Author: infrapoliticalreflections

Dialogue with Jacques Camatte (1935-2025)

The passing of Jacques Camatte (1935-2025) a week ago from the writing of this text recalls a life that ostentatiously lingered in thought, and a thought that was entirely enmeshed and intertwined in the irreducibility of life. For some of us that had the good fortune to interact – however briefly and momentary, although every contact is always destinial and inescapable – Camatte transpired generosity and authenticity, and his voice evoked an almost Adanic happiness that has become rare among human beings. A common friend these days has recalled that somewhere in Camatte’s writing there is an endorsement of a capacious phrase from Chernyshevsky that could very well serve to remember his enduring ethical pursuit: ‘we have finally understood that the Earth is a place of life rather than judgement’. The opening the Earth as a dwelling place for life forms means that it is insufficient to conceive of domination as an organization of modes of production, since capital is first and foremost a spatial-temporal arrangement towards the future of the human species, and thus of a certain conquest of the world sensuous life. 

This was the outstanding triumph of real sumption: the modulated and ongoing alienation of the human community (Gemeinwesen) into a community of capital that has arrested time of life to the point of adjusting it to homogenized agony of historical time. Against the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution that theologically exported the polarity of the eschaton and the ho katechon, already in the inception of 1970s Invariance Camatte called for an exteriority of any philosophy of history in order to rework of “a new relationship between human beings and nature”, and “breaking the lock that inhabits the creation of a new form of life”. The two citations in dialogue with each other come from “Against domestication” (1973) and the introduction to Urtext: frammento del testo originario di Critica dell’economia politica” (the 1977 Italian edition curated by Gianni Carchia), although these are variations from the depth of the emergence of the invariance of truth as a vantage point of the world. At the center is a form of life that renews the world that transitions beyond all forms of metaphysical logistics of appropriation, mere standing reserve, and the general arrangement for the mobilization of production. Any point of departure against domestication measures itself against the totality of this fluctuating dominion.

As it has been said of other great thinkers, Camatte’s ultimate passion was rooted in thinking one idea to the end and not of endorsing a system of concepts. For him it was the schism, that is, how to undo the historical process of domestication of a fictive community against the absorption of the increasing autonomization of fictive capital. The schism against the capitalist general equivalent also demands advancing a secondary schism against all humanism and its originary separation from nature. In schism, there is something of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers’ “thought of the word alone” that is receptive to the movement of the soul tries to account for the perceived voice. This precisely what Camatte carried as the lesson from Bordiga’s idiosyncratic original communist program: a movement against the historical benchmark of the development and political economy of growth, which will entail the exhaustion of the revolutionary horizon driven by an ideological political technification that tends to deepen the power towards the positionality of epochal nihilism expressed in the revitalization of strife and the ‘errancy of humanity’ (contrary to Martin Heidegger’s notion of errancy as a play between unconcealment and truth, for Camatte errancy is another name for the civilizational narrative that exemplifies the withering of the  human community into organized and protracted social reproduction and historical abstraction). Hence, as for Bordiga, Camatte conceived the ontology of communism as a world view (not as a political program oriented by concrete historical subject or distributive economic reproduction; not a soteriological dogma nor a transhistorical material idea); that is, broadly speaking, thinking the relationship between the human beings and the earth. A question more pressing than ever given the current planetary conflagration, which exposes the civilizational course that has lead to an inhospitable world where the survival of the human being has become the byproduct of an effective hostis of the community of capital integrated to the global surplus value accumulation.

In Camatte’s unrealized thought – but perhaps all forms of thinking are so – the bordigist gesture persists in locating the schism at the threshold of the force of real subsumption of the anthropomorphization of capital, where the notion of revolution itself is transfigured since, unlike Delacroix’s paradigmatic romantic painting, ‘liberty’ no longer guides the spirit of the “living”. Its redeeming voice also carries downwards unto the depth of the souls of the dead. Amadeo Bordiga himself in “Dialogato coi morti “(1956) writes that “The Revolution…it is always, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it opened and where it promised, where it has an appointment with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: they knew that it never fails, never deceives”. True life can also take place with the nearness of that which seems remote (as Gustav Landauer once claimed: “For me, the dead also live”).

If both the collapse of the future and the increasing adaptation of social life has entered a gnostic dialectic of endless self-legitimation, it is paramount to capture not just the insurrectionary, but the resurrection flight in Camatte’s gesture that opens possibilities lodged in the dead as an emblem for the return to the world “full of joy and exuberant life”, as he wrote in an apostrophe in “Scatologie et résurrection” (1975): “I will draw from mother earth the vital and infinite power and I will resurface full of wisdom, joy and an exuberant life which will allow me to reach this human community…I will have left your world and been resurrected!” Does holding on to the unity of the Gemeinwesen require a theological undercurrent? Is not the passion for schism, and by the same token the stazion, the energy within the very dispensation withheld between mystery and revelation that has prompted the congenital forms of formal mediations and institutions for the political community? These are the questions that we are exposed to in the enduring task if we are to take seriously a continuous ‘dialogue with Camatte’, which carries the voices of the dead. Ultimately, any authentic conversation that dwells in thought does not have to invent anything new; we are depositories of an endless communication that is handed over, interrupted, and transmitted to anyone willing to hear and capable of being traversed by the shared word. 

In his last year of thinking, Camatte insisted on the notion of “inversion” in the wake of the civilizational phase of extinction, which would require deposing all forms of hostilities and bringing to an end the partisan positions invested in orienting technology and morality (nature) in their seditious defense of the real dominium over the passing of the world. For the current depressing (and depressed) times, writes Camattes in “Instauration du risque d’extinction” (2020), what could very well be a prelude to a return to the repressed allowing a return to the past to initiate an inversion that would allow liquidation of lall exhibition abandoning enmity. This is why, as he told me in an exchange that we undertook five years ago, “inversion cannot be a strategy, as it is totally outside of politics, which is the dynamic of organizing people, of controlling them”. A breakthrough, then, only as a mystical downwards leap into the past? Absolutely – but only insofar as the mystic is the ethical witness to his own openness to the word, and whose exodus from the social machination prepares a return to the world beyond the flattening and dominant language molded by rhetorical dishonesty or passive narcissism of the subjectivity.

This is why according to Carlo Michelstaedter to have courage in the world means to decide between two irreducible figures: the dishonest trickster, or the mystic in the desert. There are no third terms in between. And whereas the dishonest subject knows how to play the hand to his best outcome in each given moment; the mystic knows that his decisive moment is always commencing because the genesis of the human species has yet to take place. This beginning is always at the brink of an untimely auratic experience. And aura names the incommensurable distance from the rational containment of the world — unlike Teilhard de Chardin’s internal introspection in the noosphere that will bring the fullfilment of a spiritualized humanity upon Earth (realized in part by the unification of the sciences by cybernetics); in other words, an exodus from the temporal nominalism that inhabits another life attuned to its genesis: “devenu-devenant ce monde et sur cette vie autre au moment où s’effectue sa création”, he writes in “La séparation nécessaire et l’immense refus” (1979).

