Infrapolitics

Erich Unger’s The Stateless formation of the Jewish People today. by Gerardo Muñoz

The same year that Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922) appeared in the intellectual scene of the Weimar Republic defending the exceptional of the decision against immanentism, a short opuscule entitled Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (The stateless formation of the Jewish People, 1922) written by Jewish philosopher Erich Unger was published as an untimely response to the question of “Jewish identity” (Judentum) and its fate in the wake of civilizational collapse. The fact that this essay – as well as his 1921 book Politics and Metaphysics, which Walter Benjamin described as the most important political reflection of his time – has remained on the fringe of intellectual history, political theory, and the history of thought is something that anyone must seriously reflect upon. It should not come to a surprise that this text comes back today to attentive readers evidences how every creation, event of speech, or written word does not reside in the preventive invention of a specific audience; but, on the contrary, in the way that its words, images, and thought will generate the evanescence community of extemporal readers. The century that separates us in time from Unger’s essay bears witness to its ultimately proximity and prophetic calling. 

In 1922, for Unger, very much like for us today, thinking about politics meant finding a way out of a catastrophic politics [1]. If Politics and Metaphysics had suggested the necessity of an existential and energetic exodus for breakthrough against civilizational sedentary absorption and domestication, in The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) Unger argues critically against a state Zionist project that artificially, and through the anti-universalism paradigm of force (just as Weil would argue during her war writings about politics in the West) will attempt to “absolute Judaism, and all the manifestation of judaism that remain outside, hostile to the state trend” [2]. For Unger, Zionism as a political ideology and state program fails to come to terms with the concrete “outside the world historical power” that characterizes the universalism of the Hebrews as a theology marked by dispersal in the West; that is, outside the philosophy of history of sacrifice and soteriological incarnation of the Christian eon [3]. Hence, Zionism’s political form of the Jewish people was epochally insufficient – too empirical and thus trapped into the modern logic of racial and biological survival – to express the true conditions to enact as the “a priori” for the question of Judaism as a grounded redemptive universality. And insofar as Zionism presupposes something “outside of itself” (corporeal and spiritual Judaism), for Unger “the demand for an imperial state…must modify its demand, since it should express its underlying basis of the demand differently” [4]. The Hebrew ‘universality’ was metaphysical as much as “concrete”, based on modal ritual and myth, and for this reason at a distance from the discharge of formal logical statements [5].

What did the apriorist consideration of Judaism mean for Unger? The hypothesis in The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) was far from bring esoteric: Judaism is a exclusively a spiritual, immutable soul matter that hoevers the surface of the corporeal; and, more importantly, “it governs itself independently through the insubstantial for of a concrete existence” [6]. In other words, for Unger before the unity of the “People”, the articulation of the “movement”, and the erection of a positivist constitution based on Zionist nationalist principles, one should consider the sensible fabric of a people  – a dispersed, multiple, and metapolitical communities that have endured outside the geopolitical and sacrificial structuration of Christian history – that each and every time have insisted on the separation from the subsumption into a sphere of power and domination, into an ethnic-community validated by recognition and its claims to “consciousness” at the most empirical and material level. But this would amount to an effective liquidation – a surrogate for the acceleration of the dominant religion of historicity – of Judaism into yet another planetary religion, and an expression of power that integrates itself into the struggle for the nomoi of a contained and policed world. For Unger, “empirical Zionism” becomes the attempt to reduce Judaism to a “real self-executiving power” that will diminish the “supreme expression of existence” of Judaic spiritualism as “an inner experience that it is not historically given but that must precede it in order to make Judaism an endless and inevitable precondition of a truly world historical project” [7]. In this mold, Judaism will be dispensed into the theaters of the constitutive war of historical progress. 

As such, Judaism as theologically transcendent is not to be conflated into the corset of a political fictive ethnicity, but rather as an autonomous transmission that allows the communication from soul to soul that descends all the way from its metaphysical beginning. And at this beginning that has exerted itself against the whirlwind of historical fixation (the very structure of civilization after Cain according to his mentor, the Jewish theologian Oskar Goldberg) were metaphysical and errant fragments of encounters and communication, of psychological energy and dispersal of shared spiritual goals. If this is lacking, then no political form [for Judaism] will arise, but only a foolish copy of the already-existing, because the spirit cannot be skipped and left out without the rising danger” [8]. It is telling that for Unger this rising danger can emerge not only from indirect powers that exert pressure against the unity of authority – as Schmitt would have in his framework of his theory of sovereignty in Political Theology (1922) – but also, and more dramatically, from the suppression and alienation of the spiritual interiority by which a “people” never coinciding with itself can arrive at the “crystallization point” (sic) outside of the individual [9]. 

