A friend recently suggested that the refusal is at center of multiple critical positions against the moralization of politics. And I agree. In fact, I would go as far as saying that the strategy of refusal is something like a common denominator in positions critical of political mediation. Although the refusal could take many forms, I would also add that the refusal is directed against hegemony broadly understood (culturalist, political, logistical, etc.). Primarily, the refusal awakes from the dream of hegemony as contributing towards any real substantive transformation anchored in “political realism”. Realism today is mostly deployed as a freestanding argument aimed at political traction, although it merely contributes to stagnation and paralysis; it is a katechon to any concrete transformative movement of the actual moment.
It is telling that the notion of ‘refusal’ was first developed in the French political context by the likes of Maurice Blanchot and Dionys Mascolo in the journal Le 14 Julliet, a project obscured by the monumental historiographies of May 68. In his short text “Refusal”, Maurice Blanchot defines the notion as the gap in representation between an event and language: “accomplished by neither us nor in our name, but from a very poor beginning that belongs to those who cannot speak” [1]. The refusal denotes a limit to representation. Similarly, in “Refus Inconditional”, Dionys Mascolo understands refusal as the constitutive possibility of silence so that true communication can indeed take place [2]. For both Mascolo and Blanchot, the notion of refusal was the condition for the possibility of friendship preceding subjectivism. By way of refusal, the realization of a “community of the species” is guarded against the socialization of alienable classes. I think one could name four positions of refusal against the closure of hegemony as the organization of secondly separations (alienation). These might not be the only positions – and many a time there is a clear overlap of the problem at hand.
1. The refusal of culture. First, there is Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of refusal” (Operaio e capitale), which grasps the refusal in classical Marxist terms by way of criticizing culture as resistance against capitalist form. In fact, for Tronti culture amounted to a mediation of social relation of capitalism uncapped expansion. And for Tronti, “oppositional culture does not escape this fact; rather, it merely states the body of the worker’s movement ideologies in the common clothing of bourgeoisie culture” [3]. Hence, for Tronti, refusal meant disengaging from “becoming of intellectuals” as disengaged from the practice of the class struggle. The critique of culture functioned as an inversion of mediation with no transformative leverage whatsoever. However, for Tronti ‘refusal’ was still understood as a political strategy, which necessarily needed to engage with the “subjected” force of class and organized in the party form. In other words, the refusal in Tronti’s early work was the rejection of cultural mediation by intensifying the antagonism of the autonomy of the political. There is not yet a rejection of politics, but rather the assumption that the refusal can lead the way in the destruction of capital production given the “pagan force” of the proletariat.
2. Refusal and fugitivity. Second, there is a clear and direct strategy of refusal in Afropessimism aimed at the totalization of the social bond organized around the destruction of black existence. Hence, for Afropessimism refusal takes the form of an archipolitics that seeks fugitivity from logistics of social death [4]. As Moten & Harney argue in All Incomplete (2021): “The Undercommons is the refusal of the interpersonal, and by extension the international, incomplete in the service of a shared incompletion, which acknowledges and upon which politics is built. To be undercommon is to live insists the inoperative condition of the individual and the nation as these upon brutal and unsustainable fantasies and all of the material effects they generate oscillate in the ever-foreshortening interval between liberalism and fascism. These inoperative forms still try to operate through us” [5]. Against all forms of bondage subsidized by hegemonic sature, the afropessimist refusal opens up a fugitive life in errancy that points to a new central antagonism now framed between black life and the world. In Wayward Lives (2020), Saidiya Hartman puts it in this way: “To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together. It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live” [6]. The refusal of the total circulation of social relations allocates Black existence at the threshold of politics. This negative community refuses any hegemonic social rearticulation.
3. Refusal of logistics. Thirdly, in the work of the Invisible Committee the refusal entails destituting the social bond, although the emphasis is placed in infrastructure as the concrete and operative terrain of domination. For the collective the refusal becomes twofold: on the one hand, blocking the logistics of circulation and production of subjection; and on the other, separating the form of life from the regime of subjective domestication. At bottom, the refusal in the Committee’s takes aim against the mystification of the social as a site for autonomous gain from political struggle. For both Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee one needs to refuse the artificiality of the subject (Bloom) in the name of the form of life and reject politics of class antagonism favoring the civil war as a generic science of desertion (what remains after the collapse of the authority of modern politics).
4. Posthegemonic refusal. Finally, posthegemony refuses the codependency of politics and domination, and favors their non-correspondence; it refuses politics as hegemony, and hegemony as newcomer after the closure of metaphysics. In this sense, posthegemony favors the exit from the total structure of socialization ordered through the equivalence of demands. One could say that posthegemony affirms the “realistic option of non-cooperation” with hegemony. But the space of non-cooperation allows the exit from subjective limit of the political. The posthegemonic separation, therefore, is the refusal of cooperation on the basis of refusal of conditions of obligation (what Eric Nelson labels being “stuck on the boat”), whether predicated on a distributive conception of social justice, or as the maximization of indirect interests proper to liberalism [7]. In this sense, the posthegemonic refusal abandons the temptation of establishing a new civilizatory principle with politics as its auxiliary and optimizing tool of order [8].
