Author: infrapoliticalreflections

A reply to Steve Buttes on infrapolitics. by Gerardo Muñoz

Steve Buttes’ “Some questions for infrapolitics” is an intelligent and generous effort that engages with several key problems at the heart of the ongoing collective project of ‘Infrapolitical Deconstruction’. Although, it begs to say that Moreiras’ works – from the early Interpretación y Diferencia (1991) to Línea de sombra (2006), have been central to thinking de-narrativization and the critique of metaphoricity, bringing these problems into new light from different registers (the literary, the cultural, and the political), I think it would be incorrect to frame the particular project of infrapolitics as a culmination of Moreiras’ own thought and itinerary. In this light, what I find of importance in Buttes’ intervention is the fact that he does not just hinge on a particular problem, but is able to juggle and render visible a series of common elements of the project that merge with his own research (1).

Indeed, it was unfortunate to have missed Prof. Buttes at the last formal meeting during the Harvard ACLA 2016 conference, but we could only hope that there will be another timely encounter for discussion. For what it is worth, I want to lay down a few commentaries on some issues raised by Buttes. My aim is not to correct or even less defend a programmatic way of infrapolitics, but perhaps to think about his recent inquiry as parallel with some of the problems that have been pertinent to my own intellectual reflection over the last two or so years. I hope this will serve as a reparatory outline for future discussions to come.

In a precise moment of his commentary, Buttes writes: “That which escapes regulation, visibilization through the metaphors chosen to organize the world—the unthought thought, that which “what was never [on the] radar” (“Some comments”), freedoms that remain beyond writing (Williams, The Mexican Exception), the unfinished manuscript (Cometa, “Non-finito”), averroist intellect (Muñoz “Esse extraneum”) and so on—always remains invisible, and as a consequence always emerges as something that looks like the thing it is: real life beyond calculation, beyond visibilization, beyond metaphoric capture. In other words, it is the image, as Dove has called it. This image, of course, is characterized by its invisibility, by its ability to be sensed but not seen, experienced but not known, used but not valued”.

I am entirely in disagreement that infrapolitics could be thought as invisibility in opposition to visibility, since that opposition itself remains caught in calculation that renders the operation of unconcealment and the existential analytic obsolete. The very idea of the averroist intellectual has nothing to do specifically with the image as such, but with metaxy (or metaxu as rendered by Weil’s anti-personalist Platonism). This is why life as pure means constitutes itself impersonally from the outside. Hence, to reduce the question of the image to a division of the senses (sight) or to the disciplinary arrangement made possible by modern art historical discourse (Fried et al) is interesting, but not relevant, at least not for averroism. It is true, however, that averroism is crucial for infrapolitics. To some extent averroism, like the existential analytic or marranismo, is an important referent for infrapolitical existence and posthegemonic democracy.

אIn her important research on the saturated image, Camila Moreiras Vilaros has emphasized the transformative nature of images from a regime of the society of control to one of saturation and exposure. If the first still has a mode of coercion over bodies and subjects, the second one is hyperbolically without subject, substance, and extension. Exposure coincides fully with the image of the world in positionality. In this sense, infrapolitics fundamentally thinks not the invisible, but the invisible as already fully visible. To be marrano in the open means to dwell in the event of total exposure.

Weil, Esposito, Coccia, Agamben, or Moreiras are thinkers of this outside as metaxy, although do not particularly wish to install an “invisible iconology”, or “an icon of potentiality over actuality”. I am convinced that the question of iconology features centrally in Prof. Buttes’ research, but from my own understanding, infrapolitics cannot be separated from an actuality granted by a form of life or the second division of existence that renders inoperative the very distinction of actuality and potentiality. In fact, in recent months some of us have understood the importance of undertaking Heidegger’s influential seminar Aristotle Metaphysics 1-3: the actuality over force, as to cautiously rethink the difficulty of the Aristotelian category (actuality) that is at stake here. In terms of the icon, in my own research project I have thought of another relation with pictorial space that is not possessed by iconicity, which allows possible oikonomical arrangement and sacrament institution [2]. I would say that, indeed, landscape is important for infrapolitics, but far from rendering a dichotomy between the visible and the invisible, the expropriated and the appropriated, it seeks to think distance and dwelling.

א It was something like this that was at stake for Heidegger in one of his rare essays written as a general reflection on art, but specifically meant as a commentary on a Spanish sculptor that he very much admired: Eduardo Chillida. In Die Kunst und der Raum (1969), Heidegger writes: “Solange wir das Eigentümliche des Raumes nicht erfahren, bleibt auch die Rede von einem kunst-lyrischen raum dunkel. Die weise, wie der Raum das Kunstwerk durchwaltet, hangt vorerst im Un-bestimmten.” Before the pictorial space there is the question of space. How to account for the peculiarity of space? That was Heidegger’s question, since spacing meant to ‘erbringt’ (don) freedom and the life (wohnen) for da-sein.

The word “value” appears in different ways about seven or eight times in Buttes’ piece. I am not sure I can take up the different ways in which it appears, at times in opposition to use. However, it is clear that infrapolitics does not seek to value any ontic or ontological position, since it departs necessarily from a critique of the principle of general equivalence as the contemporary determination of nihilism (an argument made forcefully, I think, by Moreiras, Villalobos-Ruminott, & J. L. Nancy). Thus, it is inconsistent with infrapolitics to argue that “infrapolitics, creates […] a fetish—“a form of thinking the political that fetishizes the undoing of power as a value in itself”. Undoing power arrives at the non-subject or post-hegemony as democratic condition for social existence. But how is this “value” or instrumentalized for “value itself”? In some cases, Buttes seems to take value for ‘preference’. Infrapolitics does not make that decision for preference’s sake, but for understanding the non-correspondence between life and politics in thought.

א The question of value tied to the problem of ‘poverty’ and ‘exploitation’ is a register that infrapolitics does not take for granted. However, I am convinced that the pursuit of a new jargon of exploitation today is always in detriment of the possibility of understanding the existence of man otherwise. It is a very strange turn that some today on the Left– take Daniel Zamora, who fundamentally misinterprets Foucault’s work – keep insisting on the question about the necessity to reintroduce proletarian identity as determinate subject against diversity. It makes no sense to do this in a time like ours, where work and labor have completely disappeared. I prefer to discuss inclusive consumption (Valeriano) and uneven pattern of accumulation (Williams), not labor and exploitation.

In one of his footnotes, Buttes claims that “infrapolitics spans writers from Javier Marías, to Borges, to Lezama Lima to Cormac McCarthy to, as I note below, Ben Lener, and also, plausibly, Sergio Chejfec or Alberto Fuguet, then infrapolitics is the canon, it is the archive itself”. It is a surprising remark, but I understand that I might not fully understand its implications. Does it entail that infrapolitics is an archive of a particular style, or that it coincides merely with a work-for-the-archive? I agree with Moreiras that infrapolitics is a type of relation with the archive, and in fact, at the moment the collective is currently thinking through the archive in relation to the general historiography of the imperial Hispanist tradition [3]. Does this mean that infrapolitics is merely a relation with Hispanism and the Spanish letters? I am not convinced. I do think that there is intricate relation between writing and infrapolitics, but it could be extended and explored in other forms of art (painting, music, cinema, or even dance). Most of us work on writers such as Roa Bastos or Raul Ruiz, Lezama Lima or Oscar Martinez, Juan Rulfo or Roberto Bolaño; but these proper names are far from constituting an infrapolitical archive. There can never be an archival infrapolitics.

א In a recent intervention on the subject of infrapolitics, Michele Cometa suggested that infrapolitics was indeed the place to use literature as a thing for thought [4]. The modern invention of university disciplines and faculties, archives and practices such as “literary criticism” is a perversion of an an-archic space of unity where there is no differentiation between literature and thought, the image and life. One has to break away from the modernist fantasy that there is a ‘proper location’ for an object of studies. There are only relations of force constituted by tradition. This is why Dante at the dawn of Modernity, and later Leopardi during the bourgeoisie revolution, could see themselves as poets, thinkers, political theorists, and lovers. There was no separation.

Notes

1. Buttes, Steve. “Some questions for infrapolitics”. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/some-questions-for-infrapolitics-by-stephen-buttes/

2. Mondzain’s research is fundamental here, since her work on early Byzantine Church’s articulation of hegemony is intimately tied to the operation of iconology. See, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford University Press, 2004.