The visitation of Jacques Camatte in the world bears witness to that invisible freedom of the human species ready to jump and traverse the catastrophic trumpeting into the living and the dead, making possible the refractions of thinking as original texture of existence. From now on, the exodus from the immanence of this world will embrace a disempowered but perpetual dialogue with Camatte’s demure schism of the living. Indeed, we are always on the path to an earthly beginning. 

Decline and renaissancing. by Gerardo Muñoz

There is something to be said about the facticity of epochal decline, and the reiterated attempts to call for its overcoming. But both decline and renewal are so interconnected in the Western dispensation of community and institutional organization that any attempt to surpass only deepens and pushes onwards the pendular movement between rise and fall towards generic equilibrium and social stabilization. Oswald Spengler understood well that decline situates civilization at the center of Western internal historical development just as birth presupposes death; thus, civilization is merely the coagulation of vital energies to overcome the emergence of decline. The genesis of civilization into final decline should at least elicit a question to break this ongoing circularity: what does it mean to hold to decline without converting its minimal energy into the orientation of a new horizontal epoch? The end of growth (economic stagnation) realized in real subsumption and the autonomization of value also allows us to formulate the question in the following terms: what does it mean to seize the fall of the rate of profit affirming demobilization and the inoperative nature of life beyond its conversion into the movement of energetic production that characterized the epoch of production through the historical figure of the worker? 

Ultimately, this is a question about how to represent (or how to avoid representation) an ethical orientation of life. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was noted that the ethical bourgeois form of life was conditioned by the sense of “community upon all men” around utility of life’s functions subsumed by work, and work as the sole purpose and meaning of life. The definite character of modern social life can be said to compensate for decline for giving up the incommensurability of life forms; that is, what Lukács also called the temporality of the “genius, in the sense that [the genius] can never be measured against anything, whether interior or exterior” [1]. Confronting this very question at the threshold of the crisis of the transmission of forms in Antiquity, Bernard Berenson in The Arch of Constantine: the Decline of Form (1954) offers a distinct position: the moment for seizing decline should be a deliberate prospect of gazing backwards; a facilis descensus that will disclose something entirely different deprived of the race towards “newness” promised by temporal futurity and its social spheres rhetorically organized. In a remarkable moment of his book, Berenson writes that: “Except in unique moments like the fifth century in Hellas or some three thousand years earlier in Egypt and Sumeria, conscious, deliberate, purposeful art is constantly looking backwards – renaissancing – if I may be allowed this uncouth but necessary verb-striving to recapture some phase of its choice in the art of the past, or at least to model itself or draw inspiration from it” [2].

In other words, there is only “renaissancing” if one is able to traverse the decline of the past in the fullest sense of its inheritance of its formal stratification. The perpetual infantilism of the modern ethical outlook is that it tries to claim its definite character in irreversibility in order to exit the downwards path of decline through abundance and vulgarity (and we know from Ruskin that vulgarity is one of the forms that death takes unto the living).

For Berenson there seems to be authentic renaissancing at the level of life forms – of that incommensurable generality of human concrete and practical creation – by holding on to epochal decline, and not through state cultural policies that have sedimented the disappearance of forms of art legitimized by a “critic that will discover a deep meaning, a strange beauty, a revelaning newness in what you have done” [3]. The vicious modern liquidation of the free interplaying creation of forms of life and their external model of appearances is paid with the ascension of the rhetorical utility that will alleviate, at least momentarily, the sentiment of the decline proper to the transmission of dissolution. Whatever redemption creation can offer in the muddled waters of decline, the modern autonomy of reified forms, pushing upwards towards “newness”, will separate the sensorial transformation of life to the homogenous representation of communitarian representative order that puts an end to mood and solitude.

What Berenson calls “renaissancing” of factical experience nourishes the unrealized instances of the tradition not towards the breakthrough of a historical epoch (something like a virtuous mythic age of “Renaissance”) that can be posited by way of general background principles nor through the enforcement of a common social morality; rather the incorporated memory of the past is transformed to its very end because in its liquidation “true life” beyond measure reemerges. Berenson will state quite enigmatically that “style cannot be manufactured by taking thought” independently [4]. This is what Hölderlin had in mind when in a moment of “The Fatherland in Decline” from his theory of the tragic and its passage of dissolution: “The new life, which was to dissolve and did in fact dissolve, is not actually the ideally old, the dissolution of which was necessary, exhibiting its peculiar character between being and nonbeing…thus dissolution, as necessary, when seen from the point of view of ideal remembrance” [5]. It is this remembrance of dissolution that reveals decline as a felicitous fall without judgment that brings the appearance of life outside the irreversibility of the modern historical progress that has accumulated the oblivion of possible worlds.

This is why Hölderlin will also claim in his “The Perspective from which we look at Antiquity” (1799) that the ‘general decline of all peoples’ is due to the inheritance of forms of “an almost boundless prior world, which we internalize either through learning or experience and exerts pressure on us” [6]. To take up decline in a serious way means that we proceed from the formlessness of life, and not from the mimetic drive that expresses, in the name of ‘originality and autonomy’, the civilizational alienation towards the most distant (Antiquity) and the most near (ethos). We can then say that in decline the most distant and the irreducible becoming allows the ascension of ethical life. In this way, we can authoritatively say that there is only hope and redemption in decline because new life flourishes in a time of prudens futuri temporis exitum (“Prudently the god covers the outcome of the future in dark night”) that will transcend itself by becoming into what ceases and ultimately is.

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Notes 

1. Georg Lukács. “The Bourgeois Way of Life and Art for Art’s Sake”, in Soul and Form (Columbia University Press, 2010), 76. 

2. Bernard Berenson. The Arch of Constantine: the Decline of Form (1954), 36.

3. Ibid., 64.

4. Ibid., 22.

5. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The Fatherland in Decline”, in The Death of Empedocles (Suny Press, 2008), 154.

6. Friedrich Hölderlin. “The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity”, in Essays and Letters on Theory (Suny Press, 1988), 39-40.

The ascent of the Shadow Docket. by Gerardo Muñoz

In recent years there has been a steady but increasing practice in the American legal system that has passed unnoticed outside the corridors of law professors and practitioners of litigation, including the federal state that has summoned to its practical use: the emergency relief, or ‘shadow docket’ that puts the burden on the Supreme Court to decide on concrete questions without a formal hearing, fact finding, or without proper argumentative opinions of visible authorship (the judge who pens the opinion tends to deface his authorship). Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Supreme Court of the United States has increasingly expanded its so-called ‘shadow-docket’ in parallel with the merits docket to such an extent that, as some legal theorists have noted, the blurring of the borders between the first and the second have become so tenuous and intertwined that it would seem that the merits docket depends on the prior selection mustered in the shadow docket. As constitutional scholar Stephen Vladeck has registered in his The Shadow Docket (2023), a practice that historically was strictly tied to emergency relief for capital punishment executions, it has now become a normal vehicle to decide on the emergency contingencies, while at the same time exercise discretionary judgement regarding the merits, or actual dispute, of case pending future review that might never be considered at all [1]. 

