Month: February 2018

Political poetics and posthegemony: on Jorge Alemán’s Soledad: Común: Políticas en Lacan (2012). By Gerardo Muñoz.

The horizon of Jorge Alemán’s thinking is constituted by a desire to confront two deficiencies that have become commonplace in contemporary political thought. The first calls for radical subjectivation to achieve liberation, and the second, the articulation of psychoanalytical theory as an instrument to move away from certain impasses of social emancipation in a moment where the outside of the capitalist general principle of equivalence has become the reification of itself through negation. Subjectivity and theoretical supplementary negation are what constitutes the frame of today’s so-called “Leftist critical hemisphere,” which has achieved nothing but the fides for those persuaded in the subtleties of the Communist Idea, the Multitude, or the biopolitical subject. The refreshing theoretical import of Alemán’s thinking is, first and foremost, that it radically breaks with all theories of subjectivity that guard the foundation of politics today and their sadistic Master discourse.

Just a couple of days ago at a conversation panel session, a person said to another with all sincerity: “there are times where you have to join the Resistance, and give up European critical theory. There are times where there are no other options.” Putting aside the extreme decisionism that such opinion entails, the surge in the absolute of inclusion through communization is today the logical and linguistic articulation by which nihilism today takes the form of exceptional politics. Renouncing communization, or thinking the common otherwise, is enough for radically expulsing whoever brings to bear the fractures within every order of majoritarian hegemony. Against the possibility of a counter-majoritarian hegemonic undoing (which would only be inverting the demand for a narcissistic and thetic contraction of the sameness, of another community, etc.), Alemán’s Soledad:Común: Políticas en Lacan (Capital Intelectual 2012) proposes a radical suspension from every communitarian closure in favor of a solitude of singular desire against the demand of the Master, the equivalence of capitalist structural differentiation, as well as the economy of salvation that is presupposed in every communitarian interdependence as mass psychology of the political. According to Alemán, what is at stake today is to think the “Common” not as a dispensation of propriety and genus, but in relation to the ontological gap that is irreducible to meaning and representation and that opens itself to “existence” (18).

This ontological indeterminacy brings to divergence the poles of politics and psychoanalysis and displaces the metaphysical subjectivist politicity at the core of leftist subjective productionism in thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Alain Badiou. The metaphysics of the subject, Alemán reminds us, is still caught up in the Master discourse and logic of identification, unable to properly give an account of the common as that what names the “void space in every social linkage” (25). Of course, the separation of the void that constitutes the unground of the subject’s ontological indeterminacy is to be distinguished from the liberal and Rortyan relativism that articulates the social space vis-à-vis moral good intentions before the Big Other. For Alemán, on the contrary, facing the non-knowledge of the psychoanalytical school is to confront the very void as the essence of every social contract, which fundamentally exposes the singular to its tragic finitude. For Alemán, and this is of major importance, Heidegger and Lacan are two proper names that untie the Master’s discourse towards a destruction of every commonality onto-theologically grounded for a messianic enterprise of liberation. Alemán calls this other than messianic subjectivist politics a “poetical politics,” which he links to the task of thought and the new beginning for politics:

“La tarea del pensar, en el sentido de Heidegger, aquella que ya ha franqueado el plano “ontoteológico” de la misma filosofía, tiene entre sus propósitos la apertura a un acontecimiento epocal que nos entregue las senas de una nueva donación del Ser. A nuestro juicio, si despojamos esta propuesta de sus acentos teológicos, se trata de construir una “poética política” hecha con los mimbres de Freud, Marx, Heidegger, y Lacan.” (38-39).

I am intrigued by what Alemán is trying to pursue here under the concept “political poetics” (poética política), which he registers in passing, but fails to define at length, immediately moving to what the concept itself has to promise for “emancipation” of the European and the Latin American regional spaces. It is obvious that poetical politics is not a new regionalism, and is not interested in the least in articulating something like a politics for Latin America, or a post-imperial (or Kojevean grand space) European geopolitics. Of course, there is an echo of Heidegger’s concept of the artwork and poetry as solicitation of dwelling; a path that for Alemán needs to suspend the Badiousian militant subjectivity, which he calls a dead subject (un sujeto muerto) at the end of the day. Later on, Alemán provides a clue when he says, “for us the problem today is how to understand the expression of the Will” (49). So, is political poetics a new re-formulation of a political will? But what is a will if not a step back to the command, whether in political, ethical, moral, or theological structure? I am suspicious of a new call for will that could leave behind the Kantian and medieval disputatio that has a long and complicated history in the medieval debates around the Infinite (the work of François Loiret here is very much at stake in thinking through the history of the Will in medieval metaphysics). Alemán is very well versed in the difficulties that the question of the will presupposes, and that is why he will identify the will with Lacan’s “decided desire” (50).