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Notes
1. Maurice Blanchot. “Refusal”, in Political Writings (1953-1993) (Fordham U Press, 2010). 7.
2. Dionys Mascolo. “Refus inconditionel”, en La révolution par l’amitié (La Fabrique éditions, 2022). 27-30.
3. Mario Tronti. “The Strategy of Refusal”, in Workers and Capital (Verso, 2021).
The core of my present intervention was prompted by a joke recently told by a friend. This friend said: “Alberto Moreiras is Spain’s most important Italian philosopher”. I felt I had to respond to it, in my own sort of way, such as this brief intervention. I will offer at least three hypotheses as why that was said. First, what is obvious: Moreiras’ analytical reflection is irreducible to the dominant Spanish philosophical or cultural reflection, however we take that to be (taking in consideration that Moreiras’ work is hardly defined solely by the Spanish archive or historical tradition). Second, that Moreiras’ reflection is somewhat close to the Italian philosophical tradition, particularly in the wake of the contemporary turn of “Italian Difference”. Thirdly, that Moreiras’ own singular thought shares a vinculum with the Italian philosophical culture as “thinking on life”, as perhaps best defined by Roberto Esposito in his Living Thought (2011). There is probably no way to find out the original “intention” of said friend in terms of the Italian signatura of Moreiras’ work, and it is not my desire defend any of three hypotheses. Rather, in what follows what I want to develop is a preliminary exploration of the way in which Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (2006) could be very well read a horizon of thought that retreats from community vis-à-vis the non-subject that transfigures the “democratic kernel of domination” (Moreiras 94).
In this analytical development I want to ‘actualize’ Línea de sombra’s potential not very rehearsing the arguments against the so called decolonial option, the metaphysical concepts of Empire and multitude, or the critique of the humanism of the politics of the subject, all of them contested in the book. It is not that I think that those discussions are closed, but rather that I want to suggest that a different politics of thought that radicalizes and abandons those very notions – nomos, legacy, and subject – through the practice of infrapolitical reflection. Hence, I will take up two instances of this nomic sites of contemporary reflections in the so called school of “Italian Difference”; mainly, Remo Bodei’s “Italian” entry in the Dictionary of untranslatables (Princeton U Press, 2014), and Roberto Esposito’s articulation of “Italian philosophy” in his Living Thought: the origins and actuality of Italian Philosophy(Stanford U Press, 2011). I would like to anticipate a critique that could perhaps note that I am putting off Italian thought, or even antagonistically clashing two schools of thought. I am not interested in establishing what could well said to be a legislative clash between theories. I am also aware that Italian Difference is a topological heterogeneity that organizes variations of common themes among thinkers, but that it is not reducible to what singular thinkers generate in their own effective elaborations. In this way, you could say that what I am interested here is in the way in which a certain nomic grounding under the name of ‘Italian Thought’ has been articulated, grounded, and posited as a tradition between conservation and rupture. In the remaining of this intervention, I would like to offer some preliminary speculative ideas about the way in which infrapolitical reflection decisively emerging from Línea de sombra divergences from the general horizon of radical democratic politics advanced by Italian theory.
For reasons that are not just chronological, I think Remo Bodei’s entry in the Dictionary of the untranslatables is preparatory for Esposito’s own take on the territorial and exterritorial force of “Italian Philosophy” in his 2005 book. Indeed, Esposito records in a footnote Bodei’s entry, as well as other recent contribution to the topic such as Borradori’s Recording Metaphysics: New Italian Philosophy (Northwestern, 1988), Virno & Hardt’s Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minnesota, 1996), and Chieza’s The Italian Difference Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009). An important predecessor reflecting on Italian philosophical culture – ignored by both Esposito and Bodei – is Mario Perniola’s early “Difference of the Italian Philosophical Culture” (1984), which already establishes the conditions for thinking this nomic specificity beyond the encompassing paradigm of the nation-state, and against the grain of the organization based Italian identity of the Risorgimento. For Perniola, “this is now over, and that natilistic ways, based on a comparison and vindication of identities have completely exhausted their historical function” (Perniola 105). The exhaustion of a national philosophical script is what reversely makes the case for Italian thought to be a thinking measured by civic activism, which entails that the conditions for transmission and interruption of tradition is essentially through a distance between history and language (Perniola 108-09).
sIn a profound way, Italian philosophy is what speaks without historicizing itself, or what speak the non-historiciable to put in Vico’s terms in the New Science. This amounts to an interruption of any philosophy of history, since it discloses a region of what cannot be rendered a science of history. Italian philosophic reflection opens up to the collapse of narration not as consequence of State persecution or constitutive violence, but as a function of a politics incapable of coinciding with the Italian nation-state (as we know this is the symptom of Gramsci’s formulation of the subaltern, and the North-South relations the Prison Notebooks). Perniola’s early essay is an important salient informant of Bodei’s entry, since what arouses the second’s reflection is precisely the drift towards a civil philosophy, or what is the same, a philosophy based on a civic vocation. Thus, writes Bodei:
“From a broad historical perspective and taking into account the limits imposed by its irreducible complexity the Italian language has been character by a constant and predominant civil vocation. By civil I mean a philosophy that is not immediately tied to the sphere of the state, nor to that region of interiority. In fact, ever since its humanist and Renaissance origins, its privileged interlocutors have not been specialist, clerics or students, attending university, but a wider public, a civil society one has sought to orient, to influence, to mold” (Bodei 516).