3. Alberto Moreiras. “A response to Steve Buttes”. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/a-response-to-steve-buttes-by-alberto-moreiras/

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6ddjE_sL5w

Esse extraneum: on Emanuele Coccia’s Sensible life: a micro-ontology of the image. by Gerardo Muñoz

coccia sensible lifeLa vita sensibile (2011) is Emanuele Coccia’s first book to be translated into English. Rendered as Sensible Life: a micro-ontology of the image (Fordham U Press, 2016), it comes with an insightful prologue by Kevin Attell, and it belongs to the excellent “Commonalities” series edited by Timothy Campbell. We hope that this is not the last of the translations of what already is Coccia’s prominent production that includes, although it is not limited to La trasparenza delle immagini: Averroè e l’averroismo (Mondadori, 2005), Angeli: ebraismo, cristianesitimo, Islam (co-ed with G. Agamben, 2011), and most recently Il bene nelle cose: la pubblicità come discorso morale (2014). One should take note that in Latin America – particularly in Chile and Argentina – Coccia’s books have been translated for quite a while, and have been part of a lively debate on contemporary thought. We hope that a similar fate is destined in the United States. For some of some of us working within the confines of the Latinamericanist reflection, an encounter with Coccia has grown out of our continuous exchange with friends like Rodrigo Karmy, Gonzalo Diaz Letelier, and Manuel Moyano. It would be superfluous to say that Coccia’s work is nested in the so called contemporary ‘Italian Philosophy’ (pensiero vivente, in Roberto Esposito’s jargon), although one would be committing a certain violence to reduce it to another ‘theory wave’ so rapidly instrumentalized in the so called ‘critical management’ within the North American university.

Coccia’s tropology (not entirely a set of fixed “categories” or “concepts” for a philosophical program), such as imagination, the sensible, and the averroist intellect are signatory relays for a potential history of thought against the grain of grand conventional histories and historiographies of Western philosophy, or even more so, against the reaffirmation of a principle of philosophy of history in the wake of nihilism and biopolitics. It is most certainty true that Coccia’s investigations share a horizon that we can call the “form of life” – some of us also call it “infrapolitical existence”, which for Coccia himself has translated as the vita sensibile – although both his approach and condensation of thought always presuppose an efficient interrogation of the singular indifferent to “influences” or “schools of thought” (even when Coccia moves deep into scholastic and medieval philosophy). Perhaps no less important of a metacritical index is the unreserved service for a reconsideration of the philosophical tradition – and more importantly, the transmission and disposition of a thinking that remains unwritten – beyond the history of metaphysics and political theology.

Sensible Life is not a book about the ontology of the image in the pictorial or phenomenological sense, but an investigation into the metaxy of existence and being in the world. As Coccia argues early on in the book, ‘the sensible life is a world given to us, and only as sensible life are we in the world’ (2). Against biopolitical or vitalist (neo-positivist) remnants of understanding as fated in the subject (or the persona), Coccia prepares the ground for a physics of the sensible that affects, without really transforming, the human as subject, although it does seek to exhaust itself in subjectivity. Coccia argues, as if implicitly taking up Simone Weil’s suggestion, that the form of sensation is always a modal relation with the outside, an improper distance (metaxu) of the ‘in between’, necessary for any schematization of concrete existence [1]. Hence, perception or sensing is only possible because there is metaxy, and not because there is a subject as the producer and commander of capacities and substances. Against distributive ontologies that design complex arrangement and division of ‘life’, Coccia’s sensibly maps out a region that has always already been there, and that turns to another relation with ontology and language.

In a large part, Sensible Life is vastly informed by his prior study on Averroes and the averroist tradition Averroè e l’averroismo (Mondadori, 2005), where Coccia studied the ways in which conventional Christian history of philosophy convicted the twelve century Iberian philosopher for the madness of positing a common and universal unity of the intellect. What Coccia thematizes in that study, but also in Sensible life with greater speculative freedom, is the extent to which reason depends on the potentiality of the intellect understood as the capacity for imagination. What is common and at the same time ‘improper’ to all beings is the potentiality of imagination that remains outside of life, never constituting a principle of sufficient reason nor the ground for dogmatic belief. The ‘scandal of averroism’, as Rodrigo Karmy has called it, was followed by the Scholastic ban on teaching averroism and removing averroists from the university. It is no surprise that this coincided with the development of the category of the person as a secondary reserve of Christian political theology and Roman Catholic ratio [2].

This is what lays bare in Coccia’s explicit condemnation of the Cartesian cogito, and his affirmation of the sensible as a de-metaphorized image without proper location, since it only dwells ‘where one no longer lives and where one no longer thinks’ (17). This impersonal drift of the sensible is what allows for an extreme de-localization in multiplicity of reproduction of images that serve to dislocate the very inside and outside of the constitution of the subject, but also of any constitution of life itself (31-32). Indeed, the first part of the book is said to write a physics of the impersonal and immaterial ‘third space’ (sic) – what in Aristotle’s vocabulary is the relation with the ‘externals’ [tōn exōthen], and in medieval scholasticism is the esse extraneum – that like marrano existence, it dwells on a dual exteriority. In a key moment of the development of Sensible life, Coccia writes:

“How, then, can we define an image? In his work on perspective John Peckham held that an image is “merely the appearance of an object outside its place (extra locum suum) because the being appears not only in its own place but also outside its own place”…Our image is nothing but the existence of our form beyond what makes up, the substance that permits this form to exist in an entirely extraneous matter to that in which one exists and mixes with. Every form is born from this separation of the form of a thing from the place of its existence: where the form is out of place, an image will have a place [ha luogo]. […] Thus, an image is defined by a dual exteriority: the exteriority from bodies and the exteriority from souls – because images exist prior to meeting the eye of the subject who observes a mirror” (19).

The reproductive machine of the sensible image does not ground itself unto the subject or the purely sensorial; a movement which would have produced yet another schism between mind and body, senses and reason, the visible and the invisible. Against the categorial arrangement of the persona (and its attributes, genus, and divisions), Coccia pushes forth a general theory of productions of forms that could account for the natural life of images (31). What is really at stake here is a medial process (provided by the medieval intentio) of multiplicity beyond being and substance, property and the proper of ontological assertion. Instead, Coccia affirms a cosmological understanding of the One. In fact, one could stress this a little bit further and argue that the averroist potential intellect is a singularization of the henological neo-platonic substance into one of pure externality beyond metaphysical structuration. But the question of henology and the overcoming of metaphysics is one that we cannot raise in the space of this commentary.

For Coccia the medial extension of the image (and the imagination) leads to a metaxy of coming together (simpatizzano, which is Italian ‘third person’ indicative for sharing, is the word he choses) that conspire to form a sort of clinamen effect of singularities. Not long ago Fabián Ludueña thematized this negative community in his important La comunidad de los espectros (Miño & Dávila, 2010) as a ghostly disfiguration that, vis-à-vis the nature of mediality, enters into relation with what is always unhomely and foreign (extraneum). That is the only possible form of the communitas in the sensible life.

The second part of the book made up of seventeen scholion unveil the way in which the sensible immaterial metaxy also provide for the man’s body that accounts for a mundane relation that exceeds and subceeds the psychological and the culturalist materialisms. By reassessing vita activa and mediality, dreams and the ‘intra-body’ (Ortega y Gasset), clothing and cosmetics, Coccia situates the sensible incarnation on the very surface of the body as momentary dwelling (52). As a general anthropology of the sensible, Coccia recoils back to the ‘subject’ and even ‘identity’, but only insofar as one recognizes in this an intention that he calls an ‘ontological indifference’ that allows for an outside projection of an “infra- or hypersychic consistency – a consistency that is almost hyperobjective. Here, “the intentional sphere does not coincide with the sphere of the mind even it includes the mind; it is, rather, the state of existence of all forms when they keep themselves beyond objects and on this side of subjects, or vice versa” (55). This “infra-subjective” solicits a concrete intentional relation of dwelling in the world.

Although the space of the political is not elaborated explicitly – and perhaps for Coccia there is no need for embarking on such a task – one could say that this region is consistent with the infrapolitical relation of the non-subject vis-à-vis the ontological difference. In fact, the marrano whose existence is necessarily infrapolitical in nature is consistent with the multiplied imposture that clothes every identity and every oikos an un-homely as being-in-the-world (91). In fact, Coccia is correct in taking this cue to the limit: “only those can make up and disguise themselves can truly say “I” (86). Marrano life is also the life of the outside, a borrowed life. It is in fashion understood as a tropological site of existence, where according to Coccia a style of the multiple is given its proper place, precisely because it lack costumes, essence, or meaning. On the contrary, fashion brings to bear that only modal relations can constitute forms of life (habits). Fashion has freed life to the sensible, through a suspension of all meditation with the metaphor as its end. Indeed, it is style and not metaphorization what provides for the sensible life.

The dwelling of the sensible is also incarnated multiplicity: it is the improper relation between man and animal, between living and dying. The sensible life as pure immersion, as Coccia has argued in another place, is a flow where movement and detention, action and contemplation become inseparable [3]. It comes as no surprise that Sensible life closes with a meditation on images for life and with a general economy of natality. Here perhaps one could raise the question about averroism as philosophical transmission, but also regarding its staging of ‘living with images’. Coccia argues that life is, above all, ‘what can be transmitted, the very being of tradition” (98). But to transmit is to re-enact a style that never took place: it is a becoming of singularity. In this sense, continues Coccia, ‘Life never stops producing and reproducing, and multiplying’. However, can there be ‘inheritance’ or even ‘legacy’ of that which lacks proper place, and that is always alocational? Is not the becoming of the reproduction of the sensible the very end of transmission, the very form of dis-inheritance from any nomic determination?