However, this decided desire is the fundamental fiction produced by the neurotic subject. Hence, the question for Alemán is whether this passage from solitude/common to the Will to the neurotic decided subject does not amount to a final story-telling that needs to be rendered inoperative in order to liberate the path of un-grounding (desfundamentación) radically open beyond the Master discourse and the faith in the general principle of equivalence. This is a problem that Alemán does not solve in Soledad:Común. But it is here where the maximum intensification between hegemony and posthegemony resides. In other words, whereas hegemony is the decided desired, posthegemony as I define it, would be the name of a fissured democratic politics that accepts the void of the social contract without subsequent compensatory hegemonic-political reconstruction of the social space. Later on in Soledad: Común, and when Alemán is teasing out the role of knowledge in Lacan’s understanding of School, he writes:

“…las distintas manifestaciones de lo Real, angustia, trauma, pesadilla, repetición, pulsión de muerte, debe ser recibidas, en su “no saber” para luego elaborar la construcción correspondiente propia de una “invención de saber y su transmisión”. El no saber no es la pasión por la ignorancia, es la distancia irreducible entre la verdad y el saber, distancia que debe ser habitada para que surja un invención.” (56-57).

It would seem that for Alemán the destruction of all grounds of politics are preparatory for establishing what he calls, following Laclau, a new “logical dignity that takes the People as the invitation of a logic of hegemony” (59). The problem of the Will seems to allow the hasty move from the fantasy of the neurotic to the construction of a social hegemony. In a way, what at first what discarded as a mass psychology of Freudianism is later achieved by submitting thought to the operation of the Will that re-organizes hegemony in the name of the People. And the problem is that this hegemony of the social is refractory of the singular. In fact, Alemán says at the very end: “This Equality would be identical to what we have called the Common” (69). But can hegemony be then the name of the psychoanalytical cure? Alemán warns us that the Common always opposes, each and every time, the logic of equivalence and value, since the sinthome of the barred-subject is always irreplaceable.

But, it is precisely for this reason why hegemony cannot do the work and it remains insufficient as a mechanism of translation for a generalized cure in the social. In other words, it is because there is always something that fails, that post-hegemony advances a politics of common solitude and the singular sinthome.

Beyond rigorisms: notes on Martin Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” (1929). By Gerardo Muñoz.

A preliminary note: it is important to have in mind that Heidegger understood metaphysics as onto-theology. This means that metaphysics was not anevent among others in history, but rather the event that allows the dispensation of the history of the forgetting of being as such. This is why it is always insufficient to take up the mission of founding an “alternative metaphysics” or an immanentization of the metaphysical horizon, which is, at the end of the day, the high price that Averroism has to pay for reenacting absolute aristotelianism against Christian dogmatics. Already in the opening line of “What is Metaphysics?” (1929), (“The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics…” 82), we encounter the gesture of awakening from the sleepwalking that is the essence of metaphysics as constituted by figures of the supreme (those “idols” that Gareth Williams already brought up to our attention in his commentary) on the one hand; and by the logic reconstruction of identity and difference of historical time on the other.

The engagement against all metaphysical rigorisms must open to a region of factical existence that clears a distinctive path that does not coincide with the demand for “exactness” in the wake of modern scientific development and the legitimacy of the ‘spiritualization of technology’. This spiritualization grounds the objectivity of scientific knowledge as its self-legitimation: “Today the only technological organization of universities and faculties consolidates this multiplicity of dispersed disciplines; the practice establishment of goals by each discipline provides the only meaning source of unity. Nonetheless, the rootedness of the science in their essential ground has atrophied” (82-83). Thus, the question of Da-Sein must necessarily move away, in a counter-universitarian fold, from the demand of exactness of mathematics and the rigorisms of inquiry that is only capable of establishing grounds. The techno-universitarian machination vis-à-vis exactness and rigor ascertains legitimacy through being understood as unveiled will-to-power and reserve for transformation, production, and distribution-organization.

But how? Of course, Heidegger not once speaks of legitimacy in this essay, and I would leave it open to whether the ontological difference and existence is a path that could be thought as an otherwise point of entry into the inquiry for legitimacy in the modern age. (A long parenthesis: this question seems pertinent, in my view, in order to bypass the recurring indictment of Heideggerianism as a “mystical step back” to the antiquity of the Greeks, to the inhumane hypsipolis apolis of the city, or turn to dichtung as the stamp of the German genialismus destroyer of the Enlightenment. I would bracket this question here for future investigation. I must clarify, however, that I pose this question not in the order of intellectual history, but as someone interested in the problem of the genesis of modernity. Also at stake here is the crucial debate with Ernst Jünger regarding the “crossing over the line” as the condition of nihilism, as well the unexplored relation between Lacan’s psychoanalysis, anthropological deficiency, and the ontological difference). In “What is Metaphysics”, Heidegger suggests that any real confrontation must be done through the nothing. The question of nothing for science and the techno-spiritual constellation is “an outrage and a phantasm”, a sort of suppository for transparent rationality (84). Indeed, Heidegger writes: “Science wants to know nothing about the nothing.” (84). But the nothing is never sutured, and that is why it takes a spectral figure; it returns whenever science fails to bring to unity of its own ground.

