negation

Why is Nelly Richard afraid of infrapolitics? by Gerardo Muñoz

The dismissal of ‘infrapolitics’ as a notion to think the distance with respect to political subsumption and civil administration was there from its emergence. I remember that around 2015, Alberto Moreiras suggested that perhaps in ten years or so, given the total collapse of actual existing political frameworks in the West, there might emerge a sound moment for real and honest conversation. The wager was on the “might” at that moment. But it has already been a little more than a decade, and the apathy in many ways has only aggravated, almost in line with the increasing liquidation of politics everywhere and the undisputed swing to predatory nationalism that has made it impossible to say the big word from the previous political cycle: “populism”. In this scenario of paralysis we are a bit surprised by Nelly Richard’s strong words against ‘infrapolitics’ in her recent book Tiempos y modos (2014), in which she appears as a reasonable, at times enlightened intellectual mediator, against what she sees as the rampant philosophical “excesses” projected their categories to an otherwise expected horizon of social transformation announced by the Chilean revolt of October 2019. 

Against “infrapolitics” as a distance of thinking against political totalization, Richard claims that she wants to hold on politics and continues to call the futility of the notion: “me parece que no hay que regalarle esa palabra tan preciada a la política resevándose el prefijo infra. Me parece que es mejor preservar la política un tono que es en sí mismo el tono de una población que, eventualmente, como en el caso de lo que estamos tratando tiene, también sus continuados por otros medios, como la Convención Constitucional. En este aspecto no creo mucho en la infrapolítica. Veo en esas terminologías la paradoja de una grandilocuencia minotitaira, una especie de resta un poco suicida que complica el acceso y lacera los caminos dejando a los pobres afuera, por que no entiende bien de qué tratan esas palabras. Y entre restarse de una suma y sumarse a una resta, yo prefiero lo segundo” [1]. The overt populist intellectualism emanating from this assertion inadvertently results in the restitution of the Vanguard intellectual in full capacity to elucidate, transmit, and “accompany” the forward march of the People as a comprehensive moral totality. What today passes – and speaks in the name of – as “political realism” is short of twentieth century political pieties and belated fusionism (the Intellectual and the People), which is all too sad. 

Leaving aside for a moment the violence against the texture of language (its non-coincidence with communication), there is a deeper problem here, which is that that the contemporary affirmation of realist “politics” today is delivered with a side blackmail: the fear of remaining an outsider, of becoming an intruder, and thus, positing an “exteriority” is always inconvenient and necessarily despicable. It is antipolitical, and thus a mere abstraction of language. This is the gnostic position that must be suppressed in order for the mandarins of social articulation to stand another chance of reformulating the forms of the social contract as the telos of political reflection. In another moment of the text Richard is quite explicit of the necessity to reject ‘infrapolitics’ as merely parasitical to the “sophisticated and bibliophilic universitarian categories of contemporary theory” (she stopped short of saying of the “global north”): “Resulta más o menos obvio que no se puede abordar del mismo modo un registro de búsqueda intellectual (lo infrapolítico como ejercicio deconstructivo que puede darse el lujo de girar incesantemente sobre sí mismo en el régimen de la escritura y del pensamiento) que la formulación constitucional de un acuerdo de la comunidad sobre las formas políticas del contrato social” [2]. 

Is that all that contemporary thought can aspire, then? Another frozen and humorless, most definitely predictable instance of the social contract, the old faith in constitutionalism and normativity, inclusion and distributed abundance with its necessary communitarian anthropology and convinced that, alas, “this time” we will surely get it right? The noble ideal of Rousseauianism in Wallmapu for the twenty first century. In the declaration of updated political promises there always lurks an informant policeman that secures the any path of exit from the human park. And so we are obliged to play within the political vectors or be prepared to suffer in the isolation of the steppe. Across the aisle of the philosophers of the Social the blackmail is more or less the same. Politics or apocalypse, which remains completely oblivious to the deeply instrumentalized apocalyptic political ratio in the epoch of stagnation and polycrisis; always making demands on “lesser evils”, whether it is Mandamni in the metropolis, or the ecological transition in the EU. But we know that “politics is action, but action always invites the invention – the renewal – of a language…otherwise, it is the near-death of the left as voice, voice, provocation, unwelcome presence that remains the reality”, as a lucid art historian of our times has observed [3]. Infrapolitics is a modest step in that direction in an epoch in which the true illusion of a hegemonic politics suffices to submit and resist within social containment. 