Italian language, which for Perloina was constitutive of Italian thought, here takes a civic function that exceeds the proper limits of the philosophical act. This is why Bodei’s most important symptomatic definition is Machiavelli’s ‘verità efffecttuale della cosa’, which is guided by desire at the intersection between tradition and innovation, revolution and rupture. For Bodei’s Italian vernacular language necessarily breaks away from the very containment of the philosophical nomos, spilling over an excess that is anti-philosophical or ultra-philosophical. By proxy of Leopardi’s writings, Bodei argues against the ‘German poem of reason’, defending a poetical space of thought that knows (according to Leopardi) “the true and concrete…the theory of man, of governments, and so on, that they Germans have made none”. The point being is not just that Italian philosophers are ultra or non-philosophical, but that an antiphilosophy of praxis, of what citizens already do. The difference, according to Bodei vis-à-vis Croce, only rests upon critico-practical reflection as the central determination of thinking in Italian (523).
As it is for Esposito – but we can say also for Agamben in the last volume of the Homo sacer series, L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) – philosophy is a praxis that provide immanent validation for Aristotle’s treatment of dunamys and energeia, as well as his general typology of causation. What is at stake here is nothing less than the actualization of the question of technology (technê), which Bodei reads in Galileo’s as a contestation to the systematization of maquination (Gestell). The scientific thought of Bruno or Galileo bring to halt the machination that Heidegger understood as the end and realization of epochality through gigantism, by positing the artificiality of the apparatus (of the ‘thing’) as an extension of nature, and not as its mere opposition (Bodei 527). Although he does not explicitly thematizes it on its proper terms, one could very easily read in this argumentation the polarity that structures Italian non-philosophy: the question of civic vocation (klesīs) and the question of nihilism (the co-belonging between technique and philosophy of history).
What is rather puzzling about Bodei’s argumentation is that at no point does he account for a genealogy of what I would call the non-philosophy of life, or even the life of non-philosophy as the excess of the philosophical life in the Italian republics. In other words, Bodei leaves out the sophist, and it is the figure of the sophist what ultimately lead a positive civic contemplative life outside the constrains of philosophical schools, such as stoicism (Bonazzi & Bènatouïl 2006). Instead, what he does offer and reconstructs is the paradigm of an Italian philosophical tradition that still structures itself between tradition and interruption, thought and action, immanence and life. This is the conflictivity or differend – we could also call its krisis, which Cacciari’s studied in relation to the labor of the negative in his important book Krisis: Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negative (1976)– that in Bodei remains unresolved at the political register, still organized around the concept of the “civil”.
Roberto Esposito’s Pensiero vivente (Giulio, 2010) shares many of the basic premises advanced by Bodie, but there is little doubt that it is the most sophisticated and sustained reflection on thinking the nature and the political consequences of “Italian Difference” in the wake of nihilism and biopolitics after Michel Foucault’s critique of governmentality. Although unlike Bodei, Esposito pushes the political consequences to its limits on the relation between philosophy and history. According to Esposito, it is on this threshold that a region beyond the impasse of the philosophical and political categories of Western modernity, would allow an actuality of thought with transformative capacities and innovative energy (Esposito 21). Departing from Deleuze & Guattari’s anarchic definition of philosophy as de-territorializing, Esposito affirms not an ultra-philosophy or a non-philosophy, but the development of an uneven grammar that is universal due to its very singularity, that is, it could travel unbounded throughout Europe with arguments, formulations, and images that everyone could make their own and share (20).
Esposito outlines three different paradigms of Italian difference: a political one that solicits conflict in every instance; a radical historicity of the non-historical; and one of life, which is to be understood as both the worldliness of the modern subject and the deconstructive gesture of the dual theological machine folded on the person. I want to limit myself to elaborate on the first and third declinations (political conflict and life). Esposito also thinks against the German or English traditions understood as State traditions – the traditions of Locke, Hegel, or Fichte – which he sees as constituting the state knowledge of the political (Esposito 21). Esposito views them as philosophies of history, whose nexus to the political is one of consensus and not of disagreement or antagonism. Instead, “Italian philosophy has shown a critical and sometimes antagonistic potential not commonly found in other contexts. Sometimes, in special situations, and under certain conditions – in the case of a drastic transition between epochs like the one we have been experiencing for some hears now – what appears to be, an is, in effect, a lack or an antimony can transform itself into advance compared to more stable, well-established situations” (21).
This ‘antagonistic potential’ defiantly avoids the nihilism of acting according to the presenting of principles of the normative order. However, so it seems to argue Esposito, the antagonistic politics feeds off crisis, is born out of transitional or inter-epocal subsumption. The question is similar to the one that one could formulate against the hegemonic principle overriding the populistic logic, which Moreiras frames it in this way in Línea de sombra: “if hegemony is the democratic horizon of domination [because it is not consensual], the search for a politics of the closure of sovereignty begs the question about the end of subalternity in a radically democratic horizon” (Moreiras 94). But the truth of democratic politics is only possible against the condition of hegemonic attainment. Esposito writes this much: “…[against] the Hegelian identification between politics and state, the world of life is cut through by pervasive struggle, in a fight to idea for hegemony: whether like it or no, we are always forced to take a position in favor of one part against the other” (Esposito 25).