It is in this aporia where Coccia’s account of the sensible life (perhaps as a flight from the form of life) touches on the question of natality as a central problem for thought, which is fundamentally a question for the history of thinking. This is also the problem that Reiner Schürmann contemplated in his posthumous Des hégémonies brisées (1996) without really unrevealing its major consequences (except in the problem of finitude posed by the tragic denial). Coccia’s invitation is for us to reimagine imagination (la vita sensibile) outside of its proactive and transcendental saturation into a region that co-belongs with thought. To this end, the vita sensible cannot amount to another anthropology, since its taskless work is to render a life that is no longer one for labor and action, but affected by the immanence of what can be imagined.

 

 

Notes

  1. Simone Weil. “Metaxu”. Grace and Gravity. New York: Rutledge, 1999.
  1. Rodrigo Karmy. “La potencia de Averroes: para una genealogía del pensamiento de lo común en la Modernidad”. Revista Plèyade, N.12, 2013.
  1. Emanuele Coccia. “Speaking Breathing”. New Observation, N.130, 2015.

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

linea de sombra

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.

Movement and Sacrifice. On Samuel Steinberg’s Photopoetics at Tlatelolco, Afterimages of Mexico 1968 (2016). by Gerardo Muñoz.

Photopoetics SamSamuel Steinberg’s Photopoetics at Tlatelolco, Afterimages of Mexico 68 (U Texas Press, 2016) is a timely contribution to the field of Mexican Studies. It posits itself as a sort of culmination of that field, and we would not exaggerate to say by saying that it is an archive of an archive that thrives to undo ‘Mexicanist ideology’ towards a different opening. Steinberg powerfully states at the end Photopoetics: “Mexicanism, in turn, is the name of the ideology that regulated the dutiful carrying-out of the relation between art and the people that the Mexican state organized until Tlatelolco…According to this procedure, one can constantly make art speak the name of Mexico as its truth, as the discontinuous thought, the spirit that haunts and must be revealed by thought” (182). This is a strong and devastating assertion that should also be strategically posited in whatever remains of ‘area studies’ structuration as institutional inertia as well as against its dominance over knowledge production of Latin America within the contemporary university. Photopoetics’ boldness lays precisely in this intersection within archive and reflection, between cultural inscription and disciplinary containment in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre during the Mexican 68. This ‘event’ is symptomatic of the hegemonic haunting of principial Mexicanist reflection and of its multivalance inscription that continuously translates and archives itself as ‘defeat’ (37).

But Photopoetics is more than a book about the co-belonging between photography and literature, the image and life. Rather this very relation, and the limits thereof, is what is tested and taken to the edge in the different folding case studies that make up the book – from Monsivais to Poniawtoska, from Paz and Volpi to contemporary artist Francis Alÿs. The name of that operation depends largely on ‘photography’ as a medium but is not entirely reducible to it. Indeed, photopoetics is the term that establishes a transversal relation with the archival 68 without necessarily being a master trope that seeks to subordinate the archive to “photographic studies” or the “visual culture” discipline (in the W.J. T. Mitchell line or otherwise). The ‘photopoetic’ is not even a concept, but rather a dispositif that varies according to the object in question, allowing for a phenomenology of the onto-photographic effect on the Real and process of encrypting the event as event, as well as the indexical repetition of the archive (25-28).  

This has potent consequences for an analytical comprehension of the political, which fundamentally entails the displacement of hegemonic structuration (not only for ‘Mexicanism’ or the ‘global 68’). Indeed, for Steinberg, hegemony is the consignation of an archive, if by the latter we understand the reduction and principial limitation of the political to calculation (27). It is thus not surprisingly that Steinberg situates his own reflection within a post-hegemonic horizon primarily defined as the destruction of the differend between theory and practice (and throughout the book there is critical engagement with Moreiras, Williams, Yúdice, and Beasley-Murray) (8). This is the unsaid ‘althusserianist’ wager in Steinberg’s book, which is, at the same time, consistent with a politics beyond the subject and a defiant a-principial thought. There are two major and unexpected figures that support this general horizon: José Revueltas and Francis Alÿs. In fact, the book opens with Revueltas and closes with Alÿs; a double movement that although not fully developed, is preparatory for an atopic ground in relation to a post-Mexicanist horizon of reflection, a new form of thought, and a democratic (and communist?) promise.

The first two chapters – “Archive and Event” and “Postponed Images” – situate the general economy of the book, that is, the relation between archive and event and archive as the hegemonic force proper to the 68. The hegemonic phantasm is that of situating the 68 as a sacrificial horizon of history against what should be read as the contingent and democratic student movement that remains encrypted or translated into a reiterated and diversified figures of closure (victims, heroes, the people, or melodrama). Understood in a rancierean key, Steinberg’s post-hegemonic articulation rests principally on the contingent heteronomy of the movement:

“…What we call 1968: “an unforeseeable coming of the other, of a heteronomy; “the event of what or who comes” as incalculable exposure to that other and to the event that is other. […]. No: it is “the event of what or who comes”, that change encounter in which ‘students are confused with workers”, and in which the peasants are also present – absent from where they properly should be. Unconditionally”. (44).

It is not just that the archival event orders them into a grammar of visibility, but also the fact that it translates it (them: the students, or what is to come) into a principle. This is what in “Postponed images” Steinberg sees in Monsivais’ popular melodrama and “national unity” that reinserts “mexicanidad” within the general analytical economy. In a similar way, although folded, this is what is analyzed in the chapter on testimonio (“Testimonio and the future without excision”) taking Elena Poniatowska’s famous La noche de Tlatelolco as interchangeably positing the sacrificial structuration of history vis-à-vis civil society. La noche de Tlatelolco tames the democratic dis-order of the movement into one of the “People” within a broad ‘collective memory’ of the nation (112). We are not too far here from a ‘fictive ethnicity’ grounded in testimonio and its politics of truth. Again, an indexical photopoeticology is what guarantees – in Monsivais’ melodrama as well in Poniatowska’s civil society deposition – the encryption of 68 and its ‘afterlife’.

“Exorcinema” and “Literary restorations” are secondary moments of the 68 archival fantasies and unusual atopics for carrying out the lasting effect of this event. “Exorcinema” takes up films, such as Fons’ Rojo Amanecer and Raygadas’ Silent Light as resurrections of the photopoetic act, but it also has strong declinations that spill over Chris Marker monumental Grim without a cat (1967-77), as well as other figures of Mexican cinema. In “Literary Restoration”, the transition is folded from the ‘spirit of revolutionary sixties’ to the ‘neoliberal age of restoration’. Restoration here is not deployed lightly. Following Badiou, the staging of restoration announces an impasse in the face of historical nihilism, but also makes evident the fascination with the ‘past’ as melancholic repetition and restitution. In this sense, the work of Jorge Volpi centrally figures itself as the symptom of neoliberal restoration, and more specifically his pedagogic novel El fin de la locura (Seix Barral, 2003) sketches something like a narratological aleph of the sixties, revolving around “French theory”, Fidel Castro, psychoanalysis, the “Padilla Case”, and revolutionary ethos. This is an ‘after the fact’ historical novel that condenses – meant for a middlebrow public – major events of the leftist politization and heroic drives. Against Volpi’s own authorial intentions, however, Steinberg concludes that Volpi’s narrative halts at complete politization (hegemony) making possible an infrapolitical register. This is not to say that Volpi is an infrapolitical writer himself. There is no doubt that Volpi’s literary program – the Crack Manifesto, his novels, also his journalism – amount to literary nihilism in the wake of Mexico’s turn towards neoliberalism after NAFTA trilateral economic adjustments. Steinberg pushes for what I would call an infrapolitical interruption in Volpi as a secondary effect of what hegemony and counter-hegemonic literary depolitization cannot hold itself up to.

The last chapter, “An-archaeologies of 1968”, is the fleeing territory from the Mexican archive, and it does so with the help of contemporary artist Francis Alÿs. In this chapter, there are at least two major problems at stake for Steinberg: on one hand is the question of the de-territorialization of the Mexicanist disciplinary (and disciplined) boundaries of knowledge formation, and on the other, the possibility of rendering inoperative any ideal of emancipation (and resistance) based on history, subject, and work (192-93). The relational aesthetics piece “When faith moves mountains” is taken as a precarious negative community that exceeds national borders, as well as any possibility of subjectivation for the Mexican being. Alÿs is resistant to the resistance of Mexicanism. While this is true, perhaps some readers are left desiring further confrontation but this time not against the Mexican archive, but on the grounds of what I would call the transnational circuit of global contemporary art. Bourriaud and Claire Bishop’s theories on relational aesthetics make an entry into the discussion, but I am tempted to say that both of these critics, in different ways, are fully committed to hegemony theory, or at least to hegemony for contemporary art relations to the political, whether in consensual or antagonistic terms [1].