The claims on behalf of absolute politicity explain the hatred against thought today, which is predicated on the introspective dogma that politics colors absolutely all aspects of life, and that life’s ultimate end is the stabilization of political community. Increasingly so, it is evident that the suppression of thought, in the strong sense of the word (thinking as noncalculation and poetizing), is rendered hostage to anthropological survival that does not see beyond domination and struggle, hostility and originary compensated violence, outsourcing social pressures to rhetorical inflation. In other words, on realist grounds, the assumption is that there is only politics because ultimately there has always been violence in the human experience. A hypothesis that fails to account for the interdependence of anthropological mutation for the abstract needs of social reproduction. 

This is why for the defenders of the closure of social mediations, there is no outside from it; indeed, there is literam no possibility of exodus at all, as Roberto Esposito claims in a recent book that resonates with Richard’s position: “From this point of view, human beings have no way out. Not because they run up against difficulties they cannot master but because any mastery is a subaltern expression of that which as always predominates. Thus. every avenue they take is barred by the very intention that moves them: ‘their not having a way out consists, instead, in the fact that they continually turn back on the path that they themselves have laid out; they get bogged down in their routes, get stuck in ruts, and by getting stuck they draw in the circle of their world’. Humanity cannot break the rifle of violence and find a way out – not due to the lack of strength because an outside, properly speaking, does not exist, given that violence occupies the entire field of existence” [4]. 

If violence occupies the entire “field of existence” for Esposito, for Richard it is politics what totalizes every relation into a cognizable order when it dares to speak in the name of the subaltern, the poor, or the slave under the shadow of the Master, masking its desire of inversion and thus becoming one itself. This is the narrative of constituent power and revolutionary dialectics at least since 1789. This is precisely what Christian Jambet & Guy Lardreau see in  L’Ange: Pour une cynégétique du semblant (1976); that is, the projected ideological revolution taking the manifold orienting principles of realist politicity (the historical proletariat, the People, Ecology, and even the revolution as the repetition of coming into semblance) that advances the plasticity of order [6]. Is a gnostic rupture possible against the realist discourses that hide their mastery? 

Infrapolitics has no programmatic blueprints or higher purposes in the interregnum, but at least it is committed with a certain stubbornness on the detachment of thinking and the irreducible ethics of language that is always more and always less than social domination; more originary and deeply existential than the scene of violence and its copious obsession with the readability of the public. Infrapolitics is always already in what we all do, and fugitivity is already under way on the other side of socialization. The “fear” that promotes its negation is, if anything, the symptomatic tenor that political forms take when what remains is a predictable rhetorical chatter. But on the side of opacity, we have already trespassed the blackmail of fear. It seems that we are already the outsiders: extranei a turbis aestimemur (Tertullian).

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.*Nota bene. Some Chilean friends have brought to my attention that the chapter where the mentions on infrapolitics unfolds, “Una pequeña y hermosa conjetura”: fragmentos de conversacion con Federico Galende”, is a dialogue between Richard and Federico Galende although at no moment does it become clear who is saying, asking or answering as one or the other. In a way, this chapter insofar as it is a flowing soliloquy of the two voices, authorship becomes a sort of third signature emerging as “Richard-Galende”. The ambiguity of the authorship in question, however, does not take away from the main premises of my response, which can be extended not only to Richard but also to Galende. At bottom, my response is not towards a specific intellectual project, it is registering a symptom of the contemporary philosopher emerging as a agent of the hegemonic closure of the Social.

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Notes 

1. Nelly Richard. Tiempos y modos (Paidós, 2024), 103.

2. Ibid., 99.

3. T. J. Clark. Those Passions: On Art and Politics (Thames&Hudson, 2025), 15.

4. Roberto Esposito. The Faces of the Adversary (Polity, 2026), 114-115.

Humanity’s way out: antinomies of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945). by Gerardo Muñoz

In an early review of Elio Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945), Renato Poggioli noted that one of the important merits of the novel was that in spite of the authort’s political commitment, the narrative was “neither partisan nor ideological. I dare to say it is not political; the author even apologizes for this at the end of the volume” [1]. Poggioli, of course, is referring to Vittorini’s Postscript where he states, favoring a thin notion of the autonomy of art, that the end of art is to “seek in art the trace progress of humanity is altogether different from fighting for it upon the political and social terrain” [2]. This is enough evidence to bring to bear Vittorini’s humanist project grounded in a faith in the “progress of the human species” that he wrestled with throughout his life, and that he never really abandoned according to Franco Fortini [3]. Of course, Vittorini’s ‘progressivism’ is not bounded to ironclad guidelines of political economy and the science of a materialist history, rather his position is the attempt to flee from it, to undertake a different path in which humanity and inhumanity could enter into an improper and inconspicuous relationship towards presence. 