I would not go as far as to say this exhaust the horizon of Esposito’s political thought, from the intricacies of the impolitical to his most recent turn to the impersonal. However, this does mark a fissure from the possible of generating a radical theory of de-theologizing the political, an operation of thought not alien to the infrapolitical horizon (132). Essentially, the problem here is not about the theory of hegemony, or the continuation of hegemonic principle of Roman politics, as what continues to divide and administer life through domination. More so, I would argue, give that we are seeing here a second order of interior domination that posits the life of infrapolitics at the expense of the political and the community (munus). This means, that if one takes seriously the articulation of infrapolitics as the possibility of action outside the subject, that it is not enough to think the politics of Italian difference as a pre-statist that is always already the promise of a democratic or post-democratic infrapower as governed by a counter-hegemony of decision (Moreiras 224). Secondly, this leads to the question of contingency that underlines the very co-belonging between history and philosophy of the Italian Difference. Stefano Franchi is right in noting that the “sporgenza” or protrusions are processes that punctuate the body and archive of Italian thought. Protrusions are also what allow for the development of epochs, constituting the excess and contingent foundation of the historical unfolding as such. Of course, the pressing question is: “and how do we know if ‘Il Pensiero vivente’ as such – not the book Esposito wrote, but though he advocates in its last sentence as a breach capable of renewing contemporary philosophy as a whole – is capable to uncover those events in unprecedented ways?” (Franchi 31). And what is more: how does one establishes a co-substantial difference from an epochal presence of living thought to Esposito’s own thought (impersonal / third person)?
My purpose here is not to resolve this aporia in Esposito’s characterization of Italian Difference, because to cross its nihilism. Infrapolitics has something to say here in regards to location. In the chapter on infrapolitics in Linea de sombra, Alberto argues: “The difference between an imperfect experience and one reducible to an aporia is also the difference between understanding the aporetic as the end of thinking, and that of understanding as a reflexive opening that is the beginning of an infrapolitical practice in the same location where the suppression against the aporia reinforces the exorbitant violence of the imperial biopolitical hegemony” (Moreiras 235). But infrapolitical dwells necessarily in a non-space or alocation, since is very excess is the falsification of life; that is, what is no longer structured around an enemy for political antagonism. Italian Difference necessitates a non-supplementary exodus that is infrapolitical life, what escapes biopolitical life of the community.
Here one must ask, what is the relation between alocationality and democracy? Is there a democracy of the impersonal or the unequal? This is a difficult question to ask at this moment, but it is pertinent if the question about civic duty (Bodei) or immanentization of social strife is constitutive Italian thought. Following the political historian of Ancient Greece, Christian Meier, Agamben concludes his recent Stasis (2015) by suggesting that the politization brought by the isonomic foundation carries the latent possibility of social strife or stasis, which is the obfuscation of the ontology of war (politics) within the polis. This runs counter to Arendt, who in On Revolution attributed non-rule to the principle of isonomy as antecedent to democracy as majority rule (Arendt 30). It also seems insufficient to end at Esposito’s determination of the community based on the logistics of binding-debt (munus), intensified today by the total unification of existence and world, in what Moreiras has called the principle of equivalence (Moreiras 2016). Is infrapolitics then, always, a shadow of civil war? If the non-subject cannot constitute isonomic citizenship; infrapolitics disjoints the mediation between the political and the differential absorption of differences. In other words, posthegemonic democracy prepares a different institutionalization for political relation that no longer covers the empty space of the One at the heart of the civil.
* A version of this text was written on the occasion of a roundtable on Alberto Moreiras’ book Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (2006, 2021), which Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and I organized for the ACLA 2016 at Harvard University. I am actualizing it here with minor changes in light of the first discussion on “Italian theory” in the framework of the Foro Euroamericano, at 17/instituto, which I am co-organizing along with José Luis Villacañas, Benjamin Mayer Foulkes, and José Miguel Burgos-Mazas. The first session is mow available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BjW4euQduE
Bibliography
Alberto Moreiras. Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (Palinodia, 2006).
Giorgio Agamben. Stasis: civil war as a political paradigm (Stanford University Press, 2015).
Hannah Arendt. On Revolution (Penguin Books, 1986).
Mario Perniola. “The difference of Italian philosophical culture”. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 10, N.1, Spring 1984.
Mauro Bonazzi & Thomas Benatouïl. Theoria, Praxis and the Contemplative Life after Plato and Aristotle (Brill, 2012).
Reiner Schürmann. Broken Hegemonies (Indiana University Press, 2003).
Remo Bodei. “Italian”. Dictionary of untranslatables (Princeton University Press, 2014), 515-527
Roberto Esposito. Living thought: the origins and actuality of Italian Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Stefano Franchi. “Living thought and living things: on Roberto Esposito’s Il pensiero vivente“. Res Publica: Revista de filosofia politica, 29 (2013), 19-33.
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.
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.