Circling back to the problem of “catastrophic politics” – that Schmitt wants to “contain” through decisionism, and that Unger wants to overbecome through an exodus from political thresholds – at the crux of Unger’s indictment of the arcana of Western politics is the “it has set everything in such a way so that the metaphysical or religious area, the internal direction, stands as a mere private thing”, sidestepping the fact that even reality and the constitution of the principle of reality depends on interiority for the possibility of an outside. And it is this outside what allows the a priori historicity that Oskar Goldberg had defended in his book The Reality of the Hebrews (1925). As the late Bruce Rosenstock lucidly argued, for Goldberg (who stands as the unnamed reference in Unger’s position about an experiential Judaism), the “a priori” takes place in an ur-time in which the physical world was closely connected to the transcendental presence of the gods, in which the people cease to be a cultural, ethnic, or identitarian unit in order to become a humanity capable of “overcoming the catastrophic history of wars sparked by competition over scarce resources” [10]. In endorsing the instrumentalized politico-theological reduction of state Zionism, Unger sees the abdication of the “Jews as the people who have driven the spirit the furthest…to cultivate the spirit deeper, more skillful, more subtle, to be the most deeply suitable through this tension” [11]. A true and vital reality was in the conspiracy between souls, wherever and whenever these meet as the ultimate manifestation of the fidelity to the unspeakable mediation between the true life and the divine. 

At the height of 1922, Unger did not suspend from a certain self-afflecting optimism, and towards the end of The stateless formation of the Jewish People (1922) he writes: “The Jews should not overlook their uniquely favorable situation; mainly, they have been materially unhistorical for two thousand years, and the only one that have not been beaten into a reality and into the shackles of the past or the empirical state that others have had to suffer” [12]. In Unger’s reading, Judaism and its errant communities (the ‘wandering Jew’ that Joseph Roth will narrate in these years, but that one must trace to the mythic texture from expulsion of Cain to the marrano) have shown the density to gather through spirit a resistance to the paradigm of force and the technicians in charge of dominating over materialism. As Unger states unequivocally: “the one who technically masters matter is ultimately defeated” [13].

This was Unger’s anti-promethean wager in 1922 skeptical of all political horizons oriented towards foreseeable catastrophes blinded to the underlying cyclical polarity of barbarism and civilization in the West.  The wayward asymptote of a non-catastrophic politics was not to be found in the abstraction of the political concept or the mechanical construction of a state form through assimilation and usurpation, but in what Unger termed, in the most intense poetic moment of his essay, the Hebrew “ increasing decipherability of its own origin”. And unlike Enlightenment historians such as Edward Gibbon who saw the state as the irreversible revolution in world history that brought the age of the nomads to an end; for Unger the twentieth century meant the fixation of the state degenerating in the worst of barbarisms. It was the existence of the unit that must generate the internal limit to the political, and not the political as the external threshold to what is inherited in the world. And yet, insofar the events of thought, language, and imagination take place, the origin (urgeschichte) will always escape what has been sedimented by rubble and wars that fuel planetary destruction and collapse. 

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Notes 

1. Erich Unger. Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922).

2. Ibid., 6.

3. Ibid., 10.

4. Ibid.,  15.

5. Erich Unger. “Universalism in Hebreism”, trans. Esther J. Ehrman, The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol.4, 1995, 307.

6. Erich Unger. Die staatenlose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (Verlag David, 1922), 8.

7. Ibid., 19.

8. Ibid., 25.

9. Ibid., 24.

10. Ibid., 29.

11. Bruce Rosenstock. Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2017), 172.

12. Ibid., 31.

13. Ibid., 32.

Alberto Moreiras and Italian theory: life and countercommunity. by Gerardo Muñoz

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).

