event

The schism of the species: theses on Dionys Mascolo’s La révolution par l’amitié (2022). by Gerardo Muñoz

1. Remembrance without restitution. The publication of Dionys Mascolo’s essays in La révolution par l’amitié (La fabrique, 2022) opens a path to a singular thinking that refused to conform to a master thinking, and even less what has come to us as political theory, or radical critique. Theory and critique have shown their resilient adaptiveness to university discourse. Thinking, on the contrary, moves annexes a relation with the missing word. This caesura negates the closure of both politics and community, it shows its insufficiency. In a letter to Maurice Blanchot regarding his ceased friend Robert Antelme, Mascolo comes to terms with this specific question: the remembrance of what loss in the actual word is – the voice of his friend Robert Antelme – what cannot be posited as a restitution of representation, but rather as effective effort to transcend mutism and silence that would have sunk writing into a pathos not short of a “miserabilist” stance [1]. The exigency of language is absolute. In an analogous way, we can say that the writing in La revolution par l’amité (La fabrique, 2022) is not a matter of restituting the history of Marxism, the intellectual debates of French theory, or even the burial site of a thinker that rejected repeatedly the metaphysical function of the public intellectual (a sort of captain at the steering wheel of public opinion, a cybernetician); but rather the remembrance that thinking is the irreductible site of common to the species. Remembrance has no “archive” and it does not produce anything; on the contrary, it invites a path to thinking in order to bring the absolutism of reality to an end.

2. The irreducibility of the species. For Mascolo – as for Nicola Chiaromonte – the stimmung of the modern age is not a lack of faith, but a bad faith subscribed by the subject of knowledge, a guardian of the nexus of legitimacy. In his practice of writing, Mascolo explored something like a countermovement to the rationality of the intellectual posture, in which communication ceases to be a common means in order to become a production of ends and instrumentality. Hence, what Mascolo called the “part irreductible” – and its “doubt in any system of organized ideas in sight” – is the only intuition of the unity of the species in communication. And if the intellectual is an organic unity of hegemony that replaces the function of the priest in the Church bureaucracy and its paideia (recall Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectual”), for Mascolo irreducibility in the sharing of thought in communication is “not political” as he states in Autour d’un effort de mémoire – Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1987). This step back from the production of modern politics thoroughly imagines another figure of communism. It is at this point where the whole Cold War polemics between humanism and anti-humanism is destituted internally: the species finds a way out of political domestication.

3. Communism of thought. We can understand why for Mascolo “the word communism really belongs more to Hölderlin than to Marx, as it designates all the possibilities of thought; that which escapes in thinking, and only that can constitute its work (oeuvre)” [2]. In other words, communism for Mascolo is not a matter of doctrine or an Idea, nor about philosophy of history and its inversion; it is not about a political subject or a unity of organization of political force; communism is a use of thought in language in proximity with what escapes in every communication. The inoperative communism, hence, is only possible in friendship, as a continuous experimentation of taste that cannot coincide with a community form. As Mascolo writes in his essay on Antelme: “We did not live in community. This is a deceptive word…we existed in a sentiment of mutual gift of freedom” (53). Any reinvention of a politics to come after the collapse of authority must commence with this rejection of a compensatory communitarian closure. Today only a conspiratio between friends can animate a new field of intensification for renewal.

4. Refusal and friendship. Even in his earliest stages of writing such as “Refus incoditionnel” (1959), the condition for friendship for Mascolo is to refuse the current state of things; to retreat from the demand of reality in order to survive in the imagination of the shared word. In this sense, the thematic of friendship does not make subjects of duty towards a social bond, but rather a secret in the word designated by separation. Friendship floats high above symbolic representation, as it moves to an inclination that is singulare tantum. If modern politics thought itself as a repression and administration of the hostis; for Mascolo the practice of friendship is the sacred space that is never inherited, but, precisely the dwelling of those who “seek” after in the wake of the homelessness of man and nature. This is analogous to Hölderlin’s allowance of thought which moves in passion while accounting for the abyss of our relationship with the world (aorgic) of originary detachment.