The question regarding nothing must be cleared from the logic operation of ‘negation’, which for Heidegger is “a doctrine of logic and a specific act of the intellect” (85). Here, Heidegger not only wants to break away from all forms of the Hegelo-Marxist dialectical philosophy of history, but with a deeper anthropological assumption that resides in the insistence of the condition of anticipation (86). (Note for future elaboration: a central kernel of philosophical anthropology – from Helmuth Plessner to Arnold Gehlen, from Hans Blumenberg to Odo Marquard – has been the story of finding ways to institute conditions of anticipation to discharge the absolutism of phenomena and organizing symbolic reality through compensatory and manageable partitions of spheres and actions). But I agree with Gareth Williams that what is at stake in the non-grasping of the question of the nothing is sustaining thinking as nihiliation to an “unconcealed strangeness” that opens up the condition of finitude. Originary attunement is what “makes manifest the nothing” (88), for Heidegger, the possibility of the closest proximity and near true distance. The unwelt of attunement (which never constitutes the idealism of a weltanschauung) is said to be found in boredom or anxiety that rips a hole in language, since “anxiety robs us of speech” (89). Boredom puts us in relation to the animal.

Now, this ur-stimmung knows no hypokeimenon (the pure “that is” of the subject, what subjects the pre-supposition), and that is why it is an instance where the “nothing is manifest” as the clearing of being as a sort of black sun in the open of nothing. “Nihiliation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihiliates” (90). This original attunement is what allows for freedom completely disintegrate “logic itself in the turbulence of a more originary questioning” (92). The digression on freedom is important. That is, the freedom that is evoked here is necessarily detached from the freedom of the subject of dialectical thought, the two conceptions of freedom in classical Liberalism (positive and negative), and freedom understood as a conatus of experience engrained in the subjective fabric of affects and habits in the tradition of immanence and philosophies of vitalism, etc. Let’s bracket it in a schematic form: freedom against liberty (liberalism):: attunement against affect (life). A question at this point: is the emergence of the freedom in this early text as a vortex of the attunement of anxiety and boredom, later displaced in Heidegger’s insistence on the Galassenheit as the fundamental mood of a suspended topology? Or is the Galassenheit an adjoined mood as the attunement with the nothing? The question of freedom emerges again at the end in an important passage:

“We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will. So abyssally does the process of finitude entrench itself in Dasein that our most proper and deepest finitude refuses to yield to our freedom” (93).

The question of freedom as posited here runs all absolute rigorisms amok, whether ethical or political, which ultimately makes their propositions fall within the regime of the “legitimacy of the dominion of “logic” in metaphysics” (95). I would like to call the freedom that opens up in this region where philosophizing takes place infrapolitical freedom. But philosophy here is trans-formed; this is thought. The dismissal of the nothing “with a lordly wave of the hand” as science does, or through an accumulation of facts as it is done in historiography, cannot guarantee freedom in the originary sense that is housed in existence.

As Heidegger says at the very end: “no amount of scientific rigor attends to the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science” (96). Not fully abandoning Husserl (or at least that is my wager here, briefly crossing to a late essay on the question of “Earth” beyond science), the philosozing occurs in the measureless earth, an earth that does not move, and beyond any conception as a ready-made idea of measurement. The moment that philosophy raises the question of our existence, it embarks in a decisive removal of all rigorisms of truth (be it ethical, logical, political, anthropological, or historical –hegemonikai or guiding faculties) as well as the absolute trepidations of the negative. Only when positing being at the proximity of the fissured ark, there is the possibility of a bringing the questioning of the nothing. It is here where all rigorisms collapse and good theories end.

Bibliography

Edmund Husserl. “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Original Ark, the Earth, does not move”. Shorter Works (University of Notre Dame, 1981). 222-233.

Gareth Williams. “First Take on “What is Metaphysics” by Martin Heidegger”. https://infrapolitica.com/2018/02/18/first-take-on-what-is-metaphysics-by-martin-heidegger-by-gareth-williams/

Martin Heidegger. “What is Metaphysics” (1929), Pathmarks (University of Cambridge Press, 1998). 82-97