______. “Infrapolitical Action: The Truth of Democracy at the End of General Equivalence”, Política Común, Vol.9, 2016: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0009.004?view=text;rgn=main#N7

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 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.

Revolutionary becoming and infrapolitical distance: on Marcello Tarì’s There is no unhappy revolution: the communism of destitution (2021) by Gerardo Muñoz

Marcello Tarì’s book There is no unhappy revolution: the communism of destitution (Common Notions, 2021), finally translated into English, is an important contribution in the ongoing discussions about politics and existence. It is also an exercise that pushes against the limits of contemporary political thought in the wake of the ruin of the grammars and vocabularies of the modern politics and the rise of the techno-biopolitics of governmentality. More importantly, the operation of Tarì’s book escapes the frame of “critique”, abandoning any false exits to regain the legacy of the Enlightenment and of “judgement” in hopes to reinstate the principles of thought and action in the genesis of the legitimation of the modern social contract. But the radicality of the horizon of destitution – which we have come to understand vis-à-vis the work of Giorgio Agamben, and the Invisible Committee – is first and foremost a thematization of the proximity between thinking and politics against the historical stagnation of a historical subsumed by the total technification of value (the principle of general equivalence). Since Tarì’s book is composed of a series of very heterogenous folds and intersections (literally a toolbox in the best sense of the term), in what follows I would like to sketch out a minor cartography to push the conditions forward that the book so elegantly proposes in three registers: the question of “revolutionary becoming” (the kernel of Tarì’s destituent gesture), the hermeneutics of contemporary domination, and the limits of political militancy.

Revolutionary becoming. Marcello Tarì correctly identifies the problem the epoch as fundamentally being about the problem of revolution. However, the notion of revolution must be understood outside the continuation of the modern horizon of the Leninist technique of the revolutionary vanguard nor party, the “revolution within the revolution”, and any appropriation of the “General Intellectual”. At the end of the day, these were all forms of scaling the desire as cathexis for the matrix of production. On the contrary, the problem of revolution is now understood in the true Copernican sense; mainly, how to inscribe an excentric apositionality within any field of totalization. When this is done, we no longer participate in History, but rather we are “freeing a line that will ultimately go down in History, but never coming from it”. Tarì argues that the field of confrontation today is no longer between different principles of organizing revolutionary strategies and even less about ideological critique; nor is communism an “Idea” (as it was thought just a decade ago in discussion that were philological rather than about thinking communism and life); the new epochal exigency is how to put “an end to the poverty of existence” (3). The potentiality of this transformation at the level of factical life, is what Tarì situates under the invariant of “communism”: “…not as an idea of the world, but the unraveling of a praxis within the world” (35). This communism requires a breakthrough in both temporal and spatial determinations, which prepares a dwelling in absolute relation with the outside (49). This revolutionary tonality is one closer to messianic interruption of historical time capable of destituting “actual state of things” governed the metaphysical apparatus of production and objetivation of the world, which depends on the production of the political subject. In an important moment of the book, Tarì writes: “…. only the revolutionary proletarian dimension can grasp the political as such, the true break from the current state of things. The real alternative to modern politics is thus not to be ground in what we usual can an “anti-politics”, which is merely a variation of the same there, but instead in a revolutionary becoming” (50).

The revolutionary becoming is a transformative intensity of singularization, which ceases to become a subject in virtue of becoming a “non-subject” of the political (67), which about a decade ago Alberto Moreiras announced to escape the dead end of the hegemony-subalternity controversy (one should note here that the fact that the Left today has fully subscribed the horizon of hegemony is something that I think it explains many of the deficits of the different experiments in a realization of a progressive political strategy). And this becoming revolutionary, in virtue of ceasing to be a subject (person, vanguard, multitude, worker) entails a new shift from action to use, and from technico-rationality to an opening of the sensible and singular means (metaxy). Again, Tarì’s continues as follows: “Becoming revolutionary…. means utilizing fantasy, freeing the imagination, and living all of this with the enthusiasm of a child” (75). The notion of “happiness” at stake in the book it is played out against the determination of the subject and the processes of incarnations (Karmy) that have haunted the modern revolutionary paradigm as always-already integrated into the metaphysics of the philosophy of history. 