It must be said that the selective practice of cases by the court through the notion of “certiorari” on merits cases was in itself a decision on the exclusivity of relief based on the criteria of major legal questions of interest to the court. But precisely the differentiation between certiorari and the shadow dockets grants sharp focus on their differences. On the one hand, the shadow docket fails to decide on “legal questions” – in fact, it avoids tailoring the boundaries between the other branches of government and itself, as some have noted – and, by the same token, its non-decision produces a precedent lacuna that further entrenches the ascension of the shadow docket, inviting an evermore practice of emergency relief to increase chances of ‘cert’. Contrary to expert opinion, this is a juridical situation that does not create the conditions for the normalization of the “state of exception”, since there is really no authoritative decision to stabilize a concrete order, which was the purpose of Carl Schmitt’s well known formulation about sovereign arcana in political theology. In a certain sense, we have already crossed this threshold. Rather, the shadow-docket as a juridical practice in the American legal order is an institutional symptom in which decision has been evacuated or rendered inoperative, so that emergent social needs enforce any specific arrangements and political vectors through an enacted order. 

Furthermore, the shadow-docket as a regularized legal practice at the highest court confirms the historical shift within American legal system from the empire of the courts to administrative departmentalized commands, which ultimately means that the formal tendency towards “delegation” should not be solely circumscribed in allocated powers of the different branches’ oversight and control, but rather is a product of a holistic tendency towards the emergence of a new form of social indeterminacy in which authority resides in the shadows. As Supreme Court Jackson writes in the “Per Curiam” dissent in Trump v. JGG  (April 7, 2025): “With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s Court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: we are just as wrong now has we have been in the past, with similar devastating consequences”. It is an astonishing statement from the Judge not only because of what it states, but also what it silences; mainly, that by leaving no trace at all of their argumentative reasons there is no precedent, and for that matter no process and thus no case. And what is a rule of law devoid of a case and precedent? The historical schism with respect to the tradition of Common Law that gives birth to its formal constrains should be utterly obvious. Ultimately, this evidences the uttermost decline of the legal positivist horizon of the modern law rooted in legitimate authority (authoritas, non veritas, facit legem), in which arbitrary decisionism, legal motorization, and appeals to external values align themselves in order to render absolute determinacy between social life and legal execution without any preclusion in the form of a social trial without end. In this sense, it would be foolish to assume that the crisis of authority with the dissolution of auctoritas in the social spheres compartmentalized in functions of the “political community”; on the contrary, in the shadow docket scenario, authority “becomes more and more abstract, more and more inhuman and inexorable; more and more demanding” [2]. The orientation of executive commands is met with proportional digression of adjudicated moral pondering, and each time the force of legalization is vigorously expanded.

The decline of the juridical decision, one would be tempted to say, paves the way for the infinite demands at the expense of the arbitrary values formation of social gigantism. In the opinion about college admissions and racial discrimination of the 2023 merits docket cycle (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College), Justice Roberts wrote that “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The constitution deals with substance, not shadows”. An ironic statement, indeed, given the preeminence of the shadow-docket in the adjudicative practice of the Supreme Court itself. While the administration of justice becomes a practice in the shadows, one cannot but be reminded of Plato’s protofigure of the Guardian of Constitution, the Nocturnal Council, as elaborated in the last pages of The Laws. And for Plato “if a state lacks such constituent [a Nocturnal Council], no one will be surprise to see it staggering from one irrational and senseless expedient to another in its affairs…that body must posses virtue in all of its completeness which amens that it will not take erratic aim at one target after another but keep its eye on single target and shoot all its arrow at that” [3]. On the tail opposite end of the platonic Nocturnal Council, the United States’ highest court’s gliding abdication seems to erratically aim at repeated targets that emerge blasting flickering lights from within the ever present shadow docket – indeed, a momentary luminosity, full of ‘technical terms’ and deferrals, that aim to showcase that the rule of law still endures in the House of Justice.

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Notes

1. Stephen Vladeck. The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court uses stealth rulings to amass power and undermine the republic (Basic Books, 2023), 19.

2. Theodor W. Adorno. “On the Problem of the Family” (1955), Endnotes, 2022: https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/theodor-adorno-on-the-problem-of-the-family-1955 

3. Plato. The Laws (Penguin Books, 1975), 520.

The world has been posthegemonic. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a recent text published at Verso Blog, entitled “The Coming Post-Hegemonic World”, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra make a case for a “turn to a post-hegemonic model” that will challenge the consensus of global in the coming era. In many ways, this era is already here with its diverse and multifaceted (in terms of intensities, forces, and leverages) of protracted and bizarre nationalisms, which as Jamie Merchant has teased out brilliantly, amount to desperate attempts to offer a belated response to the decline of growth as one more stage for containing rampant processes of accumulation via state capacities. For Hardt & Mezzadra, this “posthegemonic world to come” is characterized by a global spatial reconfiguration of capital – accommodating the logistics of regional spaces of influences and exchange across the planet – and on the other, an increasingly “domestic sphere of authoritarian rule” promoted by new accelerated initiatives at generating social homogeneity in the wake of rushing fragmentation hand in hand with a war regime that has utterly scrapped ideals about “strategic autonomy” in order to trumpet an arm race (nuclear weapons included), as it is currently unfolding in Europe. 

One can claim that this posthegemonic world is one that firmly assumes the consequences of two interdependent vectors that imploded within the project of political modernity: the end of  economic growth (thus validating the law of the fall of profit outlined in Capital V.III), and the liquidation of the principle of legitimacy that for two centuries accommodated the legislative sources of the state authority in democratic constituent power. For Hardt & Mezzadra posthegemony means global fragmentation, authoritarianism, and spatial remaking; however, one should also say that it means, the opening towards stagnation, the collapse of political unity of the state, and most recently the total discredit of the foolish leftist hypothesis that promoted a “rainbow social equivalent coalitions” to push for compensatory, and in every instance insufficient and moribound, populist resurgences elevated through the combustion of ethereal but effective rhetoric (in fact, my argument in a new short book, La fisura posthegemónica, is that the push for political hegemony of the last decades only cosigned forms of consensual totalization at the expense of the production of subalternization and social death).  

Even taken as a descriptive and normative condition of the current state of Western politics, the posthegemonic situation lays bare the reciprocal impasse of the claim of its opposition: in other words, one should also put to rest social mobilization that characterized the politics of High Modernity, since ultimately movements (and total mobilization as an apparatus of social energy transfer) presupposes that “every social structure, that it can receive what form required the needs of the political adventure…total mobilization signifies nothing other that the effort to reduce the social substance to a kind of plastic”, as Gérard Granel once defined it. Hence when Hardt & Mezzadra claim that the “effective rebellion must be rooted in social movements envisioning a life beyond the rule of capital”, they are inadvertently refusing to come to terms with the factical posthegemonic reality that they are describing, which is no longer driven by expansive economic growth, but rather by stagnation, and inoperativity at planetary scale that is maintained through the a global veneer of production into regimes of competitive accumulation (of territory, contractual debt, fiscal regulation, executive taxation or tariffs, and increasing arbitrary monetary regulations in the global system) for marginal profitability, as Paul Mattick argues in his recent The Return of Inflation (2023). 