Gramcsi’s turning away from economic primacy of the Third International meant that he had to endorse a robust principle of “politics” to suture the separation (and there crisis thereof) between theory and praxis, which is also a division of action and thought. In a certain way, going back to Machiavelli’s writings or Croce’s Hegelian Idealism is a way to introduce a total politics suture over philosophy and life. This becomes clear when in Notebook 8, while glossing Croce “Hidden God”, Gramsci asks rhetorically but with force: “In what sense can one speak of the identity of history with politics and say that therefore all life is politics? How could one conceive of the whole system of superstructures as (a system of) political distinctions, thus introducing the nothing of distinction in the philosophy of praxis? Can one even speak of a dialectic of distincts? (271).
It becomes rather obvious that what has passed as the great Gramscian novelty – mainly, the emphasis on “superstructure” as a way to relax the mechanistic economic structure of capitalist development driving the laws of History – in fact, it rests on a metaphysical principle rooted in the total politics over life. In other words, Gramscianism means, if anything, a new totalization of political domination over the texture of life and every singular destiny. This conceptual maneuver is nothing original if placed in the epochal framework of what Alain Badiou called the “ecstatic politics” of the 1930s, in which politics (and later legality) became the instrument to suture philosophy and life.
It is almost as if Gramscian political life becomes the new instrument for the age of total mobilization and the worker insofar as life is nothing but the site of immanence that must be reintegrated, conducted, and translated as co-terminus with full political activity. At the moment where “life” was fleeing from the organic reproduction of capitalist development unto autonomous forms (Camatte), the Gramscian emphasis on “superstructure” became the progressive technology to “contain” its eventual dispersion. Again, in the same section 60 of the eighth notebook this insight is explicit: “One must say that political activity is, precisely, the first moment or first level of the superstructures; it’s the moment in which all the superstructures are still in the unmediated phase of mere affirmation – willful, inchoate, and rudimentary” (271). The question solicited here is where does the “class struggle” fit in this picture, if at all?
If superstructural political life is not the site of the horizon of the working class’ emancipation, this could only entail, as Jacques Camatte understood it very early on, that the conduction of the communist party in politics demanded that militants and the working class had to act as if the communist society was a “living fact”. In turn, this meant that there was a clear “reformist” transmutation, since one could discard (in fact, as later authors of the so-called post-foundational theory of hegemony demanded, it *had to be discarded*) the horizon of revolutionary emancipation. What is surprising is that even today a reformist declination of ecstatic politics is announced and branded as “true radical political thought”, when it is just a mere inversion and reorganization of capitalist value organization. On the contrary, the total politics of the superstructure over life could only mean, as Íñigo Errejón repeated recently, merely a “struggle between opposite values”; in other words, it is no longer a transformation of the world instead of interpreting it, but a mere gaming of values to facilitate the occupation of the state.
This could explain why, many pages later in Notebook 8 Gramsci could define hegemony as the crystallization of morality. He writes univocally: “Hegemony” means a determinate system of moral life [conception of life] and therefore history is “religious” history along the lines of Croce’s “state-church” principle” (373). And of course, history is always “a struggle between two hegemonies”, whose main nexus is the unity of rulers and the ruled (373). Gramsci gives this unification without separation the label of “patriotism”, which amounts to a direct secularized form of the medieval pro patria mori. This is the vortex that organizes the ecstatic political dominium over life in every hegemonic order.
[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 constitutionof 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.
Jason Smith’s Smart Machines and Service Work (Reaktion Books, 2020) provides us with a renewed cartography of the labor transformations in the wake of automation and the cybernetic revolution, which has ultimately created a “vast service sector” (9). Although at first sight Smith’s book seems to be preoccupied with questions of technology innovation in the post-fordist epoch, the central vortex of the book sheds light on the notion of “servant economy” that has become the fast-evolving segment of today’s job-market. Smith notes that the expansion of the servant economy propelled by automation “poses special obstacles to organization and action in a fragmented workforce. The rise of the “servant economy”, increasingly forces workers into smaller, spatially dispersed workplaces, where they carry out labor-intensified production processes…. deemed low-skill occupations and therefore poorly paid” (14). The new region of the service economy is an effect of the exceptionality of capital form self-abdication where unemployment becomes an existential problem for the social fabric.
The nuanced analysis undertaken by Smith shows how the fragmented spatialization of labor has become the byproduct of the automation in which control, optimization, and feedback ensemble a new regime of total calculation. Already in 1956, Friedrich Pollock warned of a potential “totalitarian government” that could lead to mass unemployment. Pollock’s Cold War predicament was not off target: the fear of totalitarian unemployment (Habermas would call it crisis of legitimation) was answered with a total (service) economy that compensated for the paradox of stagnation of profit growth. The encompassing force of real subsumption through compartmentalization of services rendered effective James Boggs’ “nowhere to go” in the final dispensation of historical capitalism.
The phase of stagnation announces the “productivity paradox”. Smith writes glossing Mason: “If ours is an age defined by monopolies, cheap credit, rent-seeking and asset bubbles, it is not due to the concerted efforts of elites keen to forestall or smother in the cradle a new, sustained period of productivity gains….despite claims to the contrary, the weather of stagnation and drift that has settle over the advanced capitalist economies since the 1970s, and special since the turn of the century is attributable in no small part technological inertia” (41). The boom of “diversionary gadgets” are on the side of unproductiveness; and, as Ure argues, “do nothing towards the supply of the physical necessities of society” (43). But perhaps diversion usage accounts for the mobilization of the medium of the new phase of automated capitalism. In other words, precisely because traditional form of political legitimacy has crumbled, zero value technology becomes the compensatory psychic equilibrium within the process of abstraction of profit. The subjective dimension of the “medium” in the new phase of automation operates to drive dynamism in the “historic low” of labor productivity growth and the disjointed structural relation between economic growth and rise in wages (64, 69).