 Metropolitan domination. Secondly, Tarì’s book locates the metastasis of domination at the level of a new spatial organization of the world in the apparatus of the metropolis. As we know the metropolis is not just an urban transformation of the Western form of the urbs and the polis, but rather the force of appropriation of the world into interconnectivity and surface in order to optimize, administer, and reproduce flows of the total fictionalization of life. The gesture towards the outside that crosses over Tarì’s book entails an exodus from the metropolitan structure that makes uninhabitable experience. This takes place by a process of domesticating its possibilities into the order of sameness (crisis of appearance) and translating our proximity with things into the regime of objects. What is stake in the metropolis – if we think of the most recent revolts in Santiago de Chile, Paris with the to the hinterlands of United States and Italy – if not precisely a response against the metropolitan machination “aiming at the destruction of every possibility of having any experience of the world and existence itself” (84). This why the intensity of any contemporary revolt today is proportional to the experiential texture of its composition and modes of evasion. Of course, Tarì correctly identifies the metropolis as an expanded field of cybernetic inter-connectivity, which, as I would argue is not merely the production of “bad substance” (to use Tiqqun’s Bloomian lexicon), but also a recursive dominion over the medium (metaxy) in which experience and the singular autopoiesis labors for the optimization and hylomorphic regimes that administer civil war. In this sense, destitution names an exodus from the metropolitan technical order and the sensible reproduction of the medium. It is in the outside the metropolis that the ongoing process of communization can free an infinite process of communization and forms of life.

Residual militancy and infrapolitics. But does not the exodus or the destitution of the metropolis – opening to singular experience, love, friendship, and the use of one’s disposable means and inclination – presuppose also a step back from a political determination, in other words, a fundamental separation from coterminous between existence and politics? At the end of the book, Tarì claims that “whenever anything reaches a certain level of intensity it becomes political” (117). But is the intensification of thinking or love or friendship always necessarily political? Tarì writes a few pages later that: “love is continually traversed by a line of extreme intensify, which makes it an exquisitely political affect” (126). But does not the politization of love depends on a certain commitment (a “faith”) to a residual militancy, even if it is a militancy posited as the principle of anarchy? But perhaps this is the difficulty at stake: since anarchy is only entails the “anarchy of phenomena” in reality, postulating a political principle as counter-exposition, however tenuous, might not be enough. For this reason, the crisis of appearance today needs a step back from the heliopoliticity of exposition. In an essay written a couple of years ago, Alberto Moreiras thematized this difficulty vis-à-vis Scürmann’s principle of anarchy, which I think is worth quoting: “The Schürmannian principle of anarchy could then be thought to be still the subjective reaction to the epochal dismantling of ontology (as metaphysics). But, if so, the principle of anarchy emerges, plainly, as principle, and principle of consciousness. Anarchy runs the risk of becoming yet another form of mastery, or rather: anarchy, as principle, is the last form of mastery.  At the transitional time, posited as such by the hypothesis of metaphysical closure, metaphysics still runs the show as consolation and consolidation” [1]. 

If politics remains the central condition of existence, then it follows that it depends on a second-degree militancy that can govern over the dispersion of the events and this ultimately transfers the force of steering (kubernates) to mitigate the crisis of thought and action in the sea of “absolute immanence”. But immense is also a contemporary fundamental fantasy [2]. Against all “faith” in absolute immanence we need to cut through in its letting be (poein kata phusin) of the abyssal relation between existence and politics. This originary separation is an infrapolitical step back that solicits a distance an irreducible distance between life, events, and community form. The commune would be a secondary condition of political organization, but the existential breakthrough never coincides with community, except as a “common solitude”. Secondly, the infrapolitical irreducibility between politics and existence wants to reject any compensatory temporal politico-theological substitution, which also includes the messianic as a paradigm still constitutive of the age of Christian community of salvation and the efficacy of deificatio. The existential time of attunement of appropriation with the improper escapes the doble-pole paradigm of political theology, which has been at the arcana of both philosophy of history as well as the messianic inversion. A communism of thought needs to produce a leap outside the politico-theological machine which has fueled History as narrativization and waged against happiness [3]. Attuning oneself to the encounter or the event against the closure of the principle of reality might be a way out from the “hegemonic phantasm” of the political, which sacrifices our infinite possibilities to the logistics of a central conflict. If civil war is the side of the repressed in Western politics, then in the epoch of the ruin of authority it opens an opportunity to undue the measurement (meson) proper to the “Social”, which is now broken at the fault lines as Idris Robinson has put it [4]. It is only in this way that we can move outside and beyond the originary positionality of the polis whose “essence never coincides with politics” [5]. The saving of this irreducible and invisible distance prepares a new absolute proximity between use and the world. 