This means that there is no outlook towards ‘social mobilization’ that does not serve the subjective productivity of real subsumption, since its ultimate goal is to anaxate social energy into the force of (un)productive labor. This form of dilatant mobilization can only serve the master of illusionary hegemony, and thus promote functional and unwarranted servitude everywhere. Indeed, only a reprobate can be immune to the moralist or the realist conditions of hegemony. If push comes to shove, the posthegemonic factical world of stagnation and political fragmentation already here proves that the ongoing irruption of non-movements are irreducible to the modern movement’s energy; and that life never fully coincides with political claim to rule and legitimacy, even less so in the becoming-world of Production. 

Ultimately, this posthegemonic fissure outlives the crumbling hegemonic world of principial High Modernism and no ‘international movement’ can piece it back together again. We are all posthegemonic now, but only if one takes up this predicament seriously and candidly.

Justification and the demonic State. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the broadest sense of the term, questions about the law are predominantly about its justifications, and more specifically about where to locate the act of justifying. That one of the most important elaborations of exclusive positive authority was dependent on a theory of justification to transfer norms of authority (a theory labeled the “normal justification theory”) goes to show that the traditional opposition between positive law as pertaining to the sphere of rights and guarantees and natural law to that of justification comes short in the understanding of the internal development of judicial reasoning in the second half of the twentieth century that unsurprisingly coincides with the crisis of the secular liberal state [1]. The reliance on a “justification theory” will imply not only a new conception of legitimation, but also the outsourcing of the self-referential determination of “Nature” through which Roman Law constructed its principle of the rule of law and the validity of adjudication. As we know, Roman Law did not speak of “justification” but rather of necessity emanating from Nature, which could not oblige to performance or act through by what by nature is impossible or wrong [Ius plurimis modis dicitur: uno modo, cum id quod semper aequum et bonum est ius dicitur, ut est lus naturale]. The natural source of law, as famously defined by Ulpian in the Digest, is in this way permanently tilting between the good and the equitable (ius est ars boni et aequi). This is a matter of first principles of the law (ius), which did not solicit “argumentation” or second order reasoning to uphold its internal legal validity. 

The passage from natural necessity in the “hands of the priest”, in Ulpian’s conception, to the modern autonomy of justification takes place when principles are no longer the exclusive framework parameters for operative claims, but the very activity that defines the elasticity of an actual norm and its argumentation within a concrete positive order. This is one way in which one should define the specificity of the American practical legal order (not just its legal philosophies, which tends to run counter to this, cloaked under the vestigates of positivism vis-à-vis the letter and spirit of the Constitution) through juridical administration, whose structural polarity of command and justification defines the administrative process. Early in the twentieth century, Guglielmo Ferrero noted that one of defining characteristics of the American political model rested on a magistrate judicial power that fundamentally differed from European Common Law or positivist tradition in its practice [2]. Contrasting the independence of a limited bureaucracy to the predominance of an all encompassing “juridical administration”, Ferrero noted (although lacking the legal vocabulary to articulate it positively) that the administrative nexus will infinitely expand over social practical reasoning due to the unrestricted force of justification. And the need for justification is what outsources the ancient principles of natural law (ius) to the executive authority that renders operative every sphere of social action and interaction even if they are not explicitly declared prima facie by those principles. The efficacy of justification is the linguistic deployment – a rhetorical craft through rational argumentation – that will generate specific verisimilitude to the otherwise arbitrary and uncontested enactment of its principles. Justification could be said to appear as the work of language that provides internal cohesion of an array of coordinated conditions for secondary social actions. 

Since the inception of modern secularization, the nature of justification is the realization of the works without end, which inverts the notion of “justification” in the theological sphere that we owe to Paul. For the Apostle the idea of justification or dikaiōsis implies the making of righteousness through the soteriological narrative of Christianity that subsumes humanity’s fall (sin) for a redeeming liquidation of law. This means that man’s just act in faith generates “justification” (dikaiōsis) of life for all people (Roman 5:18). And as we read from Galatians 2:6: “Know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith”. The force of justification (dikaiōsis) trumps the production of the works of law that divides human beings in the immanence of this world between the saved and the condemned, the free and the imprisoned, the friend and the enemy. Whereas justification in the theological sense can only imply the ‘end of law’ for righteousness (Roman 10:4), in its late secularized rendition it implies exactly its distorted mirror image: to justify is transformed into the binding force over the void of authority that renders effective the hollow machinery of its own self-validation. 

It is telling that in an essay that was first published in German in 1938 under the title “Justification and Justice” (“Rechtfertigung Und Recht”), the German theologian Karl Barth takes note on the transformation of the State becoming “demonic” not due to its utter demise, but as a profanation of the theological justification of “unwarrantable assumption of autonomy as by the loss of its legitimate, relative independence, as by a renunciation of its true substance, dignity, function, and purpose…a renunciation which out in Caesar worship, the myth of the state and the like” [3]. The emergence of the “demonic nature” of the State was internal of its own making , since it conflated faith and people at the same level of social immanence, while preparing the actual realization of an authoritarian world without escape. Following Heinrich Schlier’s work on the figure of the State in the New Testament, Barth will suggest that this political totalization secularized the limit posited by the suum cuique of justification into an instrument of endless domination that characterized the emerging political reality. In fact, in his essay “The State according to the New Testament”, Schlier will define the phase of the demonic State as one colored by the inception of the sphragis, that is, “the sign of the state party as it were the secularized seal of baptism which levels all differences between men and only distinguishes between friend and energies of the ruling system. Those who refuse the new metaphysical slave are deprived of their economic foundations. Even economic life is directed by the spirit of the beast” [4]. 

Only in such context does the true light of the force of justification comes in full display: the sphragis can only labour to justify the vicarious social existence of the mystery of iniquity infinitely redressing itself as legal argumentation and juridical principles, administrative determinations and executive commands. And Schlier could not let the question pass: “What will Christians do in this situation? They will no longer want to have any part in this caricare of a state, they will “go out…they will simply be outlawed and persecuted” [5]. More than ever today, we are in desperate need of elaborating the elementary aspects of a political theory of demonology that defines a certain point where there is no turning back. To outlive persecution and tear the bond of justification shatters the civilizational course that has sublimated the end of time as an instrument of daemonic absorption into endless legal statues.

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Notes 

1. Joseph Raz defines “normal justification thesis” of legal authority in this way: “I shall call it the normal justification thesis. It claims that the normal and primary way to establish that a person should be acknowledged to have authority over another person involves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply with reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative directives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as authoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying to follow the reasons which apply to him directly”, in “Authority and Justification”, Authority (NYU Press, 1990), 129.

2. Guglielmo Ferrero. “American characteristics” (1910), The Atlantic. 226. 

3. Karl Barth. Community, State, and Church (Peter Smith, 1968), 118.

4. Heinrich Schlier. “The State  according to the New Testament”, in The relevance of the New Testament (Herder and Herder, 1968), 236.

