parody – Infrapolitical Reflections

In the November-December issue of Revista Sur in 1955, Jorge Luis Borges famously published “L’illusion comique”, an indictment against Peronism as a form of social theater, where melodramatic and overacted public liturgy energized the orchestrated pace of the modern mass politics. But unlike in Cornille’s baroque play, for Borges the political ensemble of the l’illusion comique is one in which social actors have become autonomous and fully aware of the script of their acts, and if they would play along fully conscious and in “willing suspension of disbelief” (the expression is cited directly from Samuel Coleridge) [1]. This secularized form of the l’illusion comique is one in which theatricality is ever-present and unabsorbed, since its ultimate purpose is to conceal and justify a “terrible reality” (una realidad atroz) even when it aims to invert or dislocate it. It is clear that in our time, the l’illusion comique is an extension of a political agency that has convinced itself that the street topos is in radical opposition to the crisis of modern state form. No greater l’illusion comique than that which imagines that one more rush of goliardic spirituality will produce the dawn of a new beginning.

The order of the sentimentalization and pathos was the way that Borges described the l’illusion comique of the 1940s, the era of the high modern state conducting the social masses; however today the illusion is flat and rhetorical, always assertive of its metonymic mediation. In just one example of rhetorical inflation, the Prime Minister of Spain recently constructed a analogy that stopped short of a full personification: “It is time for the Parliament to have the appearance of the streets”. If Parliaments or legislatures bodies cannot truly provide legislative acts any more on behalf of those that they allege to represent, what follows is the last gasp of the legislative state that appeals directly to its naked constitutive sources as “streets that speak”. We are thus in a strange and bizarre world in which streets act and speak, and parliamentary houses become mute and sterile. And yet, what does it mean that the streets speak or have spoken?

It is obviously nothing like the coming to the possibility of a unison voice, but rather the form that politics undergoes once cybernetics becomes effective through its optimization of public opinion. If Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” would write facing Van Gogh that the “painting speaks” (it is that which speaks), it was because truth is disclosed in the proximity of what is being shown. Obviously, this disclosure has little to do with intentionality or the function of a commodity or utensil that tries to drag the viewer into the mirror of semblance. The proximity to a voice or picture severs us from the common place in which we are customarily gathered, which is why painting remains an exclusive site for unmediated truth.

Hence, when we are told that “streets speak” there is nothing being disclosed except what is already enacted by the theatre of the l’illusion comique: the management of opinions to be decided on the plane of force and struggle, submission and rhetoric, hegemony and the cheap thrills of affection later absorbed in representation. As Pedro Sánchez has told us in the open, streets and parliaments today are not in opposition, on the contrary, they are the two poles that hold up the l’illusion comique that energizes whatever little remains for what we call “politics” under the defunct notion of social mobilization. It has been said that the machinery of the modern sovereignty revolved around tripartite structures of ‘crown, parliament, people’ oriented towards election, debate and statute. In the waning of modern politics, we are left with the dual structure of executive power and streets that act in place of the void of statute and the legislative state.

Any attempt to escape the undisclosed world of opinions needs to break free from the illusion comique that continuous to parody both reason and comedy. The verses from Ciaran Carson’s The Irish for No (1987) obviously come to mind: “Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. In the ruins: obliterated streets, the faint impression of a key” [3]. There are no real exits when there are only ghastly impressions that lead us to the penumbra of the l’illusion comique, merely enough to survive in nihilism.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges. “L’illusion comique”, Sur, N.237, Noviembre-Diciembre 1955, 10.

2. Ciaran Carson. “Smithfield Market”, in Collected Poems (Wake Forest University Press, 2009), 99

The well-established American Liberal historian of ideas, Mark Lilla, writes in his recent essay “The Once and the Now” an outlandish thesis: “the ideologies of modern fascism are all heirs to the Aeneid.” Any reasonable reaction should start not by disputing the content of such superficial assertion, but rather by raising the central question: what has taken place in America so that this level of intellectual putrefaction and conscious oblivion towards the past could take place, thus becoming permissible and reasonable? From where does the intellectual confidence emerge so that such a lethal rhetorical force can be deployed? At a high paced rate, the United States has become a beacon for an ongoing fascination over “fascism and anti-fascism” to the point of adapting an absolute form of parody in the “serious” forms of culture, academic production, and current event discussions.

Perhaps it is not that difficult to find an answer; and, one can say that once a culture repeatedly defines itself by the parameters of its parodic enactment is precisely a culture that has effectively ceased to exist. Carl Schmitt was up to something when he writes in Glossarium (an entry from 1953) that fascism after the war amounted to the ultimate victory of Stalinism over every other geopolitical actor in the Western world. The Cold War was also a battle for mimetic containment and pacification: the uttermost consummation to the highest case of metonymic endurance. The diffused “cultural war” in America in every symbolic dimensions of life (the media, the university, the political jargon, the legal profession, the community interaction, etc) shows that the victory has now reached definitive and unprecedented heights. It is true that fascism has always triggered a sort of libidinal drive – something that Susan Sontag knew well – in the societal attachment to symbolic production. In this sense there is little new here. But the novelty shows itself if one understands that the rhetoric of fascism has now become autonomous and sine qua non to cultural solvency into nihilism.

If Lilla’s remark caught my attention it is because it fully captures this transformation at the highest levels of the American elite. This transformation is nothing but the essence of Americanism as a fictive rhetorical parody of everything belonging to “Western culture”. This is why, regardless of ideological commitments (or precisely because of them), Americanism is in the business of an active forgetting of the West; while, at the same time, presuming credentials to be its most courageous defender. But it should be clear that Americanism’s defense of the West ultimately means the compulsive expansion of public opinion through a trivialization of the alienability of the past in its own ever-changing image.

In 1935, a short book appeared in Europe penned by Catholic intellectual Theodor Haecker that was entitled Virgil, Father of the West. This essay reminded its readers that culture in Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics is best understood as the possibility of dwelling in the land through the cultivation of the Eros itself. In fact, Haecker will go on to write that the paradigm of Virgil’s Georgica should remain well into the end of the epoch as a solid commitment to the iustissima tellus against the “mysticism of the machine and the glorification of technology”. Almost a century after, Haecker’s hope in the possibility of cultivating homecoming has literally vanished. To any attentive observer it is clear that American intellectual elites have abdicated their commitment to iustissima tellus, while the marching orders of Americanism, driven by the artificial hells of the Metaverse and planetary conflagration, have already animated the flock through the gate leaving behind nothing but resilient and uninterrupted destruction.