I am not arguing here that Steinberg endorses either Bourriaud’s or Bishop’s assessments or “contemporary art”, but that the an-archeology releasement opens to a critical assessment of the very machinistic operation of contemporary art in its very economical precocity, autonomous circulation, and so called “democratic inclusion” of extended practices and subjects. In this sense the problem of “faith” (189-91), is also about “the faith” of contemporary art: the “pistis” (credit) that in the aura of participation and immateriality ends up repeatedly bounded within a logic of exchange value through the practice of documentation.

Photopoetics at Tlatelolco inaugurates a post-sacrificial reflection on Mexican culture and its conditions of possibility. Making no concessions to ideological or locational authorities, Steinberg calls for a post-hegemonic desire that affirms the real movement of thought that is the concrete potentiality of politics beyond principles and idle chatter.

 

Notes

  1. I am thinking here of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du Réel, 1998) on the side of consensual political practice, and the article “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics “ (October, Fall 2004), by Claire Bishop on the side of antagonism.

Ironic gramscianism: on Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom: the Cultural Cold War in Latin America. (Gerardo Muñoz)

 

Iber Peace Freedom 2015Patrick Iber’s Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Harvard Press, 2015) is a very much-welcomed piece of historiographical investigation on Hemispheric Cold War in the Americas, and I think it is not just circumscribed within conventional historiography, since it also speaks to us as Latinamercanists, that is, some of us not precisely invested in writing history of Latin America. Its publication coincides with other recent books that reexamine the “culture battles” during the Latin American Cold War, such as Jean Franco’s Cruel Modernity (Duke, 2014) Mabel Moraña’s Arguedas/Vargas Llosa (Iberoamericana, 2014), or Rafael Rojas’ Fighting over Fidel (Princeton, 2015). Neither Peace nor Freedom studies the Cold War structuration in the region as a long durè process– spanning from the late twenties (take the assassination of Julio Antonio Mella in Mexico) to Sandinismo and the Marea Rosada or Leftist progressive governments that began with Hugo Chavez’s 1999 election. The Cold War took place in a climate of political and cultural conflictivity that the historian is not hesitant to call a “civil war”: “…the work of political and intellectual currents whose existence predate the Cold War, and whose sources lay in what might be described as the international Left’s civil war. The arrival of the Cold War meant that the Left’s internal conflicts would be inscribed onto superpower competition, and thus that struggles for justice around the world would be refracted through imperial interests of the United States and the USSR. In Latin America, that would leave the Left with almost no viable options for pursuing its aims without compromising them” (3).

The event of the Cold War in Latin America was in this sense a long and costly civil war overdetermined by a dual structuration. However, as Patrick Iber’s studies moves on to argue, this structuration didn’t always lead to political or cultural closure on either side. This duality had multiple replications throughout the book: there was the World Peace Council (WPC) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Casa de las Americas and Mundo Nuevo, along with the principles of “peace” (promoted by the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union) and that of “freedom” (promoted by anti-communist and largely financed by the CIA). Of course, every reader could input their favorite artist, intellectual, or country for either side. It might be superfluous to say that Neither Peace nor Freedom maps a heterogeneous and conflicting history of the Cold War in the Americas (as opposed to being a “Latin American narrative” that only “happened to them” so engrained in the common position of anti-imperialist mapping. Some of us, not all, associate this second with John Beverley’s work and in particular with his Latinamericanism after 9/11).

But perhaps less obvious is the fact that Iber’s commitment to historical writing has abandoned a model of political militancy to generate an otherwise relation with the cultural Cold War archive. I want to expand on this point. At the center of Iber’s argument is that this dual structuration – whether you were anti-communist or anti-anti-communist – encompassed both a technology of liberation and a position in favor of occasional oppression (149). If this is in fact what ‘contained’ the logic of the Cold War, then one can see that Iber’s own position as a historian is consistent with not being on the side of ‘liberation’ or of ‘oppression’. To affirm this, either side would have to hold on to some principle of imperialism. These are the stakes in Patrick’s own book, and I am bringing up this point as to allow for a reexamination of the “dual structure” of the Cold War epoch in light of our present. I think there is something to this. If Patrick is neither on the side of “peace” or “freedom”, ‘liberation’ or ‘oppression’, ‘Latin American anti-imperialism’ or ‘neo-conservative domination’, what is his ground? Where is he standing?

I think there is commitment in Neither Peace nor Freedom, but only in so far as it uncovers another space beyond ideology. This dislocation is the excess of the cold war duopoly. One of the places in which one could start discussing this space, is where Iber argues the following, which can be found at the very end of the introduction of his book:

“Each camp would accuse the others of corruption and operating in the service of foreign empire. But it was not so much an issue of corruption as of the inscription of intellectuals’ preexisting campaigns onto Cold War. The evidence from Latin America suggests that the Cultural Cold War is best understood within a framework of “ironic gramscianism” – the pursuit of cultural hegemony through a combination of coercion and consent, incorporating many agendas. But the consequences were so varied that cultural fronts produced nearly as many ironies as they did movement in the direction that their patrons hoped…And the experience of Lain America’s Left during the Cold War was less a betrayal of democracy than a true paucity of options” (18).

This notion of “ironic gramscianism” – that also makes an important come back at the very end of the book- remains an underdeveloped quasi-concept making it even more suggestive for understanding the endgame of the cultural Cold War [1]. To finish, I want just to elaborate on two aspects that seem latent in this fragment of Iber’s text, and I take them to be hyperbolic of some of the strong claims laid out. First, “ironic gramscianism” seem to be understood by Iber as the contamination by way of the effects of hegemony. Hegemony here is taken as producing not just ‘other effects’ than those desired or intended, but more importantly, perverse effects. As I understand it – not just explicitly in this fragment, but more implicitly in Iber’s study cases– ironic gramscianism breaks the very closure and suture logic of hegemonic articulation, opening itself to an excess that it cannot contain ideologically. That explains why there were “many ironies counter to the direction that the patrons hoped”.

Iber seriously puts hegemony theory in crisis. As we know, hegemony theory is not just a theory, but also inevitably the principial political theory of and about modern Latin America State form. I do not know to what extent hegemony theory can come back unscathed as a viable political option (another example: to what extent the valence of Estado Integral as Estado Aparente in Álvaro Garcia Linera not an ‘irony’ in a deep sense?) [2]. If gramscianism is always ironic, this means that gramscianism does the work in the negative (the “cunning of imperialist reason”), and this negative is the limit of what is no longer “tolerable” in history (think dictatorship, or forms of oppression) (244). If Gramsci (consent and coercion) is always a machine that generates other effects, then it cannot but be ironic. A fundamental consequence here is that hegemony theory does not produce democracy (it cannot do this labor). It is my impression that it is not just a matter of perception, but that gramscianism (hegemony) is irony tout court. Is the ‘irony’ constitutive of hegemony not the very excess and ruin of itself as shown consistently through the Cold War disjunction?

Secondly, I want to raise the question of democracy that lies at the heart of Iber’s intervention. Fundamentally, the question about the Cold War is also a genitive question about democracy in the region: why has there always been a demise and impossibility of democracy? Why the condemnation, the open repudiation across intellectual groups and politico-cultural ideologies? I don’t think that this is something that Iber takes up in his book, nor should we demand an answer from it. In my view, Patrick Iber makes a modest plea: democracy (or let’s call it republicanist democracy) was impossible because there were no options that allowed for such a drift. It is here where I want to open another question for Patrick – as well as for our debate more generally– and this is: what about populism in the Cold War? The national popular State (Peronism, Cardenismo, Varguismo) with all its limitations and authoritarian drives has been the closest to true democratic experiment in the region. Early castrismo, for instance, is in a sense-liquidated populism [3]. Perhaps populism is what the negative does not let be in time. My point is not that populism is something like a “Latin American destiny”. What I wonder is if populism is not what could allow for a republicanist drift (as I suggested recently reading Jose Luis Villacañas’ Populismo) as to establish long lasting democratic institutionalization, perhaps for the first time in the region’s history since the independences of 1810.

I realize that this a highly speculative question, since with the demise of what some of us are calling the “exhaustion of the Latin America political progressive cycle”, populism is not even a viable option. What is worse, the neo-populisms from the Right are neither desirable nor consistent with a democratic opening. The Marea Rosada was a fundamental moment of the Latin American Leftist democratic desire, but not for the reasons proposed by Beverley (geopolitical inversion or State-subaltern alliance), but rather because of the implementation of a certain “fiesta del consumo” that expanded the borders of democratization. Now, to keep insisting on ‘gramscianism’ – and its categories, such as the Integral State, hegemony theory, “identity”, “correlation of forces”, albeit the admiration for Garcia Linera’s thinking, whose work is the most systematic effort to re-inscribe Gramsci in the present – is more of the same, and in an ‘ironic’ way, an option that is highly consistent with neoliberal machination and de-hiarchization (Hatfield 2015).