5. Revolution as style. In a brief text on the Cuban revolution of 1959, originally written for the collective exhibition Salón de Mayo in Havana, Mascolo says a new revolution in the island could potentially offer a the opportunity of a new style [3]. Of course, as soon as Fidel Castro supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was clear that such promised crumbled, and that the Revolution will fall well within the paradigm of the metaphysics of historical project and the subject (“a new man”). But what is style? Once again, this speaks directly to Mascolo’s passion for the irreductible outside of the subject, and for this reason never alienated from the schism of the species. The notion of style relates fundamentally to our exposition to the outside, to the event of expropriation, which defines our fidelity to the invariant dimension of our character. A new style, therefore, is not something to be produced, an effect of the subject, but rather the unit of an ethical practice in our encounter with the outside. If the apparatus of the revolution was instituted as a the production of a civilization; the fidelity to a style names the modes of life that cannot be oriented towards a specific work. A new aberrant freedom emerges.

6. Saint-Just’s ethos. Mascolo never ceased to reflect on the ethical determination of politics, against politics, and for a transfigurative notion of a politics for the here and now. And he dwelled on this problem in his writings on the ethical figure of Saint-Just during the French Revolution (“Saint Just” and “Si la lecture de Saint-Just est possible”). Unlike the monumental historiographies – both left and right, revolutionary and conservative, historicist or revisionist – that situated the revolutionary under the sign of Terror and Revolution, of will power and the emergency of Jacobinism; for Mascolo Saint-Just stands a figure that keeps an important secret. And this is it: “the inhumanity of Saint Just is that unlike many men, he does not possess many lives but only one” (130). This is a concrete definition of a ethos that is irreducible to the “monstrous arts of government” in an epoch where the political had become the secularization of fate. In the same way that Hölderlin turned his gaze towards the impossible and concealed distance of the moderns in relation to truth of the Greeks, for Mascolo’s Saint-Just the legitimacy of the modern universalization (in the State, the Subject, the Social) does not have the last word. The ethos of life keeps the remembrance of an abyss of the monstrosity of historical universality and the social equality.

7. Borrowed existence. Dionys Mascolo lived at the dusk of the modern arch of the revolution, whether understood as eschatology or a conservation of the natural order of the species, as Saint-Just proposed against the Rousseaunian social contract and the Hobbesian mechanical Leviathan in exchange for authority. We have already crossed this threshold, and we are in the desert of the political, retreating on its shadow fallen into administration of fictive hegemonies. Hence, the question of an ethos of existence becomes even more pressing from Mascolo’s thematic of friendship in order to refuse what he calls in “Sur ma propre bêtise et celle de quelues autres”, a “borrowed existence in a comedy that feels as if we are being watch by God alone” (219). Indeed, as some have diagnosed with precision, the religion of our time is absolute immanence, the full disposition of the tooling of our means [4]. A cybernetic dreamworld, whose pathetic figure is the “influencer” (a few strata beneath the luminosity of the intellectual). This can only fix us into the stupidity of intelligence of the species: specialized intelligence, in other words, prisoners in the sea of nihilism. The intelligence of the species, on the contrary, is the cunning (methis) of the fox: a way out in spite of the swelling tides. But against the nihilism of a borrowed life of immanence (beatitude of the impersonal, and iconicity of things), Mascolo’s thought insists stubbornly in friendship as the initiation in an uncharted path to reenter the world once again.

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Notes 

1. Dionys Mascolo. Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Maurice Nadeau, 1987). 

2. Ibid., 50.

3. Dionys Mascolo. “Cuba premier territoire libre du socialisme”, in A la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (fourbis, 1993).

4. Lundi Matin. “Éléments de descivilisation. Partie 4”, Lundi Matin, 2019: https://lundi.am/Elements-de-decivilisation-Partie-4

Event and retreat: on the autonomy of the Cuban contemporary art scene. by Gerardo Muñoz