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Notes 

1. Alberto Moreiras. “A Negation of the Anarchy Principle, Política Comun, Vol. 2017: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/pc/12322227.0011.003?view=text;rgn=main

2. Lundi Matin. “Éléments de decivilisation” (3): “It is also about the creed of the dominant religion: absolute immanence. Doing itself, designed to obey the modes of proceeding from production, is in advance conforming and consecrated. On this sense, no matter what you do, you bend the spine in front of the cult dominant. If all things count, none has a price, and everything is sacrificeable.”. https://lundi.am/Elements-de-decivilisation-Partie-3

3. This is why Hegel claims in his lectures on the Philosophy of History that: “History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history”. The revolutionary overflow of happiness is only possible as an exodus from the theological political structure of historical production. Here the question of style is emerges as our defining element. 

4. Gerardo Muñoz. “The revolt eclipses whatever the world has to offer”: a conversation with Idris Robinson”, Tillfällighetsskrivande, May 2021: https://www.tillfallighet.org/tillfallighetsskrivande/the-revolt-eclipses-whatever-the-world-has-to-offernbsp-idris-robinson

5. Gerardo Muñoz. “Some Notes Regarding Hölderlin’s “Search for the Free Use of One’s Own”, January 2019: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2019/01/14/some-notes-regarding-holderlins-search-for-the-free-use-of-ones-own-by-gerardo-munoz/

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. 

Afropessimism and infrapolitical friendship. by Gerardo Muñoz

Ángel Octavio Álvarez and I had the wonderful opportunity to have a brief exchange with Frank Wilderson III on Afropessimism (2020) for the weekly radial program Dublineses in Mexico. I am grateful to Wilderson for his time and generosity, since I am aware of his many speaking obligations around the book these past months. Because of time restrictions, both Angel and I did not get to ask Wilderson many questions. In my case, I felt that my last question did not come through in a clear away. In this note, I want to make an attempt to better articulate it here, not just for the sake clarification, but because I think it pushes the discussion forward; at least one of the possible paths of the discussion that Afropessimism elicits. At the end of my review, I asked whether it was possible for Black existence to imagine itself as a figure of friendship with the inhuman. I want to think of friendship as a “positive outside” of solidarity, which is a target in the book, in particular as it emerges in very concrete institutional contexts, such as the university and communitarian self-examination.

I agree with Wilderson that solidarity is always tendentially an apparatus that regulates “intra-communal narrative acts of transformation” (102). But to be committed to the narrative acts means that one is already subjected to its force, which essentially feeds off social death of black existence. In other words, solidary is the apparatus through which certain hylomorphic cohesion of the “Human” is organized and rendered legible. Essentially, this means that the transformative change always takes place at the level of the human (“a new man”, the ideal of Guevarism in the revolutionary imagination of the New Left) in virtue of disposing the inhuman. Humanity is essentially the somnambulism of the inhuman, as it cannot be otherwise. 

         There is production of Humanity through the different exercises of identification and demand – which ultimately entails the equivalence of singular sufferings – but there is also the side of the inhuman and social death in the world. Of course, the ultrapolitical question has been dominated by the metaphysical niceties of leninist reason: ‘what is to be done?’. But as Wilderson himself admits in the chapter on Stella (55-147), the ‘destructive act’ against the world that sustains social death is psychically unenabling and impossible (103). I take it that one of the things that Wilderson is pointing out here is that there is no “exodus” from the constraints of nihilism through sacrificial investment, nor by simple inversion of violence for the ends of liberation. There is also no exit through a narrative of redemption, or for that matter, any practice of narrativization of social death, which already amounts to the domestication in the other’s phantasmatic economy. 