The end of the Latin American progressive cycle puts to the test the populist democratic articulation that conditions the national popular state form. As we know, this past Sunday, Evo’s MAS lost the referendum in two of its most important political bastions (Potosí and El Alto). If las nuevas derechas are able to keep the level of consumption on the side of large underprivileged popular sectors, then this would mark the final collapse of Latin American populism as a potential democratizing force, obliging us (scholars, and students) to rethink the nature of the political anew.

 

 

Notes

  1. Patrick Iber. Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America. Harvard University Press, 2015. In the conclusion, Iber writes: “The history of the MLN is another reminder that prodemocracy movements in Latin America, whether of the anti-Communist or anti-anti-Communist variety, used languages of liberation that were implicated in support for empire somewhere on the globe. Perhaps there was no other way” (149). Also see (195) his emphasis on “truncated Leninism” as the modernizing drive of the anti-communist intelligentsia.
  1. For this conceptual translation in Garcia Linera, see Gareth Williams’s excellent “Social Disjointedness and State-Form in Álvaro García Linera”. Culture, Theory, and Critique, 2015.
  1. On the Cuban Revolution as hegemony, see El Viejo traje de la Revolución: identidad colectiva, mito, y hegemonía política en Cuba (Universidad de Valencia, 2007) by Sergio López Rivero.

*Introductory remarks for Patrick Iber’s book worskshop at Priceton University, February 23, 2016.

Thwarted Universalisms and Latin American Identity: on Charles Hatfield’s The Limits of Identity. by Gerardo Muñoz

hatfield limits

My review of Charles Hatfield’s recent Limits of identity: politics and poetics in Latin America (U Texas Press, 2015) was published today at Berfrois. It is an admirable book, which I hope will promote  important discussions both within and beyond the professional field.

“In spite of its simplicity and methodical pragmatism, Charles Hatfield’s The Limits of Identity: Politics and Poetics in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2015) is an ambitious and systematic effort to dismantle some of the predominant variations of identarianism that feed the discursive apparatus of Latinamericanism in a period that spans over a century, from José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (1891) to John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11 (Pittsburgh Press, 2011) [1]. The organization of this book, however, is not chronological nor is it structured around case studies based on regions or authors”…[to continue reading].

The republicanist drift: on José Luis Villacañas’ Populismo. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Villacañas populismoThere is little doubt that populism has profoundly upset the debates on thinking politics in recent times. Indeed, Jose Luis Villacañas’ motto in his recent essay Populismo (La Huerta Grande, 2015) correctly captures this anxiety: “el populismo acecha”. In this brief and intelligent essay – this must be underscored, since unlike other monumental studies of his, this text is meant for a widely informed public, hence the lack of footnotes and historical reconstructions – populism is weighted with the much needed urgency that it deserves against its superficial dismissal by liberal thinkers or conventional political pundits that understand it as irrationalism or Catholicism in politics.

Villacañas’ starting point is twofold. On one hand, he affirms the confusion that structures today’s international political scene; the multiple uncertainties, and unclear directions. The fact that the Democratic and Republican parties have opposing national and international agendas, attest to this indecision even within imperial reason. The reemergence of populism departs from this current predicament. On the other, Villacañas confronts Loris Zanatta’s liberal reconstruction of populism, as one that profoundly derives its consequences as a confrontation between modernization and the survival of its archaic remnants. In Zanatta’s conceptualization, populism is the outcome of an ancestral community predicated on the mystic body of Catholic representation, a formulation that seems to repeat early Schmittian theory without too many nuances. But the problem with this overarching thesis is that, although there are analogic mediations between the Pauline figure of the katechon and populist structuration, it dismisses all too easily the populist experiences in Protestant national communities, such as that of Nazi Germany or the North American democratic ‘We the people’ that runs from Abraham Lincoln to F.D. Roosevelt.

Nonetheless, it is not a matter of disagreeing with Zanatta’s conceptual limitations in El Populismo (Katz, 2015). What is crucial is that this assessment allows Villacañas to clear a space of for his own intervention that neither affirms a hyperbolic thesis of secularization (populism as a sort of plebeian Catholicism), nor discards the recent debates on the Left regarding the specificity of populism. Against Zanatta, Villacañas defines the point of departure of populism in the contingent articulation of a “people”:

.
“…nosotros hemos dicho que el pueblo es una comunidad construida mediante una operación hegemónica basada en el conflicto, que diferencia en el seno de una unidad nacional o estatal entre amigos/enemigos como salida a la anomia política y fundación de un nuevo orden” (Villacañas 2015, 28).

The author of ¿Qué imperio? admits that he does not seek to sketch an “ideal type” of populism, if there ever was one. Instead, he offers a rough guide to interrogate more complex associations that the concept generates. In the subsequent chapters the discussion is displaced over a mapping of Ernesto Laclau’s important architectonics of populism through the reformulation of the categories of the people, the equivalence of social demands, the role of affect, the friend-enemy antinomy, the elaboration (and distortion) of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the intertwinement with charismatic leadership. It is important to note that Villacañas is not interested in a recapitulation of Laclau’s political trajectory, to the extent that Laclau’s On populist reason (Verso, 2006) is the culmination of a long political and militant itinerary that commences in the argentine syndicalist experience and comes to a close in the British school of cultural studies, so well studied by John Kraniauskas (2014). Opting for a different path, Villacañas situates Laclau as the symptomatic figure that condenses a series of problems in the history of the modern categories of the political since Hobbes; showing how, far from irrationality or even anti-liberalism, the author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a quintessential modern political thinker at its core.

There are analytical limits to Villacañas’ Laclau, which serve to ground the arguments of his essay. For example, throughout the book, there is an insistence in reading the argentine thinker in confrontation with the neoliberal epochality, as if Laclau’s theory of equivalence of demands or the catachrestic national popular springs as a response to the so-called ‘big-bang’ of global neoliberalism. A second imposed limit is the role of affect and power, which implicitly (it is not developed to its outermost consequences in the essay) has much to do with the debate on post-hegemony, which connects not only to Jon Beasley-Murray’s well known contribution of the same time, but also to the most recently published volume Poshegemonía: el final de un paradigma de la filosofía política en América Latina (ed. Castro-Orellana, Biblioteca Nueva 2015). A central gesture in Villacañas’ essay is to move away from a reductionist opposition between the “populism and post-hegemony” debate, while simultaneously drifting toward a discussion of populism beyond the concept of hegemony as identitarian production embedded in the principle of equivalence.

To this end, “el populismo acecha” is not a matter of competing master tropes or schools of thought in the contemporary university where intellectual battles sometimes seem to be placed. Villacañas’ wager is that thinking populism allows for clearing the political opacity and anti-institutionalism promoted by neoliberalist machination. It in this conjuncture that populism, for Villacañas, is situated in a permanent double-bind, that is, populism is the effective response to “neoliberalism’s stealth revolution”, as Wendy Brown recently has called it; and inversely, it also coincides with neoliberalism’s drift for anti-institutionalization that fuels the anarchic principle of economic valorization at all levels of the social life.

This double bind is a secondary contradiction, since Villacañas rightfully notes that populist anti-institutionalism also rests on a minimal institutional differentiation and a maximum expansion of equivalent demands. This entails that with no institutionalization; populism cannot consecrate a principle of equivalent conversion. However, with full institutionalization there is no longer any possibility for populism, since this would result in the fulfillment of all social demands withdrawing the need for charismatic personalism. Carlos de la Torre’s informative analysis of Ecuadorian Rafael Correa’s technocratic populism confirms Villacañas conceptual reflection on the convergence of populism and neoliberalism in relation to the question of institutionalization (De la Torre 2013).

At the risk of an evermore-latent alliance between neoliberalism as the reactive form of government and populism as the proactive response to the crisis, we are limiting the political to nihilist circularity. Nihilism should not be understood lightly here. The question of time is implicitly located in Villacañas’ essay as what anti-institutionalization cannot account neither from the side of populism, nor from destructive hyperneoliberalism. The more we push for second one, the more the populist dessert grows. In fact, according to Villacañas, this seems to be a necessary consequence that neoliberal and liberal administrators should seriously accept. More important than the fact that the populist option does merely plays the game with neoliberalism, it obfuscates the necessity of a “third” option that would allow for a change beyond this circular temporality.

What, then? For Villacañas this third option is the republicanist drift. This republicanism is not limited to the Republican governmental form of State but rather to a contingent democratic form (opened to the extension of social demands and antagonism of singulars) based on the guarantee of institutional stability. In a few words, it is the time of justice:

“Pero la justicia es un empeño positive que surge de lo más propio que ofrece el republicanismo: una percepción de confianza y seguridad que abre el tiempo del futuro sostenido por estabilidad institucional. Si no se atiende con una voluntad específica, la justicia no se producirá de modo natural. Abandonar toda idea de justifica facilita la agenda populista de configurar una nueva…Donde el republicanismo no ejerce su función estabilizadora a través de instituciones, el tiempo del la sociedad se reviste de esos tonos inseguros que el populismo tiene como premisa”. (Villacañas 114)

The Republicanist drift affirms a post-hegemonic form of democratic politics against the neoliberal structuration of the world. It radicalizes the “minimal republicanism” that populism trims through anti-institutional time of “grand politics” (Villacañas 117). This republicanism is not manufactured on the question of personal freedoms – which is still the limit of Liberal political theory from Rawls to Nussbaum – but grounded on firm redistributive policies that, unlike populism, could transform the time of life. In this light, Villacañas understands the eruption of participatory politics in the Spanish scene (the so called “Mareas”) not as an anti-institutional equivalence of demands, but as a republicanist affirmation of deepening democratic and public institutionalization (Villacañas 124-25).