5. Ibid., 237.

Due Process and justification. by Gerardo Muñoz

Even if it is appalling to witness the brute amount of executive force in the current American political system, it is nonetheless “business as usual” if understood within the internal development of its own legal order. In other words, what is emerging is not a drastic rupture or abdication due to external pressure against “legal liberalism”, broadly understood as a package of normative rights to solve social conflicts in a political community, but rather the consequential effect of the decline of the legitimating force of positive law, the modern legislative state, and the principles such as the right to due process – which includes but it is not limited to a public hearing, a defense, the right to a defense, cross-examination of witnesses, or an impartial jury. The slow erosion of constitutional due process has not only resulted in an unprecedented upsurge of civil cases resulting in “guilty pleas” devoid of legal process (about 95% of cases according to Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch), but also in the collapse of remedies from government even if a federal court decides against the state. As Aziz Huq shows in The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (2021), the demise of legal remedies means that the federal courts at large can only “interpret the constitution” but remains silent and inoperative in terms of the practical solutions to amend injuries, seizures, or plain violence enacted.

Any attentive student of the history of law does not second guess that many centuries before the ratification of the Constitution of 1789, the principles of modern criminal procedure, such as due process, fair trial and reasonable doubt, were already sedimented to such an extent that the Medieval canonist Guillaume Durand in Speculum iudiciale (1291) claimed that the right to defend himself should not be denied even to the devil if he were summoned to the court. In this sense, the so-called “Due Process Clause” of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that claims that “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” is a latecomer to the internal development of Common Law’s theological secularization. And it should not go unnoticed that the clause explicits states “person”, instead of the narrow privilege to the “citizen” or the “legal resident”, which is why during the Founding Era even foreign pirates accused of illegal activities were still subjects of the Due Process clause under the international and domestic legal order. As crude as it may sound, in the current moment one could very well say that the “concept of piracy” had more footing in a juridical concrete order than in the current legal stasis operative in a post-positive scenario. 

Even those constitutional scholars that in the wake of the “War on Terror” defended the Sedition Act of 1798 in order to defend a “process reduction” during an instance of political emergency, also warned of governmental overreach could very well upset political opposition and public support or loyalty (Vermuele & Posner, 2007, 235). Today we are in muddier waters (although fully “rational”) in which the punitive juridical order increasingly acts without a “process”, and the Federal Courts are incapable of offering clear cut remedies. This begs the question: what comes after the classical paradigm of due process inherited from the historical dispensation of Common Law? In other words, if the rule of law can now fully prescind, under ordinary times (there is no “emergency declaration”), of the right to due process and to the guarantee of remedies, what is the source of its legal authority? 

This is an ambitious question that we cannot even attempt to answer here, but there is at least one possible working hypothesis: mainly, that post-positive rule of law adjudicates from the production of its own justification. It goes without saying that legal justification has always been an internal mechanism of legal authority; but only now is the force of justification taking over formal procedures, normative guarantees, and written and unenumerated rights. Justification makes its way as a rhetorical subsumption of any sphere of social reality. This is why, for the Federal Judge James Ho, “migration” can be understood as hostile forces if properly justified as an “invasion”. As a further task to be explored, one should bear in mind as a symptom that the most influential and enduring legal philosophy to have emerged within the crumbling edifice of modern legal positivism was precisely a concept of law defined by two guiding criteria: “fit and justification”. This means that law’s empire is no longer ordered through the “process” but through what becomes “justified”.

Unelevated politics. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a fragment from 1919 entitled “World and Time”, written around the time of the elaboration of the essay on the question of violence, Walter Benjamin offers his most succinct definition of politics: “My definition of politics: the fulfillment of unelevated [ungesteigerten] humanness” [1]. The ontological reduction is compact, and the three terms in it are carefully chosen: fulfillment, unelevation, and humanness, which indicates a ‘preparation for a profane politics’ at the threshold of secularization and its negation in a new “spiritual ornamentation”, as he would claim in the notes of “Capitalism and Religion”. The stress on the refusal of “elevation” (gesteigerten), however, does bring to bear that Benjamin’s refusal of a political ontology constrained in subjective and objective representation, which is why in the same fragment he connects the abutting of politics to a “living-corporality” [Leiblichkeit] of the human species. To retract from the cycle of civilizational violence, politics had to be reformed from the groundlessness of the energy of the living.

Hence, for Benjamin there is a metapolitical condition or archipolitics that plays out in refusing “elevated humanity”, which for him was at the source of the romantic response to the impasse of the critical enlightenment, placing the subject of knowledge and its self-reflective faculty at the center of the developing self-rationalization of the spiritual transcendence of the world in this new critical religion: “…the ideal of humanity by rising up to…that very law which, joined to earlier laws, assures an approximation to the eternal ideal of humanity” [2]. Hence, neither trascendental representation nor spiritualized immanence of order could, but unelevation of the “human possibilities” (Menschhaftigkeit). But such possibilities could only be disclosed beyond the pretensions of spiritual elevations of a unified consciousness, as Erich Unger had proposed in his Politics and Metaphysics (1921) around the same time to enact a “politics of exodus” for a common psychosocial regeneration. 

Benjamin’s proximity and distance from Unger’s position could perhaps inform why instead of writing a promised book that was going to be entitled True Politics (Die Wahre Politik) – allegedly containing two chapters “The destitution of power” and “Teleology without ultimate goal” – evolved into the landmark essay “Towards the critique of violence”, in which the frame of domination and the ontology of politics was recasted as a mediation about the folding of secularized annihilating violence, substance intrinsic to the philosophy of history and indestructible life of the soul (“annihilating only in a relative sense…never absolute with regard to the soul of the living”) [3]. Thus, one could say that accounting for the groundwork of “politics” meant accepting the constitutive verticality cosigned to modern philosophy of history, and its bipolar schematism between moral principles and sacrificial production. If Peter Fenves’ assumption is correct, Benjamin was not only inscribing a distance from Unger, but, more importantly, from Kant’s Toward Eternal Peace who defined his “true politics” as dependent on moral determination: “The true politics can therefore not take a step without having already paid homage to morality, and although politics by itself is a difficult art, its union with morality is no art all, for as soon as the two struggle against each other, morality into two cuts the knot that politics cannot dissolve – The right of human beings must be held sacred [heilig], however great a sacrifice this may yet the dominant power” [4].

The Kantian liquidation of politics to morality is hyperbolic to the modern epoch and its crisis – the crisis and enmity against the concept of the political, Carl Schmitt would claim in Political Theology (1922) – rendering modern politics and legitimacy hollow; something that Benjamin had understood well he saw to retract from the question of “politics” to that of a critico-metaphysical exploration waged on morality “as nothing other than the refraction of action in knowability, something from the region of knowledge…Morality is not ethos” [5]. Elevation could only have meant the production of a subject of knowledge and the specific (technical) arrangement of knowledges for subjection. On the contrary, the ethos was the necessary condition no longer for any “coming politics”, but rather for the disclosure of “the coming world” [die kommende Welt] itself. This means that working through the redemption of the world solicits a reversal from morality to ethics only to later transform the conditions of politics.