But it is precisely here where the question of friendship emerges; since friendship is irreducible to alliance or subjective solidarity. Friendship is the sharing in thought that is always constitutive of the outside of the sayable. This is how Mascolo defines friendship: a sharing of thought that is suspicious of thinking as a mere “foam of things” [1]. Thought is the event of this encounter for which we are never prepared for. Assuming the unconditional function of thought frees a tonality of innocence that emerges without the compensatory excesses of original sin and guilt. Assuming one can traverse the theological apparatuses of the Christian tradition in his way – for which there is much archeological work to be done – could not one say that friendship is, in every case, the errancy of the afropessimist tonality? In other words, friendship is committed to the sacredness of the inhuman that in its proximity, it delimits an experience that is irreducible to normative ethics or political causes. 

Infrapolitical friendship has no demands and retracts from a “politics of care” (the intramural pole of global solidarity); rather, its inclination is contingent upon the unscripted cartography that provides life with a sense of destiny. This a joy in an inhospitable world. What friendship (philos) finds is also alien to the genus of the Human. Every friendship dwell in the unnarratable fabric of experience. It seems to me that this is one of the gestures of Afropessimism, which resists narrative from experience without exemplum. It is most definitely what emerges in the story about Stella.

Unlike love that demands amalgamating and redemptive competences, friendship is the hard look unto a broken world in which the existence of paradise (outside the apparatus of Human nature) is its aftertaste. This is not merely remembrance, but the passage from metatheory to the event of thought. But this is, after all, only a mere question for Wilderson.

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Notes 

1. Dionys Mascolo. “L’amitié du non”, Lignes, 1990.

Revuelta experiencial contra movilización: un apunte. por Gerardo Muñoz

La excelente conferencia magistral “Virus, revueltas, capital” de Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott en el marco del Coloquio Umbrales en el 17/instituto de estudios críticos instaló un complejo mapa sobre las mutaciones que atraviesan nuestro presente, donde la impronta de un acontecimiento como el Covid19 depone todas las garantías conceptuales y filosóficas del saber ilustrado. En realidad, pocos están capacitados como Villalobos-Ruminott parar cartografiar el despliegue contemporáneo, puesto que su propio pensamiento (en libros que van de Soberanía en suspenso a La desarticulación) ha puesto en relieve la irreductibilidad de un agotamiento epocal que mora en la desvinculación propia de lo insondable. Creo que es innecesario hacer un resumen de todos los vectores de su charla, y próximamente tendremos la oportunidad de seguir discutiendo a la luz de su nuevo libro Asedios al fascismo (Doblea editores, 2020) que vuelve sobre el octubre chileno al interior del interregno planetario. Lo que tan solo quisiera anotar aquí – a modo de continuación del intercambio e invitación al mismo – es un aspecto en torno a lo que pudiéramos llamar un nuevo tipo de revuelta en el presente.

Tengo para mi que uno de los aspectos más decisivos de la colocación del pensamiento de Villalobos radica en avanzar en otro tipo de comprensión de la revuelta; un tipo de revuelta que, como él mismo sugirió, ya no sería heredera de la tecnificación leninista de la acción revolucionaria, sino que más bien, estaría dada por un nuevo tipo de experiencia que irrumpe en el estado presente de las cosas. De ahí que estoy de acuerdo con Villalobos de que no hay ni puede haber una “teoría general” de la revuelta, de la manera en que hubo una “técnica leninista”, una “teoría foquista”, un proyecto insurreccional estratégico (toda las teorías autonomistas durante los 70s en Italia), u hoy, una “teoría de la hegemonía”. Incluso, me atrevería a apuntar (sin lugar a duda es algo que tendríamos que desarrollar en otro lugar y en otro momento) que una contra-mitología de la revuelta queda subordinada al régimen de la existencia y sus fugas experienciales. De ahí que tal vez la revuelta hoy ya no esté posicionada contra la máquina mitológica per se, sino contra la metrópoli que es el topoi del armazón cibernético. No deja de ser curioso que este nuevo tipo de “revuelta experiencial” (por decirlo con la terminología del sociólogo Michalis Lianos) haya sido antes que todo una revuelta anti-metropolitana. Y cuando las revueltas experienciales han sido ejecutadas por fuera del leninismo de la proyección y la intencionalidad, la desesperación de la izquierda ha sido enorme.