This republicanist turn, unlike liberalism’s promise of redistribution, centers political life, as Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil understood so well, in the polis or citè as radical desistance from principial (State) order. Positing the polis as the minimal unit of political community, Villacañas retains the popular demand along with the always impossible pursuit of the singular. The extent to which this republicanist drift can account for the generic production of the subject is not clearly outlined in Villacañas’ essay. But Populismo (La Huerta Grande, 2015) does open productive ways for future probing and interrogations.

 

 

 

Notes

Carlos de la Torre. “El tecnopopulismo de Rafael Correa: ¿es compatible el carisma con la tecnocracia? LARR, Vol.48 No.1 Spring 2013, pp. 24-43.

John Kraniauskas. “Rhetorics of populism”. Radical Philosophy, July/August 2014.

José Luis Villacañas. Populismo. Madrid: La Huerta Grande, 2015.

Five hypotheses on Reiner Schürmann’s anarchy. (Gerardo Muñoz)

It was pitch black at Bryan’s Revolution Café and Bar, a smoky fire behind us, when Sergio Villalobos claimed that more vital than becoming “experts”, what really mattered was to produce an encounter that permitted us to leave our “skins behind”. In a similar vein, I added, that lizards too lose their skin in the desert. Lizards in the desert: that seems to be the right image to describe what was indeed a productive and worthwhile, and much needed conference on Reiner Schürmann’s oeuvre.

The purpose of the workshop, if any at all, was far from wanting to establish a consensual theoretical frame on “Schürmann” as yet another proper name within the marketplace of ideas. Rather, it seems to me that at the center of our debates, to paraphrase Schürmann himself, was a “nocturnal knowledge” of sorts, a constellation that produced moments of encounter and releasement; a thinking on the basis of the epochal structuration of the history of being and the exhaustion of principial thought.

What remains of interest in Schürmann’s thought is the potential to make thinkable the relation between hegemonic phantasmatic maximization, principial articulation, and the question of finitude (what he calls the tragic denial in his monumental and posthumous Broken Hegemonies). If anything, Schürmann contributes, as noted by Alberto Moreiras’ introductory remarks, to the archive of infrapolitical thought in a line of reflection folded within the contemporary university discourse and the consummated politicity of globalized machination [1]. To be sure, to “become lizards” is very different from “becoming Schürmanians”. The first thrives for releasement of tragic denial, and posit in the singularization to come in what it can no longer be reduced to the will, which is also the predicament at stake in thinking by and through principles. The second is the professional philosopher committed to the accumulation of knowledge, and by consequence, to the denial of the singular in the name of the duties of imposed on life. There is no normative judgment in making this distinction, but rather it is a matter of a tonality, and of establishing differences. One needs not “sacrifice” the epistemological grounds that demand the first in appropriative gestures of the second.

“Nocturnal knowledge” signals a drift of thought that is not longer bounded by the location drawn by heritage, proper name, archive, expertise, or even ethical relation. Yet all of these remain of importance, even if not exhausting the possibility of thinking otherwise beyond the masters and the articulation of “being in debt” as a structural position or intellectual commitment. It is futile to reconstruct a debate whose consequences and “effects” are always beyond our reach. What I would like to do in the remainder of this note, is to sketch out a hasty catalogue of “five hypothesis” – by no means the only hypotheses discussed during the rich two days of discussions at Texas A&M – that will inscribe, at least for me, a path of further investigation and writing to come in line with the project of infrapolitics.

  1. The “epochal” hypothesis. Schürmann’s breakthrough philosophical project is without question the monumental Broken Hegemonies. Surpassing a telic drive of Heidegger: Being and acting, BH installs the topology of the history of being as a heterochronic montage that, as powerfully argued by Stefano Franchi, “rewinds” or unwrites to a certain extent Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Deremption against the synthetic offers parameters to think the differend of naturality and mortality in a strictly non-dialectical movement, but still a politically significant one. For my purposes, what is at stake here, besides the ruin of any philosophy of history, is the translation of the legitimacy-legality differend that opens another way of thinking the legal and legitimate grounding of the categories of modern political thought. Epochality and epochs establish a reversal of the metaphoricity of history, contributing to the historicity of being that radically retreats from the “poem” of development. The nexus between epochality and the end of principial thought (or anarchy in the face of globalization) is a daunting question that remained open in much of our own reflection on Schürmann. Villalobos-Ruminott picked up the subtle but open Schürmann critique of the “deconstructive text” at the beginning of BH as to go into the “thicket of the text” (BH, 15). But if this is a crucial task, is not the task of deconstruction precisely the drifting beyond the “hegemonic maximization” towards those spaces that remain contaminated by the labor of minimization and transgression? The very legislative differend Derrida-Schürmann remains a fertile space for problematization. In other words: how can we think the postulate of the post-hegemonic ultimate from BH last pages with the deconstructive differànce?
  1. The Democracy hypothesis. It is not obvious in any case how Schürmann himself situates the problem of “Democracy” at the intersection between the end of principial thought and the maximization of legislative-transgressive norms. If infrapolitical reflection is also a question about the potential of democracy, then it remains to be thought how Schürmann’s work contribute to this task beyond the limitations of the political that structure Arendt’s work (which seems to be the modern thinker that best informs Schürmann’s thought on democracy). Guillermo Ureña’s transversal take on Schürmann and Marzoa’s Concepto de lo civil, indicates a point of departure in light of singularization to come as it faces its tragic destiny. The question of democracy gains space of its own if it could radically differentiate itself from the maximization of community, which binds the maximum phantasm of hegemonic politics in light of natality and the denial of the tragic. If we take Arendt to be a thinker that establishes an antinomy between the oikos and the polis, it is easy to sidestep the question of stasis or civil war as always already fantasmatic constitutive of any demos articulated between these two poles, as well as any promise of “democracy” regulated by the category of the citizen [2]. In light of our current “global war”, however we understand it, is difficult to affirm democracy without taking into consideration the facticity of neoliberalism. This was the relevant point made by both Charles Hatfield and Patrick Dove on the “life without why” as replicating or even coinciding with the nihilist condition of transnational accumulation at the “end of history” ideologies.
  1. The “life” hypothesis. Alberto Moreiras and Stefano Franchi’s noted in contrasting ways how BH necessarily opened to the question of “life”. The radical opening towards the tragic denial recoils back to this problem where another relation of experience (passion) must be thought. If for Franchi the tragic opens back to natality and even to the comic; in Moreiras’ grammar it is a matter of affirming the existential analytic where something like an “infrapolitical breakthrough” could possibly take place [3]. Let’s call this instance infrapolitical dwelling or breakthrough. In terms of the “possible”, and what is meant by the possibility of that which remains impossible, Ronald Mendoza reminded us that it is a task to be pursued on the threshold of Heidegger’s rendition of possibility in Being and Time. This is no mere exegetical task, since what is at stake here is nothing other than the confrontation with the economies of reading and thinking through Aristotle’s Metaphysics, reconsidering the relation between dunamis and energeia. It is in this direction or turning towards the possibility where something other than a biopolitical closure. Releasement towards the tragic destiny is only evoked to reopen the question of life beyond the antinomies that organized logics of causation and distributive ontologies that, in the words of Agamben in Lo aperto, have only fueled the anthropological machine of the West that divides the animal and the human.
  1. The “text” hypothesis. It would be unfair to treat Schürmann’s architectonics of the topology of being as sidestepping the question of narrativity and the literary text in general. What are myths if not a textual machine, as understood by Jesi, which plays on the organization as well as excesses of each economic phantasm? Nevertheless, much work needs to be done to wrench Schürmann’s topological arrangement of the history of being in relation to the function of literature. It is at this intersection where Dorfsman’s meditation on the poetics dwelled, as well as perhaps the figure of the marrano strategically analyzed by Humberto Nuñez. Literature has all to do with a textual economy that is the excess of hegemonic maximization, and that for this reason is difficult to locate on a single plane of ordering and commandment of language. But what becomes clear is that through Schürmann a tropology opens with fundamental consequences for grapping with “life”: this is the “fool” as suggested by Franchi, Don Quixote’s wandering joy through La Mancha alluded by Teresa Vilarós, or Moreiras’ pícaro. I would also suggest Dante’s Divina Comedia, where mundane life seem to mark the passage from the hegemonic Latin phantasm of natura to the sovereignty of the modern passive epochality [2].
  1. The Luther hypothesis. It seems to me that the only major figure that throws off a shadow at the grand epochs of the topology of being is that of Martin Luther. It is a risk that Schürmann takes, but that allows him to read the modern tradition of the subject against the grain of Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s autonomous subject, or Spinoza’s Deus sive natura. Luther stands out in BH as an outsider that fundamentally returns to inflict the totality of the modern structuration. It is through Luther that we are confronted negatively with a possibility of the de-basement of the subject, emptying the signifier of “God” that connects with the releasement and play in his analysis of Eckhart’s sermons. Jaime Rodriguez Matos rightfully noted that the arguments on the existence of God, far from being the central problem, function as a pretext for an underlying problem consistent with the ruination of the subject. And what has been modern politicity if not hyperbolic to the condition of subjectivity? The figure of Luther for Schürmann signals passive transcendentalism and the opening towards heteronomy, which must be understood in light of the subject of command through duty and debt. It is here where Sam Steinberg’s reflection on the Mexican modern politicity as a history of debt resonates with the modernizing paradigm in Luther. The militant figure of Worms offers another paradigm to understand the epochality of secularization, and reassess Schmitt’s well-known “occasional decisionism” (Löwith) in differential positioning with the passivity of the vocation. It is also through Luther that Hegelianism becomes an epochal possibility (impossible?) for the narrativization of the history of the West. Luther also signals the problem of returns not only in the modern epoch, but also as Jose Valero argued in his own terms, in relation to the arche of metaphysics and repetition. How does tradition gets transmitted and repeated? In slightly different terms, Michela Russo’s problematization of heritage also speaks beyond the metanarrative task imposed by Schürmann’s “archive”, situating the archive as command and origin of a form of doing history of philosophy; even if it is aprincipial history that questions the very antinomy of progression / containment.