Event and the problem of sequence. According to Carlo Diano some historical epochs are prone to being inclined towards events rather than forms; that is, they allow the proliferation of states in the world rather than allocating forms to make sense of what has taken place [1]. Since 1959 – but also before this historical demarcation if one considers the failure of the bourgeois Republic and the apparatus of transculturation – the Cuban Revolution was poor in both form and events. Indeed, the institutionalization of the revolution has attempted at all costs to police the excess of both of these poles of world-making. On the one hand, the historical development of 59 secured an event that translated itself as historical and national necessity to legitimatize the production of a new “revolutionary subject” (el Hombre Nuevo); and, on the other, it assigned the supreme form of political unity in the charismatic authority of the Fidel Castro as the principle of a new political legitimacy [2]. It is against this historical frame that the event of 27N that gathered young artists, intellectuals, and writers at the doors of the Ministry of Culture should be measured up: the November gathering was an exodus from the total narrative of the revolution by insisting on the contingency of an event that affirmed a relative autonomy from the state as well as a separation between state and civil society. More than a set of clear demands at the level of objectives, political calculation, and cultural reabsorption to the logistics of the state; the 27N event in its outermost radiant potentiality was a breakthrough as a vital discontent of the youth that attuned itself to an experiential politics that have characterized the cycle of recent revolts of the past five years or so from Paris to Santiago de Chile and Quito, to the hinterlands of United States that no longer seek a modification of the social, but more fundamentally a thorough exodus from it.

I am not saying that they all recent revolts are homologous processes (or events of the same intensity or destructive vocation), but they do share the ecstatic vitality that posits experience over the technified and well-organized planning proper to the vanguard artist invested in mass conduction. Of course, giving primacy to the force of the event raises the question about both temporal and spatial sequence: in what way could those fragments, affects, and gestures transformed by the event mitigate their swerve without succumbing to the re-totalization of political recognition? There is no doubt that this has happened to the 27 Movement by virtue of the actualization of the phantasy of a movement. But a movement is the force that unifies political will, concentrates degrees of intentionality, and crafts a specific subjective discipline against any deviation from its rectilinear force [2]. We can call the phase of the “movement” a mediatized sequence that limits the possibilities of autonomous forms to effectively renounce the limits of totalization. Rather, given the experiential dimension of the contemporary events, it seems to me that the emphasis today should be placed at the level of genesis of forms, which implies connecting rhythmically the fragments within a sequence as a response to the metaphorical articulation of parts into a ‘movement’. In this sense, the sequence in the aftermath of an event must rethought against the grain of the category of ‘movement’, which in political modernity dialeticized the parts into in a temporal suspension unto the homogenous field of historical reabsorption. The force of the event, on the contrary, is what can render destitute the seduction of historical narrativization; or, for that matter, the assumption that political action still has transformative capacities within the set of developmental strategies of subjection, sacrifice, and voluntarism, all elements at the service of the metaphysical grid that constitutes the infrastructure of the philosophy of History. 

The hypothesis of the artistic legal turn. It should not come as a surprise that the limits of the movement demands that we raise questions about the functionalization of the militant in contemporary artistic practice. We should be willing and able to abandon the figure of the militant as always already positioned as a reactionary subject, which transfers military force to unified energies of the cause established by the movement [3]. It should be remembered here that the theoretical grounds of “activist” relational aesthetic was rooted in the transposition of the post-foundational theory of hegemony in Laclau & Mouffe’s theorization as a regulatory principle in the field of artistic practices [4]. But the price to be paid here is enormous, given that the artistic gesture and the possibilities of imagination are now folded unto the ground of “political action” recasting the old semblance of vanguard to achieve cultural domination. But since no cultural hegemony is ever fulfilled, it follows that political hegemony becomes a vector for the valorization of available strategies. It is no surprise, then, that artistic practice, once it turns to activism, becomes a pedagogical tool for and by militant subjects to stabilize the ascesis of self-consciousness. In sacrificing the autonomy of forms, militant subjectivity mirrors an intra-communitarian domination premised on policy and calculation to the idea. In other words, situating the set of strategies at the level of hegemony means necessarily that we have to accept the conditions already in place. What really changes is merely the site of subjection. It seems to me that this same issue is behind a nascent “legal turn” by which the artistic practice centers around drafting, contesting, and exercising pressure against the state by means of its own legal pathways. The problem with this strategy is that, as any jurist knows well, law is constituted of the pole of legality the pole of legitimacy. The turn towards legality becomes accepts the pragmatic conditions of norms and rules but leaves untouched the crisis of legitimacy that it seeks to transform.