One of the conclusions that one can derive from Smith’s rich political economy empirical analysis is that the expansion of the service economy is fundamentally an anti-institutional phenomenon, both at the level of social forms (unions, movements, legal grounds for disputes) as well as in terms of mediations of exchange (intellectual labor, shadow-work, spatial relations to urban centers, etc.). In this sense, the absolutization of the regional “service economy” is the reallocation of reduced labor. In the same way that all ‘originary accumulation’ is an ‘onging accumulation’; the “crisis” of the economy is always already the recurrent stagnation of growth. But Smith notes with precision: “services therefore appear to obscure more than it clarifies” (80). This new process of rationalization mobilizes the valorization of the outside, that is, of every non-market sphere. This process draws a specific ordo rationality: “The true “advances” such as they are, have been in the domination of the labor process by employers: their ability to coerce more labor out of a given hour by means of refinement in supervision, oversight, and workplace discipline” (112).
Mirroring the optimal logistics of cybernetic and automation processes, one could claim that the expansion of the service economy initiates a regime of governmentality that allows for the attenuation and cost-benefit management of flows. Now I think one can clearly see that “service” is not just an avatar to formal processes of value, but also, as Ivan Illich showed, a secularized theological concept of the Christian notion of hospitality. According to Illich, hospitality was transformed into a use of power and money to provide services and needs [1]. For the ex-Catholic priest, this meant nothing less than the corruption of human freedom, which became tied to the logistics of equivalence. This is why, more than an economic theory, neoliberalism needs to defend an ever-expanding freedom of the subject. In the context of deep social atomization, the service economy self-legitimizes itself as absolute freedom in the social (141).
At the end of the book, Smith notes that in the wake of automation the relation between political struggles and the new economic composition begin to diverge. There is on one side the model of the teachers and that of the expendables (146-147). In a sense, the “nowhere land” registered by Boggs in the 60s has only intensified, as modern politics forms no longer seem up to the task in the face of total extraction and exclusion. If we think of arguably the most successful leftist political strategy in the last decade or so (the strongest cases have been in Latin America and Spain), the left populism rooted in the theory of hegemony; it becomes clear that after the empirical analysis of Smart Machines, any set of ‘equivalential demands’ is already a demand for exploitation within the regime of the service economy. During this months of pandemic the right has been calling for the immediate reintegration into the economy, bring to bear the internal production at the heart of the project of hegemony. Rather than thinking about a new multitude or unified subject of class, the expendables that Smith situates at the outskirts of the metropolis (the ‘hinterland’), constitute perhaps a new experiential texture of life that is no longer moved by representation but rather expression; it is no longer defined by class, but consumption; it is not interested in negation, but rather in “discovery” (148). Indeed, the new marginalized surplus population does not constitute a new “subject”, but an energy that seeks an exodus from the ruins of the political given the collapse of the whole framework of leftist hegemony [2]. It seem reasonable to think that it is precisely in the threshold of Boggs’ call for a “discovery” (a movement of anabasis), devoid of place and time, where the unfathomable stagnation of our epoch is defied.
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Notes
1. Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future (Anansis, 2005).
In section 79 of Gramsci’s Notebook 6 we are offered a strong definition of “politics” that I think illuminates the core of the Gramscian program fundamentally as a substantive morality. Gramsci writes the following against the “particularism” of normal associations (say the aristocracy, the elite, or the vanguard): “[an universal] association does not set itself up as a definite and rigid entity but as a something that aims to extend itself to a whole social grouping that is itself conceived as aiming to unify all humanity. All these relationships give a universal character to the group ethic that must be considered capable of becoming a norm of conduct for humanity as a whole. Politics is conceived a process that will culminate in a morality; in other words, politics is seen as leading towards a form of sociality in which politics and hence morality as well are both superseded.” (30). It is an astonishing definition, given the precise way it mobilizes the content of this new politics. Of course, there is the explicit the Hegelianism of the ‘universalist’ translation through the dialectical conflation between state and civil society, which just a few sections prior to 79, Gramsci deploys in order to posit the ultimate goal of communist society.
But in this section he goes further, since it becomes clear that the state and civil society, as they march towards an ‘integral state’, dissolves politics into pure morality. But Gramsci immediately clarifies that it is not just a “morality” of a new dominant class (which could still be contested vis-a-vis other values), but rather a “morality that is superseded”. This is an absolute morality beyond value disputes. In other words, it is an absolute morality that needs to be so because state and civil society have become a unified whole. Concretely, this means the dissolution of politics and of any concrete order of the republican tradition, which recognizes that, precisely because civil war is the latent in the social, no morality can be granted hegemonic status. At bottom, this is the reason why we need politics and institutions to mitigate conflict. The Gramscian moral universe frames a world in which the conflict not only disappears, but rather it becomes pure morality towards a “substantive common good” in which every person is obliged to participate. Indeed, one could claim that the theory of hegemony as morality has never appeared as strongly as in this fragment. I think it is fair to say that the telos of hegemony is, in every case, a drive towards the consolidation of this uncontested morality.