As Hispanists or Latinamericanists working in the contemporary university, one must renounce the burden that implies carrying forth or reproducing Schürmann’s legacy as a question of fidelity, preservation, or even detachment. The history of the topology of being, argued Moreiras, seems at moments even more complex than the one offered by Heidegger himself. This much is needed. Metaphysics will neither be abolished nor put to a standstill with Schürmann’s injunction in the theoretical scene. For my purposes, a possible turning would always be a-locational, and for that very same nature, incalculable. In lesser words, this would imply the suspension of the very ground that feeds into our beliefs.

 

 

 

Notes

  1. Alberto Moreiras. “Preliminary remarks on Infrapolitical anarchy: the work of Reiner Schürmann. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/preliminary-remarks-for-no-peace-beyond-the-line-on-infrapolitical-an-archy-the-work-of-reiner-schurmann-a-workshop-january-11-12-2016-texas-am-by-alberto-moreiras/
  1. Giorgio Agamben. Stasis: civil war as a political paradigm. Stanford University Press, 2015.
  1. Eric Auerbach. Dante: poet of the secular world. University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Against American gigantism: on Peter Trawny’s Heidegger & the myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Trawny Heidegger Jewish 2016

One of Peter Trawny’s main theses in his new book Martin Heidegger & the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2016), if not the central one, is that the expansion of machination at world scale was identified by Heidegger not only as the invisible power in the hands of a “dangerous band of Jews” (as Jaspers writes in his Philosophical autobiography), but also as “North America”, understood as the hyperbolic location for the fulfillment of wordlessness calculation. “Americanism” was tacitly interpreted by Heidegger as completion of nihilism, due to a “gigantism” that surpassed even the English overseas imperial trade. America lacked a proper destiny.

Against the idea of Empire built on the thriving commercial rationality, Heidegger counter-posed a non-biological conception of race ingrained in the possibility for a German turning vis-à-vis the poetic, the gods, and “the encounter in which each learn through what is respectively foreign” (Trawny 2016, 52). Whereas the “other beginning” for Germans was marked by the event of being-historical, continues Trawny, “Americanism is simply incapable of a beginning because it does not know the “origin”, because it is the offspring of an English that pursues its “gigantic business” (Trawny 2016, 37).

Taking distance from American machination also implied an open anti-Semitism within the history-of-being, conditioned by a fear due to loss of ground and a-locational fissure of dwelling. If this is Heidegger’s position in the recently published Black Notebooks, one could read here a paradoxical conjunction between Trawny’s first book Freedom to fail: Heidegger’s anarchy (Polity, 2015)- where errancy signaled not just momentary slippages of thought, but constitutive phases of his philosophy – and now errancy as privation of historical destiny. It seems as if between Trawny’s first and second book on Heidegger’s Black notebooks, what we get are really two types of errancy: the first that has to do with the site of the philosopher’s thought in opening of the Ereignis and second phase, where errancy is externalized and deeply connected to the anti-semitic a-locational dwelling in America.

It is here where one could partially inscribe a distance against Heidegger’s anti-Americanism, and establish an alternative anti-anti-Americanism, which would neither affirm the dismissal of America as the site of nihilism in the name of “Destiny” or lack thereof, nor uphold a populist or American imperialism in the name of modern mass consumerism and historical exceptionalism. Rather, it is precisely the a-locational errancy which one could affirm as a third space of an American experience of freedom. This will be the Marrano freedom, both at the level of politics as well at the level of the work within the university (knowledge).

What is crucial here to understand seems to be that Heidegger’s dismissal of America as gigantism went beyond the well-known aristocratic resentment against modern industrial society, exemplified by poets such as Stefan George or R.M. Rilke; or reactionary conservatives such as Erik Peterson, Carl Schmitt, or Julius Evola. What differentiates Heidegger’s anti-Americanism revolves around the fear of errancy and foreignness that is predicated on “race” (Judaic domination and reproduction). As Trawny quotes Heidegger:

“World Judaism spurred on by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere elusive. In all the unfurling of its power, it need nowhere engage in military actions, whereas it remains for us to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people” (Trawny 2016, 30).

It would be wrong to infer from this annotation that Heidegger is making a plea for a sacrificial substance within the German history-of-being. In fact, as Trawny reminds us, Heidegger’s anti-Americanism is accompanied by a deep regret against Germans who, instead of following the path of poets and thinkers (the conference on Holderlin’s Ister was given during the war), were deceived by the “rootless foreignness” who reckoned unto German ground in Jünger’s total mobilization (Trawny 2016, 53). What fundamentally perturbed Heidegger, however, was not the errancy of the German destiny, but the fact that American machination had turned the “rootless foreign” in all directions and spaces. Returning invisibly to the very German ground.

Why was the radical thinker of finitude unable to comprehend the horizon of democracy as consistent with the tragic condition of thought? This seems to be the limit of Heidegger’s intra-war politicity. A limit that Reiner Schürmann and Hannah Arendt’s problematize in their respective endorsements of aprincipial democracy. Against an easy dismissal of Heidegger’s thought, Schürmann’s Broken Hegemonies could well be said to affirm the a-locational errancy of democracy through the development of two of his master concepts: singularization to come and the releasement of tragic denial effectuated in hegemonic order. Beyond Heidegger’s another beginning based on Parmenides, Schürmann’s destitution of henology is reworked precisely in the name of a tragic democracy.

It is interesting that both Schürmann and Arendt were thinkers committed to different projects of post-heideggerianism in United States and that neither affirmed an Anti-Americanism of North-American gigantism, nor assumed the conventional anti-imperialist anti-Americanism sentiment of so many Cold War Lefts. It would be naïve to say that Arendt or Schürmann “fixed” Heidegger’s anti-Semitic anti-Americanism, but both definitely rework the nexus between the democratic stature and the place of thinking against the grain of onto-theology. Trawny’s book do not take up these issues, but allow us to commence to discuss them.

Our task leaves us with the necessity of affirming Heidegger’s dismissal of a-locational foreignness as a space of freedom of thought, if we are to remain committed to what in recent times Alberto Moreiras and Miguel Abensour have called savage democracy. America could well be said to be the name of that inheritance that is no longer in need of affirming a destiny or “a people”.

Macrismo: populismo y nuevas derechas. (Gerardo Muñoz)

Aun no ha pisado la Casa Rosada y las medidas del macrismo ya dan un primer acorde a la época que se abre con Cambiemos: una explicitada alianza con la derecha regional en búsqueda de un acelerado agrietamiento del eje Mercosur (que en primera escena del bunker del PRO estuviese Lilian Tintori, esposa del encarcelado líder político venezolano Leopoldo López, no es un dato menor). Reclamarle a TeleSUR y a la prensa bolivariana neutralidad parece no solo injusto, sino incorrecto, ya que ha sido el mismo Ingeniero Macri el primero en hacer un guiño a la opinión pública de la nueva reorganización geopolítica en la región. Es obvio que el eje bolivariano haya contestado beligerantemente y se sienta interpelado por un marcado giro en las relaciones bilaterales con el nuevo gobierno porteño.