In other words, whereas artistic imagination should be able to destitute the objective conditions of any given reality to new set of operations of transformation; the strife over legality ends up, at times counter-intentionally (and in a preserve way, generating unintended consequences), those very goals that it wants to endorse. In the Cuban case this is even more so, given that “fidelismo” far from being a set of original ideological principles or an unambiguous political philosophy guided by principles, has morphed into an all-encompassing institutional fabric that sustains the total state vis-à-vis a juristocratic operation of the legal order. Borrowing the terms from the discussions about the limits of constitutional transformation in Chile in the wake of the post-dictatorship transition to democracy, one could argue that the performance of the legal operation becomes the juristocratic tool to transform the relations between political life and imagination within the framework of given social relations [5]. Hence, if the artist pretends to incarnate a new version of the old paradigm of the “artist as jurist” soliciting the sovereignty of the creator over the vocation of the politician, one should expect the boundaries of the legal dominium of the state to expand, as it has happened with the reiterated executive administrative decrees deployed to normalize the rule of the state of exception. To break this cycle of legal administration, the artistic practice must affirm a disjointed zone between life and artistic autonomy over the excessive boundaries of the law. In fact, legality and policing should be understood as the two poles of the optimization of control once legitimacy no longer works to bind a political community. 

Retreat and obstruction. The minimal condition of any sequence in the aftermath of the event resides in how we protect the surround against the logistics of state policy, cultural administration, and political militancy [6]. These three vectors are the agents of hegemonic intervention against the unregulated proliferation of forms in the wake of the event. Recently, I have called this autonomous self-defense of forms a diagonal that moves against and outside the political demand [7]. The failure of not retreating from the foreclosure of subjective politics (of reducing a form of life to a subject of the political) entails that action will always be on the side of reaction. As Elena V. Molina has brought to attention on several occasions, the reactive action is so not because of ideological color or political affinity, but rather because it remains inscribed within the coordinates that the state has assigned it in order to generate responsive relays or bring to exhaustion the emergence of a new sequence. Rather, in the gesture of retreat (which can be read in the works of Camila Lobón’s infantile books, the opaque graphism of Esequiel Suarez, the sensible violence of Raychel Carrión’s drawings, or the youthful vitalism of the Mujercitos Collective), the possibilities lay on the side de-subjection against both the movement and the state in favor of an infinite practice of autonomy driven by the turbulence of the imagination. What is at stake is a radical abandonment of the historiographical machine that delimits and polices the mediations between culture and state in order to open up a new reservoir of existential gestures in order to break from the previous historical epoch.

The growing autonomy of the contemporary visual arts scene announces this oblique passage from willful political dissent across ideological lines proper of the Cold War to a play of gestures that unleash a new vitality capable of defictionalizing the historical process of the state and its moral demands. Contrary to the notion of action, the gesture does not seek mimetic repetition and reproduction, but rather the preparation of an experience here and now. In a society that is subsidiary on moral conducts and expectations; the gesture, in the words of contemporary Cuban artist Claudia Patricia Pérez, becomes a way to obstruct the efficacy of power relations [8]. There is no doubt that the force of the gesture is a nascent strategy for transforming contemporary Cuba, but the scene of the visual arts is the vital field where the storming of the imagination can unclutter a hastened path outside the ruins of the civilization of the state and the stagnant epochality of the revolutionary process.  

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Notes

1. Carlo Diano. Form and Event: Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World (Fordham University Press, 2020).

2. Nelson Valdés. “El contenido revolucionario y político de la autoridad carismática de Fidel Castro”, Revista Temas, N.55, 4-17, septiembre de 2008.

3. Giorgio Cesarano wrote in Chronicle of a masked ball (1975): “Neo-Leninists perceive the disintegration of the capitalist system as if they could anticipate, in their methods, their role as true inheritors of power…the distance between militants and militarists is only expressed as a transfer of force.”

4. This was Claire Bishop’s argument in her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”, October, 110, Fall 2004, 51-79.

5. On the notion on the “crítica de la operación efectiva del derecho”, see my conversation with Chilean philosopher Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, “Soberanía, acumulación, infrapolítica”, Lobo Suelto, 2015: http://anarquiacoronada.blogspot.com/2015/04/soberania-acumulacion-infrapolitica.html  

6. Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Autonomedia, 2013).

7. Gerardo Muñoz. “La diagonal que nos separa de la política”, Columna Cultural, mayo de 2021: https://in-cubadora.org/2021/06/02/gerardo-munoz-·la-diagonal-que-nos-separa-de-la-politica-un-comentario-a-la-conversacion-con-leandro-feal

8. Personal communication with the artist, June 2021.

  • This text was written as an intervention in the panel “The Art of Protest” organized by the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, June 24, 2021. Image: Collage by Claudia Patrica Pérez.