Here we can part ways with Poggioli’s suggestion that Uomini e no (1945) is not “sufficiently political” because the characters do not dare to make political slogans or identify themselves with a concrete political party line (the Communist Party that Vittorini himself identified with in spite of having written a non-political novel) during the underground resistance during the years of fascist domination in Milan during the interwar years. If Uomini e no (1945) drifts aways from engaging in a formal political identification to mobilize the narrative persuasion it is because for Vittorini there is an original struggle for “life” that necessarily precedes subjection and political action: it is the struggle of human species to confront the difficulty of its own inhuman threshold, which becomes necessary to account for in any materialist conception. The whole tension of the novel hinges on the unnerving formal composition of the narrative with the asphyxiating dread and angst of the character that embodies the existential the practice of an incarnated struggle beyond survival. 

However, what is beyond survival? What comes after the desert of a world that soon enough – in the words of Theodor Adorno at the height of the mid century – will turn human life into “mere functions within a monstrous social machine in which “life does not longer lives”…in which what grows is the scope of socialization and its functions. What I want to say is that liberty has become a mere pretext to enhance the ways of domination” [4]. If politics is the religion of modernity (political theology suturing the void with authority), the accumulation of liberty can only be understood as the moment of expansion and reproduction of effective domination. In a way, the metropolitan scenario in Uomini e no (1945) foreshadows the evolving historical epoch of this ‘monstrous socialization’ as a civil war or stasis, in which the mere survival of political struggle is proportional to the dispensation of death of humanity as the last dialectical movement of humanity against itself; that is, towards the concrete extinction of the human. For Vittorini the swerving black sun of fascism and political militancy (in its idealized version invested in the paradigm of sacrificial structure of history) can only amount to the realization of epochal nihilism and the fertilization of the expansive desert in the novel at the expense of sacrificing the erotic mediation with the world, which entails the liquidation of the sensibility external to human: “Love, in those deserts, is at its most squalid; it is not that life is absent from but the life it has is not alive. You are thirsty and have a chance to drink; there is water. You are hungry, you have a chance to eat; there’s bread. There is a spring and alms around, just the one you are looking for. But it  is only a mirage, it is not the thing itself” [5]. The fundamental question posed by Vittorini is never truly resolved by Uomini e no (1945): crossing the desert to achieve something like an erotic distance with the thing itself as ultimately the confirmation of one’s irreductible destiny. No doubt, there are moments where this emerges in strange ways, at the limit of narration and as a linguistic declaration. This is scripted through the exchange with the old lady Selva on happiness: “We work in order that men be happy. Isn’t that what we are working for?…Men need to be happy. Would there be any point to our clandestine newspapers? To our conspiracies?” [6]. 

Is happiness a subterfuge to return to the world, or is happiness, authentic non-compensatory happiness, the stimmung of life as it retreats from the delegated representations of civil society? The suspended dialectical closure at the level of form in Uomini e no (1945) provides a preliminary resolution to the question of happiness amidst wreckage; a collapse that speaks to Vittorini’s impossibility to bring into synthesis political action and existential authenticity. The narrative texture of Uomini e no (1945) is a preparatory exploration – showing the false exists in the meantime – towards the possible liberation of man’s passions, even against the premises of a reconciled ‘Humanity’ capable of leaving behind the antinomies of humanism and antihumanism at the service of the ‘communist way’. And we know that for Vittorini the commitment to ‘Communism’ was inscribed not in the idea or the organizational tactics but in the notion of the “way” (una via), capable of opening possibilities to counter the coercive efficacy of the administrative social apparatuses that turn historical progress into a totalizing desert [7].  How to do so – is there any legible index to the “via comunista”? As a novel Uomini e no is preparatory towards this retreat from the confusion of the inhumanity of the human on the one hand, and the total humanization of the world to deface the possibility of happiness and experience with the world itself. 

In this sense, Fortini is right in describing the lyricism of the novel as attuned to a funeral oration or song (“canto funebre”), which is also a prolonged farewell to the ideals of Vittorini himself as a moral humanist; that is, as someone committed to the ideals and abstraction of redemptive self-sacrificial christology and the self-serving autonomous action of the pardon as man’s last hope to absorb the inhuman kernel into the vita nova of a redeemed universal Humanity. And in fact, these are two “endings”’ of Uomini e no (1945): the self-immolation and sacrifice of the protagonist N2 waiting to confront the Nazi official Cane Nero, and the final sequence of the worker that refuses to murder a German soldier because he looked “sad” even when standing on occupied soil, even when he occupies the role of the protectorate of the nomos of the earth [8]. These are the novel two preparatory distinct actions in the dense fog of the interregnum: the Christological path of sacrifice of N2  – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, which according to René Girard’s defines the advent of the Christian sacrificial  practice- seeks a last action of resistance holding on to “humanity’s internal weakness”, which carries the elevation of secularized mythic discharge of subjective martyrdom [9]. On the other, the milanese worker offers redemption as a form of secret forgiveness (without a justification and without a why) to the occupier, and in this way integrate the inhuman into the human species as the solution to the repeated rumination over the movement of struggle and resistance: “Why, without being in any way forced to do so, had they entered this duel to the death, and why did they continue to wage it?” [10]. 