Si esto es así en materia internacional, en la economía ha seguido una ‘intempestiva suba de precios’ que, como ha visto en su última nota el historiador Alejandro Horowicz, marcan la clara tendencia de un proceso de devaluación y comienzo de una serie de medidas de ajuste económico que el propio jefe de gabinete Marcos Peña no ha dudado de adjetivar como “impresionante” [1]. Por el frente doméstico la sorpresiva nominación de Patricia Bullrich para el Ministerio de Seguridad prepara la grilla policial para lo que se espera que pueda ser otro ‘Diciembre caliente’. Es cierto que el actual ministro de seguridad Sergio Berni no se queda atrás en cuanto a los cumplidos de represión y despliegue securitario, pero lo nuevo aparece aquí como una réplica naturalizada por los dispositivos del discurso instalados en el mismo seno del macrismo triunfante. Lo que antes pudiera haberse leído como errónea anomalía, ahora se registra como el estado de excepción desde los cuerpos y las lenguas que lo gobiernan. Si le agregamos a todo esto, la nominación de Pablo Avelluto en Cultura y el indecente editorial de La Nación “No mas venganza” apenas un día después de la derrota del Frente para la Victoria, vale confirmar el regreso de la naturalización del discurso de los ‘dos demonios’ y de una lengua de pacificación que escamotea la continuación de la guerra sobre los cuerpos y la del propio campo de la política [2].

Están las cartas echadas y los cromos de pie para hacernos una idea de la nueva escena post-Kirchner. En efecto, esta podría ser un espejismo del kirchnerismo, aunque aun está por verse si el macrismo está en interesado o no en colonizar las reductos estatales del kirchnerismo o aplicar a la menemista, una serie de shocks sin anestesia. Esto es, solo el tiempo dirá si la ‘nueva derecha’ se constituye como tal y si el macrismo logra navegar gradualmente sobre la estatalidad y la reestructuración económica distanciándose de las formas compulsivas que caracterizaron a las derechas neoliberales de los noventa en la región; o si, por el contrario, la nueva derecha será capaz de emprender el incierto camino hacia el “cambio” aprendiendo de sus enemigo y de una larga derrota que ha durado más de una década. El mismo lema de “cambiemos” instala y apropia el horizonte progresista en una nueva jerga de la ciudadanía votante [3]. Si bien no hay elementos contundentes para afirmar uno de los dos derroteros para la derecha, si partimos de la hipótesis de la supervivencia de la cultura del consumo al interior de la era “posnacional”, como la ha designado el historiador Pablo Hupert, entonces es muy probable que la acomodación hacia una postura de nueva derecha no sea un proyecto tan arduo ni voluntarista de construir como parece.

La inclusión por el consumo y la revitalización de un neoliberalismo de baja intensidad – que se repliega y organiza a varios niveles, en la esfera laboral informal, tal y como lo ha estudiado Veronica Gago en La razón neoliberal (Tinta Limón, 2015) – sumado a la devaluación internacional de los precios de los commodities que signa el límite de la matriz de acumulación para la expansión democrática, sería consistente con una agenda de esa new right investida en clausurar el esquema de la gran política en cuanto antagonismo social y reformulación de grandes preguntas triangulantes (entrecruzamientos entre Estado, cultura, subjetividad, símbolos, y retórica). No es casual que el globo amarillo sea el símbolo de PRO, si nos esforzamos a leer en ese signo el pasaje del viejo nacionalismo culto de las banderas fascistas, a una simbología más light, donde el carnaval (notable topos de la cultura de masas) es apropiado por nuevos insumos colectivos sin aquel viejo identitarismo ocultista que sabiamente había estudiado Furio Jesi y que ahora se parecieran estar a la altura cultural del hombre común [4]. El insigne globo macrista es consistente con la esferología contemporánea de la globalización, tan animado como las propias mercancías que circulan por cada urbe. Como en las escalofriantes masas carnavalescas de los relatos anti-peronistas de Rodolfo Wilcock, el macrismo es la perversión de lo nacional-popular, aunque sin el matiz grotesco que caracterizó tradicionalmente al fascismo.

Lo que llama la atención de la novedad macrista es que reinstala ese ‘salgan todos que ahora entramos nosotros’ que apunta no solo al tan discutido ‘continuismo peronista’ de parte del FpV, sino a otro problema de fondo, tal vez un poco menos referido: el presidencialismo hegemónico. No es que Macri sea en este sentido una réplica de Kirchner, sino que ambos se cobijan sobre una misma estructura. A la apuesta de los movimientos sociales no estaría mal suplementarle el tema de la democratización del presidencialismo desde arriba, como pedía Eugenio Zaffaroni recientemente [5]. Una democratización al presidencialismo de facto funcionaría como bastidor en momentos transicionales e incluso como resguardo de los errores del gobierno de turno y sus timonazos inequívocos. Esta es la vieja tensión entre ruptura y conservación en los precarios modelos democráticos latinoamericanos, así como la pregunta que coloca en el centro la posibilidad de la democracia real en América Latina por fuera del ropaje republicano del institucionalismo de derecha (conservacionismo tradicional) y de las “transiciones” (y con lo mismo estoy diciendo una interrupción del orden que siempre ha sido interrumpido, esto es, un orden de excepcionalidad soberana).

Es aquí también donde se impone el dilema del constitucionalismo y la necesidad de su reforma. Buena parte del éxito de gobiernos de la Marea Rosada (particularmente los de Ecuador y Bolivia), se deben a procesos constituyentes capaces de reinscribir constitucionalmente la extensión de derechos plurinacionales o no-humanos al interior del Estado. Está es una tarea que excede la matriz funcionalista del derecho y que profundiza sobre sus condiciones operativas. Es por esta razón que el repetido reclamo ilustrado ‘anti-corrupción’ o ‘legalista’ corre el riesgo de perder de vista la insuficiencia del derecho como organismo imparcial (‘qué no me venga a decir Habermas sentado en una oficina en Alemania que la constitución y la ley es el canal de solución’, escribe Spivak en su reciente Nationalism and the imagination). Tal vez por estar inscrita en la tradición republicana y muy ausente de los modelos de gobernabilidad latinoamericanos, la pregunta constitucionalista, sin embargo, siempre acaba siendo menoscabada o relegada a la opción populista. Es difícil incluso imaginar que significaría un nuevo republicanismo para el debate de la política latinoamericana de cara al agotamiento del ciclo progresista sin repetir esta doble estructuración.

Éste sería un republicanismo como crítica efectiva de eso que el sociólogo boliviano Luis Tapia ha llamado, justamente, la tiranía del derecho. Por eso no estaría mal comenzar a pensarlo no solo en línea con la eventualidad del macrismo, sino como debate crítico sobre el populismo, cuya interpretación de la instucionalidad (como ha observado recientemente José Luis Villacañas) aparejado de su silencio sobre la esfera del derecho (la soberanía) pareciera ser unas de las patas flojas de la teoría de significación equivalencial de Ernesto Laclau [6].

Si el anti-institucionalismo depende de la estructuración (identitaria) de la equivalencia, ¿por qué no pensar y hacerse cargo desde el pensamiento de un republicanismo institucional de la inequvialencia? Traídos al presente, ¿no querrían populistas y neoliberales esa misma flexibilidad institucionalidad para un voluntarismo político cuya fórmula redonda es el anti-institucionalismo de la hegemonía? Es en este punto donde hegemonía equivale a soberanía excepcional de la razón transicional del poder. Las nuevas derechas – y el macrismo como encarnación inmediata – pudiera tomar este camino, sin que esto suponga un retroceso necesario hacia el “mínimo Estado” que caracterizaron a las derechas tipo Sánchez de Lozada, Vargas Llosa, o Fujimori a finales de la pasada centuria [7]. Y esto no implicaría, en modo alguno, la expansión del horizonte democrático, sino todo lo contrario. Será interesante seguir la metamorfosis del macrismo en los próximos meses, pero desde ya pareciera más fascinante pensar un institucionalismo por fuera de la equivalencia del populismo, así como del liberalismo criollo históricamente excluyente y subalternizante.

 

 

Notas

  1. Ver la columna de Alejandro Horowicz. “Los precios de la derrota”. http://tiempo.infonews.com/nota/197116/los-precios-de-la-derrota
  1. “No mas venganza”. Editorial del 23 de Noviembre. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1847930-no-mas-venganza
  1. La pérdida de horizonte por parte de la izquierda es tal que pareciera que solo la derecha la que puede hoy enunciar o apenas trazar un plan de la utopía. Esto se comprueba con el hecho que buena parte de los gobiernos de la Marea Rosada en estos tiempos ha estado anclada en lo que Fernando Coronil llamó en uno de sus últimos ensayos una nueva teleología nacional como índice de legitimidad. Ver, “The future in question: History and Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)”.
  1. Furio Jesi. Cultura de derechas. Barcelona: Muchnik, 1989.
  1. Eugenio Zaffaroni.” El derecho latinoamericano en la fase superior del colonialismo”. Passagens, Mayo-Agosto, 2014.
  1. José Luis Villacañas. Populismo. Madrid: La Huerta Grande Editorial, 2015.
  1. Veronica Giordano. “¿Qué hay de nuevo en las «nuevas derechas»? Nueva Sociedad, Noviembre-Diciembre de 2014.