2014.

5. Hugo Ball. “Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. p.84

6. Ibid. p.89.

7. Carl Schmitt. « Coloquio Su Hugo Ball », en Carl Schmitt: un giurista davanti a se stesso (ed. Giorgio Agamben). Neri Pozza, 2005. p. 149.

Infrapolitical Deconstruction (and Other Issues Related and Unrelated.)

Tag Archives: Schmitt

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