In his early reading of Uomini e no (1945) Franco Fortini offered a thesis that I am tempted to call the domestication of the wolf argument; an inversion of Hobbesian anthropology and the Christian felix culpa in which struggle’s optimism will ultimately transfigure the internal wolf unto the human’s heart [11]. But we know that the homo homini lupi depends on a thick notion of anthropology, of the human’s unfathomable deficiency in relation to ‘object reality’ so that any domestication of the wolf within humanity is also an anthropological quest; perhaps the last “route” of negating humanism through substantive acts (sacrificial sacrifice and forgiveness) in the attempt to reconcile the wolf with man. But this is the very enterprise of civilizational techniques of adaptation proper to the tooling of political anthropology – that is, the domestication of the savage wolf entails its conversion to the passive dog. Could there be a way out to the final verdict of dialectical form beyond struggle, and the reconciliation of humanity with its negation? Perhaps this is only registered as the unthought in Vittorini’s Uomini e no (1945); an experience that prepares a return to the world through the conatus essendi, or  the preservation of each thing’s being as their are. This is registered in only instances of the novel in the backdrop of a landscape; indeed, outside the subject of self-reflection, and beyond the premises of radical evil proper to moral platitudes. And the moment reads like this in chapter CXXX: “The long dusty road, the drowsiness, the hay, the stitches where the cicadas were: everything that was, and that, along with everyone who is lost, still wants to be. And the sky filled with kites? The sky that was filled with kites” [12]. The perseverance of the conatus essendi puts to rest what the delegated forms that politics and morality have to offer as temporal substitutes for dragging the historical promise of humanism within epochal nihilism. 

In this suspended imagery of an arid landscape, Vittorini descends to the preservation of things as they open to their manifestation of another sense of freedom – no longer tied to the paradigm of historical liberation nor to the assumption of synthetic anthropological determinations to sooth pain – comes upwards, always silently, through the order of description outside the human. And is not in this description what Gianni Carchia would call “the non-human…a gesture of farewell to the idealist movement; a farewell to the exaltation of the human up to the highpoint of its explosion. The refusal to substitute the dead god for a human that in the depredatory scope of totality crosses every limit, every transcendence, and infinity” [13]? This transposition of this  proximity with this “other-than-humanity” ( what Humanity can no longer hold on to) is the secret to Vittorini’s infrapolitical impasse in Uomini e no (1945) that holds the key to his insistence on a notion of “freedom” against the subject incapable of overcoming itself in the face of the abstraction (morality) or ideological  reassurance (militancy) [14]. One could assume that the worker’s last line in Uomini e no (1945) – which also coincides with Vittorini’s mimetic repetition in his “Postscript” – in the form of a promise (‘I’ll learn better’) registers the final attempt to grasp what remains on the exterior fog of humanity: a notion of freedom that, in seeking ‘a way out’, insists in the possibilities of establishing contact with the world. Thus, the program of historical liberation can only be achieved against historical and civilizational fixation; traversing the polarity of humanity and inhumanity, and thus deposing the sublimated sentiment of pain that social domination can administer as an unending process of degenerated and moribound humanity as mere continuation of the fictive life.

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Notes 

1. Renato Poggioli. “Review of Uomini e no by Elio Vittorini”, Books Abroad, Vol.20, N.4, 1946, 393.

2. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 199.

3. Franco Fortini. “Ma esisteva Vittorini?”, L’Expresso, 4, 2 febbraio 1986, 86.

4. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. “El mundo administrado o la crisis del individuo”, Pensamiento al margen: revista digital de ideas políticas, N.19, 2023, 200.

5. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 34.

6. Ibid., 13. 

7. Elio Vittorini. “El comunismo como vía”, in Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 279.

8.  Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985), 50.

9. René Girard. Sacrifice (Michigan State University Press, 2011), 65. 

10. Ibid.,  196.

11. Franco Fortini. “Che cosa può l’uomo: Uomini e no” (1945), in Saggi italiani (1987), 253.

12. Elio Vittorini. Men and not men (The Malboro Press, 1985),190. 

13. Gianni Carchia. “Glosa sull’umanismo”, L’erba voglio, N.29-30, 1977, 9.

15. Elio Vittorini. “La libertad es difícil” (1956), en Diario en público (Gadir Editorial, 2008), 382.