Let us return to the definition of politics as “unelevated [ungesteigerten] humanness”. What defines “unelevation”? From the ethical point of view it conjoins with the notion of “inclination” [Neigung] that Benjamin favors because of its unconditional valance that disarms the cycle of violence of the human community and its willful hostilities. The inclination rejects the paradigm of force because it an erotic mediation, that is, an affection of donation and love beyond exchange [6]. But inclination is only possible through language, as Benjamin had expressed in his “concept of politics” in a letter to Martin Buber from 1916: “I understand the concept of politics in its broadest sense…in this sense, therefore, language is only one means of more or less suggestively laying the groundwork for the motives that determine the person’s actions in his heart of hearts. Only the intensive aiming of words into the core of intrinsic silence is truly effective action” [7].  

Thus, the suspended elevation of the subject and higher order meant that its persuasive purity allows the inception of the “divine” as a «teleology without a goal» validated by the suspension of judgement of appearance. The intensification of the unelevation opens life to an ethical demand of a “living corporality” that roams the world’s crust beyond depredation where the force of autonomy of social practices does not risks the world of life forms and the soul. Indeed, at this point Benjamin does join Unger’s cardinal thesis: “Overcoming capitalism through wandering”. Or as he wrote even earlier about Hölderlin’s poetics: “[In the world of Hölderlin], the living are always stretching of space, the plane spread out within which destiny extends itself…it already comprehends the fulfillment of destiny” [8]. A politics oriented pending dowards to “unelevation”, inhabits the ground level of co-existence and cultivation dismissing the ontological derivatives or principles (archein) of ‘politics’ in order to conquer every possible destiny in the lawless fulfillment of the world.

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Notes 

1. Walter Benjamin. “World and Time”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 74. 

2. Walter Benjamin. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, in  Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 138. 

3. Walter Benjamin. “Toward the Critique of Violence”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 58. 

4. Peter Fenves. “Introduction”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 18-19. 

5. Walter Benjamin. “Ethics, Applied to History”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 74. 

6. Walter Benjamin. “On Kantian Ethics”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 71. 

7. Walter Benjamin. “Letter to Martin Buber” (1916), in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994),  79-80.

8. Walter Benjamin. “Two Poems by Fredrich Hölderlin”, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 26. 

The instrument stripped bare. On Adan Kovacsics’ Guerra y lenguaje (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

Endless war and infinite strife is always preceded by the erosion and the putrid decomposition of language. Such is the thesis of Adan Kovacsics’ idiosyncratic and historically situated Guerra y lenguaje (Acantilado, 2025), which sets a specific date for the moment of such linguistic rot into consciousness in European modernity: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Lord Chandos Letter” of 1902 in which civilizational decline signaled the total detachment of expression, making language flourish in the form of opinions resembling rotten mushrooms. For Hofmannsthal this event was neither accidental nor a temporary malady, but a tonality of existence that soon enough broadened like a “spreading rust” (Kovacsics 11). Just a few years later in his posthumous Persuasion and Rhetoric, Michelstaedter will describe this rusting of language as the triumph of “darkening ornaments” (kallopismata orphnes) of the epoch, liberating the destiny of language as a mere transactional exchange between “technical terms” mastered by everyone regardless of their idioms (it surprises the reader that the thinker of Gorizia is absent from Kovacsics’ Austro-Hungarian constellation on the crisis of language). 

The decline of an empire shimmering with languages and dialects across its territory began to suffer the malady of miscommunication that resulted in making language uninhabitable, throbbing in its empty chatter. Thus, the attempt to initiate an exodus from language began to appear everywhere according to Kovacsics: Fritz Mauthner drafts an encyclopedic treatise on the venereal misapprehension of language, Gustav Landauver battles in the trenches of linguistic scepticism and the mystical tradition in the name of revolution, while others like Hugo Ball attempts to flee from language altogether through the liberation of sounds and words, from the Dada avant-garde to his later Byzantine Christian asceticism. For his part, Karl Kraus in The last days of Mankind prefers to expose the surface of language as it becomes a regime regulated by opinion for bureaucratic administration over facts of reality. The nihilism that colors politics at the turn of the century is accompanied by the instrumentalization of language as the primordial technical apparatus that allows the flows of information through the acceleration of the autonomization of the linguistic mediation; as consequence, language began to arouse constant disbelief and doubt over the very essence of the sayable (Kovacsics 31). This throws light on contemporary debates about “misinformation” that, precisely because they are caught up on the epistemological determination proper to the linguistic crisis, it comes short to putting into perspective the range and depth of language over the problem of appearance now deprived of the expressive mediation between the speaking animal and phenomena, reducing experience to rhetorical commonalities or inter-social allocation of commands. 

Kovacsics’s Guerra y Lenguaje (2025) brings to bear – without totally exhausting the crushing weight of its archive and set of problems for thought – the immense significance of the first decade of the twentieth century at outset of the waning of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which has always been understood historically as the condition for the last configuration of European nationalism and its war-economies, but rarely in light of its functionalization of language. If read against the backdrop of Simone Weil’s “Are we heading for the proletarian revolution?” (1933) intervention about the “functional” dimension of the state form in the first decades of the twentieth century, Kovacsic’s essay ultimately helps us to define the concrete nature of functionality as the index of mobilization of ‘worlding’ through the commanding force of language. To deliver this point home, Kovacsics tells how language itself severed enunciation from action:

“La transformación que se produjo y que la ha alejado, como si un tablón se hubiese desprendido del muelle y se hubiera adentrado en el mar, no se debe a que otras gentes se impusieron en su día en Grecia, sino a un cambio radical en el uso concreto de la palabra. Es en la Gran Guerra cuando esa corriente inicial de la utilización del lenguaje como herramienta se consolida de manera definitiva. Es entonces cuando la palabra pasa a ser plenamente funcional y su papel se reduce a aportar argumentos para la acción o incluso a “parirla” mediante el tópico. Hemos visto hasta qué punto el silencio de Karl Kraus al comienzo de la contienda se debía a la percepción de este vínculo entre palabra y acción, al que no quería ni podía sumarse de ningún modo” (Kovacsics 76-77). 

Language does not disappear as much as it transforms itself into two vectors of social enforcement towards communication: functionality and rhetorical enthymemes. In this way, language is able to colonize reality and stabilize for the concrete order, or what Walter Benjamin called during those years the “bourgeois conception of language” hindering on causality and objectivity accelerating the collapse of its vocation to naming the exteriority of the world (Kovacsics 81). The totalization of this new rhetorical social structure becomes the main stage for the production of justification and competing regimes of fiction. But this implies no general theory or systematization of a linguistic science, but rather how language coincides with life in the form of an ethics. This is at the heart of the different attempts to retract language in the eclipse of empire and the new interstate fragmentation – which also entails grammatical and functional unifigies of national language – as a problem that concerns the limits of ethics. Ethics here cannot coincide with the general condition of ‘knowability’ that makes morality possible; rather, the problem of ethics can only reveal in turn the senseless of wanting to go beyond the facts of the world and allows us to dwell in one without completion.  The withdrawal from the language of propaganda and objectivity demanded an ethics of the sayable beyond the commodification and intentionality of words promoted by “war” and “ware” (commodity) that the West had continued to endure; a total communication of ends that decades later evolved into cybernetics as the warping of world into informational encoded relation.