Needless to say, this is a frontal assault on positive law, which aimed, from Hobbes to H. L. Hart, to clearly differentiate between politics, institutions, and morals. In a surprising but direct way, Gramsci’s definition of politics as substantive morality is closer to the tradition of “Thomism” in at least three compartments of Aquinas’ thinking. First, because it posits a substantive morality as a unified conception of aims, which negates any competing positions between values. Secondly, the substantive morality of politics informs the Gramscian theory of the state, which, very much like the Thomist subsidiary structure, understands institutions not as a concrete order of conflict (stasis), but rather as a depository for the reproduction of civil society (that is why Gramsci also in notebook 6 will speak about the “state without a state”) in the image of the state. However, if we are to be fair to the natural law tradition, I think we can claim that Gramsci is really an archaic and not a “modern” (or revolutionary) Thomist, since even John Finnis in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980), in an attempt to square natural law with modern liberalism, countered Hart’s objection of unified moral aims in this way: “…there are basic aspects of human existence that are good leaving aside all the predicaments and implications…all questions of whether and how one is to devote oneself to these goods” (30). Finnis distinguishes between general principles and personal elaborations of aims. However, Gramsci is not interested in establishing generic “principles” for plural aims, but rather he seeks the actualization of a morality that is substantive because it is understood as “superseded as morality” as such. The kingdom of the Gramscian integral state is only realized if the heterogeneity of the social is captured by the hegemony of a supreme morality of Humanity.
The distance between Gramscian moral politics and the modern natural law foundation (Fuller, Finnis) is driven home when later in section 88 of notebook 6 he claims that: “…one should not think of a “new liberalism” even if the beginning of an era of organic freedom were at hand” (76). This confirms that Gramsci is interested in crafting a morality tied to the efficacy of immanent individual ends and desires, and not at the level of generic principles of a common order. If one takes this moral politics seriously, then it becomes difficult (impossible, in my opinion), to square the primacy of this morality with positive law and the republican tradition at large. At its “best light”, the Gramscian absolute morality can only yield a faith in “Humanity”, which feeds from the production of enmity (turning dissent into ‘inhumanity’) in a civil war, as it cannot be otherwise.
In the “Fourth Prison Notebook”, Gramsci offers a treatment of the science of “historical materialism”. A science that is not to be understood as a region of thought, but rather as a totalization and condition of possibility of the very opening of a new epoch. At some point in the notebook, Gramsci writes the following (which is also exemplary exposition of the reduction of his program): “As a matter of fact, historical materialism has no need for extraneous support: it is itself so robust that the old world turns to it to supply its own arsenal with some more effective weapons. This means that while historical materialism is not subjected to hegemonies, it has itself stared to exercise a hegemony over the old intellectual world. (156). We do not want to put too much pressure on the term “intellectual” here, but it is a notable expression. There is a dual logic of “hegemony” at play: hegemony is both the archê that can sustain an epoch phantasmatically never fully closing it; while, at the same time, it is also the opening of the epoch of the “reign of freedom”, which is the discovery of historical materialism as a science of totality. When Gramsci writes that historical materialism has potential hegemony over the totality of the intellectual world, he is strongly positing a civilizational principle as a new conception of the spiritualization of the world. From this basic condition of transitional political thinking, it is difficult to see how Gramscianism can ever be freed from Hegelianism, given that Hegelianism is what informs substantially the theory of hegemonic reduction. Hegemony: what reduces the world.
At the same time, and in order to secure this transition to this new epochal principle, another operation comes to the forefront: to obtain hegemony over the totality of the old intellectual world requires a technified form of thinking as such vis-à-vis its intellectual class as an active player in the process. A few pages later after he treats the exception to epochal hegemonies, Gramsci writes that: “…the importance of the technique of thinking in the construction a pedagogical program; here, again, one cannot make the comparison between the technique of thinking and the old rhetorics…the technique of thinking cannot be compared to these things, which is why one can say that it is as important to teach this technique as it is to reading and writing.” (160). This thematizes the political hegemony that harbors above the alleged organic development of the new epoch; as if, the menace of the deviation from hegemony is a “bad adventure” in thought, a derailing of intensity that needs to be straighten out by the force of pedagogic reinforcement. Gramsci recognizes that thought does not have a technique, but it is in virtue of said absence that its instrumentalization must be set tightly. There is no doubt that this is catastrophic. This is the internal catastrophe of any thought when reduced to hegemony. By positing thought as pedagogical techne, Gramsci cancels any possible relation to the world. The world has already been annihilated, since it has been taken to the limit of its realization, making it only accessible from the condition of the specie’s alienation with reality. To a certain extent, pedagogy and the “common school” program stands for the performance of the laws that make up the new science of history. Hegemony becomes the accessory that guarantees the entry into a theoretical totality that pushes out any relation with the world.