A gloss on the “element” of love. by Gerardo Muñoz

It might be the case that the self-evident nature of love as an affection proves itself lacking mediation in thought, insofar as it is a resource of mediation between thought and the world. In this sense, it is true that what one “loves” resists to be grasped as an object of representation or exposition; it is a question of limits, and those limits posit the question of the world. Now, love gives form, but it is not in itself a form or a mandate or an object. This means that love is outside of reality; indeed, it is the absolute indifference between object and world.

The question perhaps is one regarding proximity and distance. The problem of “nearness”, which is why in the text one reads the orphic inscription: “When we are in nearness to which we love we then go through the other side of the mirror.” Of course, what is interesting it not the “other side”, but rather to have become transformed by something without ever being entirely dissolved. Amor fati? Perhaps. In the transient path of the night one is opened to the condition of the “moon hunter”, in which one path reveals itself as the question of destiny (“one life”). The trick is that no path is ever ‘obligatory’, but rather validated by an access to an experience. Now, it is obvious that love cannot exhaust an experience, but there is no experience that is not affected by love, since it is this affection what inscribes the limit of a world without the fantasy of possession and abuse. 

Another moment: “In abusing something we no longer love; and even in the pleasure that were invested in we do not love”. Here the exotic (extemporaneous) nature of love becomes visible: no love is exhausted in materiality and form. Love is ex-scription: it demands exodus as homecoming. However, no fundamental fantasy of love can validate what is granted to us by the irreducibility of an experience. Perhaps this is after all what Gianni Carchia, reading Schelling called the “transfiguration with the divine”. Or, as I would like to call it, the intromission with the invisible [1]. In the invisible we carve out the limits of our deconstitution with our world in which our existence is possible through separation. 

There might a rebuttal, although it might not be one after all. It is a recent suggestion by a friend who claimed in a psychoanalytic speculation that: “Perhaps after all ‘love’ is a Christian invention, a compensatory and necessary one for the fact that we do not communicate”. There might be a few ways to respond to this claim; the first one being that the task of the transfiguration of love responds, precisely, to the subordinated status of love as mere compensation to the subject of sin and thus of the pleasure principle. The existence that can traverse the pleasure principle of the subject could be said to have gained reentry into a happy life capable of outsourcing the succession of infinite deaths while in life. 

Contrary to life or death, love might be another name for the orphic passage between the two states of potentiality; that is, of pure affection and the opening of the impotential in every life. To experience the death of what is possible as transient to the time of existence opens the path towards a “life to come…in underground streams” (Auden). If love is to be taken as compensatory to the impossibility of communication, then there is a love of thinking, but not necessarily a thinking of love. It is strange that philosophy – just as “liberty” for political thought – fails when measuring itself up to a thinking of love, a vertigo before the immemorial attunement to the state of mousikos. Such is the taking place among the things that we have surprised in the world, but only accessible to those who “seek” outside reality. 

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Notes 

1. Gianni Carchia. “Indifferenza, eros, amore: la critica dell’essere spirituale nella “filosofia della libertà” di Schelling”, in L’amore del pensiero (Quodlibet, 2000), 101-121.

Three ideas for a discussion on «Éléments de décivilisation» by Gerardo Muñoz.

[These are some preliminary notes for an ongoing discussion on Lundi Matin’s “Éléments de décivilisation’’, a text that condenses a series of problems dealing with, although by no means, limited to infrapolitical reflection, the event, world, and the question of civilization in the wake of the ruin of hegemonic principles. This particular essay, more than content, raises the question of the status of the style of thought; and, in broad terms, I tend to link the notion of style to the constitution of an ethos. But let me offer three theses to open the discussion in very broad terms. What follows is the reconstruction of three brief points in a recent group meeting about this text.] 