Kovacsics reminds us that there is a story here of extreme violence and creative destruction, only comparable to nuclear fusion and the flaying of a human being, only that this time, unlike the myth of Marsyas, without ever reaching transcendence of redemption through the proximity of language to myth (Kovacsics 129). Underneath there is the body of language, stripped of its capacity for truth and reduced to functions of survival and needs oriented towards the homogeneity of the future. Towards the end of Guerra y lenguaje (2025), and glossing Hobbes’ notion of political authority that legitimated the modern interstate system to neutralize truth contents and the stasis over words, one cannot help but think that the date 1902 as a. arcana was an effective culmination rather than genesis of the modern, which means that the foul scent of the twentieth century was destined for decomposition since it had already stripped bared one of the most beautiful lacunae of the human species: being in language and the event of appearance became integrated into the worldly utopia of the machine.

As captured in Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare”, the obsolescence of language over time evolved into a candid instrument of social functions of proportional exchange, coordinated fortuitous relations, and increasing moral indictment that purported parodies of contested realities. Thus, the sickness is always unto language – a basic assumption that reveals the need for infrapolitical analysis before there is any political practice and categorial reinvention. The overexposure of language as an avatar of metaphoric communication for ends and needs of humankind brought itself bare and all encompassing in its appropriative force, but only at the expense of darkening and losing the world forever. 

Of the destruction of worlds. On Mauricio Amar Díaz’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024). by Gerardo Muñoz

What does it take to destroy a world? It would seem that the question itself is too metaphoric and impertinent; perhaps also hyperbolic and presumptuous against the flight of the infinite embodied in worldling. But this is the question that we should direct ourselves to according to Mauricio Amar’s short and highly accessible book El Paradigma Palestina: Sionismo, Colonización, Resistencias (DobleaEditores, 2024), which is written in the wake of the ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza in order lay bare the paradigmatic abyss of social death in which humanity finds itself at the peak of its civilizational dominance. Amar does not use the term “paradigm” lightly, and nor is he interested, as recasted recently by none other than Steven Bannon citing Thomas Kuhn’s work about scientific revolutions, in posting a central conflict towards transformation; rather, one must situate this strategic conceptual deployment in light of the Chilean philosopher’s own work on imagination and use, which provides an irreducible and sensible texture to every emergence of a paradigm [1]. This means that if Palestine is, indeed, the paradigm of our epoch is precisely because it has no-space in the world – it is what can be infinitely be destroyed, as Maurce Blanchot famously said commenting Antelme’s work – and what illuminates the core and extension of the “integrated” planetary humanity oriented towards the administrative governmentality of contemporary Western democracies, and its corollary geopolitics of the total artificial spaces, as Bruno Maçaes has recently called it. Reading Amar one senses that under the name “Palestine” he is registering a limit to the Humanist force, where an existential claim reveals the maelstrom of an epoch that has resorted to a grotesque parody of the ancient homeric standards of domination and submission. It is the outlook that Simone Weil described as the paradigm of transforming the world into nonliving things.

If understood as a paradigm, Palestine reminds us that the homeric energy towards the aristocracy of equality through force and death among the human race never truly ceased, but only changed forms and cloaks throughout the ages. The post-mythic West seemed to have constructed itself through the repeated revolutions that accommodate justifications for usurpation and containment, self-deification and legibility of the territory at the service of a fictive ethnos. The belated nationalism of modern Zionism has had the paradoxical quality of being both a project of territorial usurpation after its illegalization in International Law (The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928); while, at the same time, a politico-theological configuration that, as Monica Ferrando has shown in L’elezione e la sua ombra: Il cantico tradito (2022), clings upon the manipulation of the theological election of “a People” in order to deploy the coterminous binding between community and territory justified through divine narration. The interdependence of the spiritual goal of Zion is only possible through the construction of a settler state, at the same time that the occupying state’s only legitimacy based on ‘one God, one People’ relies on the restitution of an instrumentalized form of the theological election. This is why for Amar the Zionist state building project is a the paradigm of a specific type of colonial governance whose end is not just to capture errant people into social subjects, but more fundamentally a translatio imperii that folds the Earth into a territorial nomoi of distinct multilevel functions: checkpoints, walls, vigilante control of movements, constructions and erasure of surfaces, administration of critical infrastructures, development of extractive resources, and finally the hunting down of humans that necessarily blurs the line between civil population and battlefield combatants. When Amar reminds us of Israel’s predominance in planetary security and warfare technology, one can immediately recall Emile Benveniste’s suggestion that “measurement” (med*-) and the proportional addition to produce objectivity, entails an efficacy of permanent dominance and governability whose main enterprise is the management of populations through the regime of accumulation. As Andreas Malm reminds us of the current cartography of Palestine: “The genocide is unfolding at a time when the state of Israel is more deeply integrated in the primitive accumulation of fossil capital than ever…This is the political economy of normalization: a sacralization of busines as usual that destroys first Palestine and then the earth” [2]. The ongoing devastation of Gaza is a window into the project as a whole: the necessary destruction of the worlds and the total artificiality of the life-worlds, always at the service of maintaining the needs of anthropological symbolizations.

For Amar this points to an epochal scenario of a people without world; and, following the lead of Sari Hanafi, he will claim that the paradigmatic mirroring of Palestine is also an spatial-cide, in which the living are deprived of a sense of inhabiting and roaming that brings to bear that the nakba is not something that has taken place in history once and for all, it is a catastrophic event that has not ceased from repeat itself, and whose ultimate intention is to suture the world and existence, the soul and the spirituality of the open atmosphere that is needed to sustain life. Reading Amar between the lines  – who towards the end of the book finds distant interlocutors in Darwish’s poetry, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as well as in the glosses of Walter Benjamin on history and the prose of Edward Said – one learns that the true arcana of Palestinian resistance is also a secret promise for our apocalyptic times: to hold on to the world, so that we can all passionately land on the Earth and freely breath in its surroundings. The nexus of the Palestinian question and the intrusion of Gaia, although underdeveloped in Amar’s analysis, obliquely runs through a text that is also very much about the central question of ethics that never abandons thought: how to name what escapes without taking the world as such into an object to be possessed, destroyed, and remade anew as a hostile secular imago dei. The vindictive hyper-consciousness of the contemporary unmediated arcana imperii now reveals, as Amar says towards the end of he book, a mirror through which we can observe our own increasing domestication, in which the metropolis is just the luminescent and self-protected hub, but whole ultimate darkening shadow is the Gaza’s pile of rubbles resembling an open air necropolis (Amar 108-109). Through different arrangements of organized destruction, both the metropolis and the necropolis converge in their preeminent ‘struggle against space’ and its form of life for the sake of familiar pieties of enslaved survival of unworldly anomie (Amar 116). 