Esta postura de desesperación, en realidad pone sobre la mesa dos posturas irreconciliables. Por un lado, una política de las demandas, lo que supone la unificación y la síntesis con el polo del Pueblo. Por otro lado, estaría lo que llamamos una revuelta experiencial que rompe contra la dimensión archi-télica de la “ocupación del poder”, y que afirma la fragmentación del mundo o lo que Villalobos sugirió como un tiempo de existencia que despeja la infrapolítica. Para mi esto significa también algo más: necesariamente dejar atrás el paradigma de la movilización como dispositivo de una política de masas. Derivo esto de la presentación de Villalobos, puesto que no fue tematizado directamente.

Esto no es menor puesto que vuelve a instalar la discusión sobre el estatuto de la democracia. Esta es la cuestión: ¿podemos pensar la democracia más allá del dispositivo de la movilización?  Creo que abandonar la movilización supondría dejar de lado uno de los elementos medulares de la ius reformandi de toda democracia. No puede haber una democracia sin movilización, como bien lo enseña Bruce Ackerman estudiando nada más y nada menos que dos cientos años de historia del We The People. Y, sin embargo, pensamos que pueda haber otro tipo de actuar en la revuelta que no sea volver a repetir el mismo modelo de movilización instituyente, unitaria, traducible, y subjetiva. En efecto, si queremos hablar en el umbral del agotamiento de la política moderna, entonces tenemos que abandonar la movilización. O desplazarla, ponerla en otro plano. La pregunta es si hay otra cosa fuera de la estructura de movilización. Ya hacia el 2001, en La hipótesis cibernética, Tiqqun tenía alguna intuición al respecto:

¿Cómo puede lo que escapa al capitalismo y a la valorización ganar fuerza y girar contra el capitalismo? La política clásica revolvió este problema con la movilización. La movilización significa sumar, agregar, ensamblar, sintetizar. La movilización significa unificar las diferencias pequeñas de cada fluctuación; mostrar que cada desvío es una curva a la que debemos enderezar” (130).

No hace falta recordar la alegoría del bastón de Lenin. No cabe duda de que la movilización es un dispositivo de la técnica moderna de agregación de voluntades, y de lo que en otra parte hemos llamado el polo del “fantasma hegemónico”. Por eso el propio Carl Schmitt fue el gran teórico de la movilización para la composición de una “política nacional-popular” en compenetración con la forma estado. En una época de desintegración de la soberanía, no tiene ningún sentido seguir intentando enmendar la movilización popular como fuerza “desde abajo”. Al contrario, pudiéramos decir que la revuelta experiencial destituyente continuamente desliga fuerza de movilización a partir de lo que Rodrigo Karmy ha llamado “marcadores rítmicos” que, efectivamente, ya no son índices de agregación de voluntades ni mucho menos canje de sujetos en alianza (como hace unos años pedían Hardt & Negri contrahegemónicamente para una subjetividad domesticada), sino desistencias temporales que se abren un tiempo existencia irreductible al movimiento del capital y su negación compensatoria como “lucha de clase”. Justamente porque hay experiencia irreductible o en separación al dominio de la metrópoli, es que la movilización se desvanece siempre y cuando hay un escape, un camino de la deserción, lo que en Chile apareció bajo el signo de “evasión”. El debate abierto de momento es si una evasión de la movilización tiene en su horizonte a la democracia o simplemente otra cosa. ¿No es el espíritu de la movilización parasitario de la forma democrática en cada caso?

Durante la discusión, Villalobos remitió a la importante tesis de la “antropomorfización del capital”, compartida por P. Pasolini, pero también por Jacques Camatte, o Giorgio Cesarano. Si asumimos esta tesis como punto de partida, la revuelta ya no es voluntad agregada de poder, sino justamente lo que yo llamaría un corte contra lo real desde una dimensión corpórea y sensorial que resiste a quedar presa en la biopolítica como último dominio de la vida. Es cierto que nadie puede decirle a nadie cómo ser provocador o cómo responder a la devastación en curso. La destrucción carece de hegemones. Sin embargo, y dicho esto, me gustaría instalar un límite discriminatorio diciendo que la destitución del dispositivo de la movilización es la verdadera apertura a la revuelta experiencial. Y ese ser ahí es la existencia como posibilidad de afuera.