i. The priority of the event. For me at least it is very important to consider that Éléments de décivilisation’’ moves away from at least two important precedents of a common intellectual orbit: messianism and the political theory of modern sovereignty. Of course, this is important for many reasons, but most it speaks to what I would call a strong opposition between thought and philosophy (favoring the first over the second). These two registers open important distinctions, such as, for instance, a displacement between historical temporality (messianism) to a notion of the taking place (the event or encounter) as exteriority. Whereas we were told that the “event is the enemy within Empire” (Gloss in Thesis 60 of Introduction à la guerre civile) , now we have a more through sketch about the way in which the form-of-life is not a category reducible to vitalism or the problem of the subject, but rather about the play between form and event. Here I think that Carlo Diano’s Forma ed evento (1952) is crucial as a backdrop that is not just philosophically (Aristotelian formalization against Stoic predication), but rather a sound position of thinking in relation to what has been passed down as “civilization”. 

ii. Civilization as a principle. Now, the question of civilization raises to a problem of thought insofar as is neither an ontological problem nor an operative idea in the history of intellectual concepts. Civilization becomes the apparatus by which the total regimen of production in any given epoch is structured to establish an order. And here order is both authority and police. To put it in juridical terms: the first secures legitimacy while the second posits the flexible energy of legality and execution. This is the same problem in the relation to the world. In other words, civilization means enclosing, domesticating, and producing. By the same token, civilization is the operative domain by which nomōs, history and the subject come together in virtue of their separation. Is not this the very issue in the Greek polis in the wake of the discovery of measurement, isonomy, and the distribution of the goods in which hegemony replaces the basileus (Vernant)? It is one of the merits of the text not having understood this problem at the level of an “archeology of Western political thought” (Agamben), but rather as an evolving transhistorical process that binds the axis of domination and power to the axis of anthropology and domestication. Civilization, then, would name the total apparatus of hegemony under which politics falls as a problem of metaphysical structure (I have tried this problem in recent positions here). Whether there is an assumed anthropological anarchy at the level of substance, capable of “inversion” (Camatte), is something that must be explored in further detail. 

iii. Happiness cuts absolute immanence. My last point. I would like to insist on something that Rodrigo Karmy mentioned recently: “Happiness is the unthought of the Weestern tradition”. I agree with Karmy not on the basis that there has not been any reflection of “happiness” in the tradition, but rather that this reflection has either been a) subordinated to politics or economics (Jeffersonian “happiness” conditioned by commerce); or, as a moral virtue of self-regulation and privation. But it seems to me that “Elements” wants to offer something else in a very novel way. It is here where the question of violence must be inscribed. A curious displacement since violence has been thought in relation to beauty, but not happiness. The violence at the level of forms puts us in proximity with the event at the end of life itself. In this sense, the Pacôme Thiellement footnote is important:

“l y a deux lumières: il y a la lumière d’avant la nuit et il y a la lumière d’après. Il y a celle qui était là au début, l’aube radieuse du jour d’avant, et puis il y a celle qui a lutté contre les ténèbres, la lumière qui naît de cette lutte : l’aube scintillante du jour d’après. Il n’y a pas seulement deux lumières, il y a aussi deux joies : il y a la joie d’avant la peine et il y a celle d’après. La joie originelle, la joie innocente, primitive, cette joie est sublime, mais c’est juste un cadeau de la vie, du ciel, du soleil… La joie qui vient après la peine, c’est le cadeau que tu te fais à toi-même : c’est la façon dont tu transformes ta peine en joie, l’innocence que tu réussis à faire renaître des jours d’amertume et des nuits de bile noire. C’est le moment où tu commences à vivre, mais vivre vraiment, parce que tu commences à renaître de toutes tes morts successives. C’est le moment où tu t’approches de la divinité ou du monde”. This position  – which I think it is prevalent throughout the text – allows the opening of a series of articulations:

a) it is no longer happiness an effect on the subject, which has only grown in the Spectacle or consumption; that is happiness as an exception to life.

b) it is not that happiness is a theological state of ‘blessed life’, which would presuppose the transmutation of sin and thus overcoming of the non-subject. This position depends on conditions of mythic-history and theology.

c) It is rather that happiness is the way in which the singular gathers his possibilities in use without enclosing the other possibles. To live a life among the fragmentation of the use of our disposed potentialities is a way to violently cut the seduction of absolute immanence in which style is diluted. Play could name the variations of use. But there is a second order risk in what constitutes “play”: a transfiguration of politic as civil war. The problem becomes how to think of ‘play’ (i. messianic abandonment, ii. political intensification – insurrection, or the separation between rhythm and voice, a poesis). I am interested in pushing for the third figure of play; a third figure in which the event and happiness impose a new division of souls, moving away from the separation from life.