Does this mean that we are all “Palestinians”? Mauricio Amar’s El Paradigma Palestina (2024) rejects the all too well expected craft of solidarity and subjective identifications that can only work on the payroll of the gravediggers of the current civilizational project. On the contrary, if Palestine is our paradigm, and it remains so, it is because it can only refuse measurement and recognition in order to dwell in the only possible exteriority as embodied to Darwish’s poetry that Amar quotes towards to the end book: “Do not trust the poem / absent child / it is the throbbing of the abyss” (Amar 140). From the abyss we nourish the soul as the return to land on Earth prepares itself in order to no longer conquer a territory, an ancient tradition, or a “People” (ethnos), but to dwell on the nearness of a place that is an excess to every location or community of belonging (this is the false exit of the kibbutzim). We do not have political grammar to articulate what this integral freedom could mean, except that it is an exotic relation in Victor Segalen’s sense: a creation of a world alien from the compatible and petty one that currently drains us into its ongoing desperate destruction and passive enslavement [3]. Finally, like all authentic paradigms, it is worth noting that Paradigma Palestina (2024) teaches and preaches nothing; it only invites us into the swirling sensation that crosses over the imagination and the singing voice, from the world of the last remaining lives to the isles of the dead martyrs, and back. 

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Notes 

1. Mauricio Amar. Ética de la imaginación: averroísmo, uso y orden de las cosas (Malamadre, 2018).

2. Andreas Malm. The Destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth (Verso, 2025), 53.

3. Victor Segalen. Essay on Exoticism (Duke University Press, 2002), 24.

Osculum pacis. by Gerardo Muñoz

It has taken Pope Francis’s public letter addressed to the Bishops of the United States to put in perspective how late American imperial politics in matters of immigration and probably other spheres of social life is not only at odds with the Christian vocation, but even waging war against the very dogma of Christian revelation. The reminder does not come completely out of context, since as we know, the marching band of intellectuals that for a long time have defended a “Christian postliberal” transformation – some of which not long ago offered theological justifications for the Church as the universal ark for migrants – given the current hegemonic configuration find themselves as mere scribes of whatever is enacted by unilateral executive command. The impossibility of enacting a transitional political theology evidences the emptying of politics into a technical mobilization of apocalyptical overtones, as clearly defended by Peter Thiel. The attempts to pilotage a planetary gnosis to his own image in the last stage of imperial stagnation, definitely supports Francis’ assertion politics today is built “on the basis of force, and not on the truth about equal dignity….begins badly and will end badly”.  But in a way, this “end” has already taken place through the revocation of the ethical tenor of the Christian mystery. 

It comes to no surprise, then, that if the erosion of an ethics is at stake, that Pope Francis would allude to the parable of the Good Samaritan and fraternity, something that he has explored previously in the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” [1]. It is also important to note that Francis is not opposing the Good Samaritan to the ordo amoris; rather the operation is more subtle: for any community to be organized around ordo amoris, there needs to be a space for the infinite discovery that the Good Samaritan parable solicits of every Christian’s responsability. According to Francis: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”. In other words, and implicitly taking distance from the Calvinist dependency on community of salvation, the Pontifex is disclosing the memory of an ethical vocation that cannot end in social norms or national unity without exteriority. The communitarian ordo at times could also amount to oppressive familiarity, as it appears in Corrado Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte: “Village life seemed to him a strange invention, a protective agreement between people who were afraid”. Thus, what the Samaritan teaches human beings is that there are no ethical standards for which we can respond, since every encounter opens up a ‘decision of existence’ before an absolute other beyond the sacramental duty of “I ought”. 

Who is this “other human being” that now becomes your brother? As we know, in Ivan Illich’s late work the ethical inflection of the Good Samaritan illuminates the true character of our poetic relationality and creative act: “You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds….and create the supreme form of relatedness which his not given by creation but created by you. Any attempt to explain this “ought” as corresponding to a norm takes away the mysterious greatness from this act” [2]. Indeed, Illich goes further in telling us that the suppression of the ethical decision of encountering the Samaritan can only leave us with a “liberal fantasy…where bombing our neighbor for his own good” [3]. Just like today the moral justifications of “ordo amoris” or the administrative allocation of a substantive “common good” can produce justifications for mass deportation of immigrants and dividing the social space between citizens and noncitizens (removing the foundation of ius soli) can become the strange patent of a monstrous theological manipulation. 

The ethical mystery exemplified by the parable of the Good Samaritan introduced into history a new conception of “brotherhood” that was not conditioned by national, political, or family affiliations, but by a common vocation expressed upon acting through mercy and charity. Belonging to the “human fraternity” allows me to decide who is my brother through the osculum pacis – a conspiratorial mouth-to-mouth kiss that creates proportionality and peace through the encounter that yields mutual creation. Before the Samaritan we give everything without waiting for anything in return, as required by any true ethical disposition. As the scholar of Ancient Christianity, Christine Mohrman once noted, the osculum pacis was a universal relationship of the human species through their voices coming together to assert external political peace as well as interior health of the soul [4]. If the predatory programs of mass deportations and intensification of hostilities between nations have come to forefront in our days, this is due to the fact that the overall end is not to piecemeal ordo amoris coordinated by state social policies, but rather a permanent assault against the association of the free souls constitutive of the osculum pacis. 

In light of the theological drama of Christianity, nationalism can only be taken as a symptom of brute force and inequity (radical evil). As Erik Peterson reminded in his essay “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum” (1951), the cult and strife between nations and imagined communities, at least for the Chirstian vocation, do not have any traction, since the warring angels of nationalities have been overcome by the event of resurrection [4]. The ‘strange career’ of American political Catholicism is precisely that through a technocratic administration of social pain and spectacular delirium, it can only offer an noncorporeal ideal of ordo amoris “in the service of a single nation which seeks to establish its supremacy, by identify its own interest with that of humankind”, as Peterson observed  in the wake of European nationalism, but that it applies today to the letter with little variations [6].

In vain should we attempt to pin down the osculum pacis as professionalization of care or the hospitalization of pain that have become practices of a “corrupted core of a very clear and powerful ideal of democracy”. In the disjointed time that characterizes the end of political theology and its warring nomoi, the osculum pacis will be not be found in those that attempt to conjure a “Christian civilization”, but only in those that dwell in the state of adelphos, faithful to the scandal of peace and the endless conspiracy of speech. 

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Notes 

1. Pope Francis. “Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), 2020: “By his actions, the Good Samaritan showed that “the existence of each and every individual is deeply tied to that of others: life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html 

2. Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future (Anansi, 2005), 207. 

3. Ibid., 208.

4. Christine Mohrmann. “Quelques traits caractéristiques du latin des chrétiens”, in Études sur le latin des chrétien (Edizione Di Storia E Letteratura, 1961) , 29-30.

5. Erik Peterson. “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum”, Theologische Zeitschrift, 7, 1951, 81-91.

6. Erik Peterson. “Die Frage nach dem Menschen”, in Offenbarung des Johannes und Politisch-theologische Texte (Echter Verlag, 2004), 250.