There is a “genetic problem” that can be contested even at the level of its own “scientific” assumptions. Already Hans Blumenberg in The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975) argued that the configuration of a totality of knowledge is impossible given its heterogenous conditions and “inherent pressures of its workings”. There problem of epochal hegemony, then, it is not that it elevates a supreme and all-inclusive principle; but rather that, as a concept, it cannot name a process of rationalization required to advance a civilizatory principle. Indeed, Gramsci calls “the conquest of the historical world, a new civilization” (164). This is why Gramscian appeals again and again to Catholic ecclesiastical administrative capacities for the formation of the new communist integral state. However, whereas for Weber “bureaucratic rationalization” was an organic process within history; for Gramsci, on the contrary, it is conceptual and pedagogical. In other words, it is a mimesis that transforms itself as a command of the Party, the militant, and disciplinary orientation. The Gramscian cosmos of production is a secular form of angeology for the intellectual class that must guide the working class (203). Of course, as we know, angels are not mere mediators between God and the sublunar world, they are also the keepers that glorify the dogma. And dogma here is the secular science of historical materialism.
One last point about the date of this notebook (1932). This is most certainly a Gramsci that is no longer the one writing in the 1910s full of enthusiasm and good convictions; a Gramsci that could sense the trembling of gates of the revolution conquering the world. On the contrary, the Gramsci writing in the wake of the 1930s is one that is already noticing that “workerism” is dominion and form, or form that is already the byproduct of total mobilization. It is no coincidence that Ernst Jünger’s The Worker is published this year. At this point the worker is no longer a fixed transcendental category of the philosophy of history, but rather an energetic gestalt driven by mobilization and will to power. This means that formation – giving form – is always infinite, while the world remains objectivized into this total encompassing movement. Gramsci would mobilize intellectuals – but also thinking and imagination – to accomplish the labors of hegemonic politics.
The problem, already in 1932, should have been contested at the level of the form of life and distance between domination and world that I call post-hegemony. The false exit was taken: the multiplication of the modes of production, including the production of an “intellectual class” in an attempt to tilt the bourgeois order towards true hegemony. By 1930s it becomes clear that Gramsci cannot stand up to a problem oriented at the level of the critique of metaphysics. By adopting the science of historical materialism, Gramsci seems only capable of giving us a regional political practice masked by the metaphyisical pretensions of universality and totality. It wasn’t enough then, and it is most definitely not enough today.
As I continue the systematic reading of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, one can finally provide substance to the thesis that gramscianism amounts to a sort of new priesthood of the political. The question here is about the specific substance and form of the theological. Most definitely, Gramsci is pursuing a strong theological position that is not reducible to monasticism, nor his he interested in subscribing a counter-modern Christian ethos against the modern “gentleman”. In this sense, Gramsci is a modernist tout court. Now, it seems to me that underneath the secularization of his political subjectivation is Jesuitism. This makes sense for at least two reasons. First, Jesuitism is a modern attempt of deification in this world through discipline. But, secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Jesuitism is a practice that serves to expand the energy of political militancy. As Alberto Moreiras suggested a while ago in an essay on the onto-theology of militancy, the reduction of the subjection into action has an important point of inflection in the Jesuitical practice.
So, what would happen if we read Gramsci when he claims that he prefers a politician that “knows everything” and that is the most “knowledgeable” not as a Machiavellian strategy, but rather as a Jesuitical exercise? Leaving aside the paradoxical instrumentalization of Machiavelli’s political lesson (paradoxical because if political virtue is about keeping the arcana of power at a distance, then why reveal it?), one could very well say that Jesuitism is not just about the management of contingent events, but rather about the administration of habits and practices of the subject in order to reduce any interference of the event. Jesuitism, then, is an instrument to block and reduce all exterior turbulence vis-à-vis the very capture of the heteronomic intrusion. This capture accomplishes two things at once: from the outside it initiates a process of controlling the irruption of heterogeneity; from the inside, it is a technique of subjective militant discipline. It seems to me that Gramsci was not unaware of this theological apparatus when, in the third notebook, he writes the following:
“New orders which have grown up since then have very little religious significance but a great “disciplinary” significance for the mass of the faithful. They are, or have become, ramifications and tentacles of the Society of Jesus, instruments of “resistance” to preserve political positions that have been gained, not forces of renovation and development. Catholicism has become “Jesuitism”. Modernism has not created “religious orders”, but a political party – Christian Democracy”. (332)
Now we are in a better position to state that Gramsci’s political theology is compartmentalized in the specificity of Jesuitism. Indeed, he himself reads the transformation of the Church into Jesuitical practice of resistance as parallel to the bourgeois Christian democratic party formation. Does not Gramscianism amount to the same, that is, a combination of party formation and disciplinary militant form? Indeed, Jesuitical practice contains the production of form. Here we see the dimension of Gramsci’s anti-populism, since the main strategy is not to “construct a people”, but rather to build an army of militant community of believers. Any study of Gramscian political theology has to begin by displacing the veneer of political Machiavellism to the concrete practices propelled by theological Jesuitism.
Thus, the gestalt of the “new priest” is profoundly Jesuitical. As Walter Benjamin noted in the fragment “Zu Ignatius von Loyola” (1920), the practice of “consciousness transformation” becomes the way to submit to the spiritual authority. This mechanic domestication of habits becomes the sacrament that regulates the interior life of the militant. A question emerges from all of this: is there a counter-figure to sacramental militancy?
Infrapolitical Reflections 