The recent response to Nelly Richard’s critical stance against infrapolitics, has prompted an ongoing conversation although not always public. However , there has been a public reaction in a column by Samuel Toro Contreras, “El poder ya no está donde creemos” published in El Mostrador. I do not think that this reply is necessarily critical of Contreras’ article, since I tend to agree with its main framework. I mean this comment as a sort of recalibration of Contraras’ observation, which ultimately hinges upon on two central elements: first, that there is no need for “cultural war”; and second, that a debate regarding the centrality of politics (the hegemonic position) or the non-centrality of politics (infrapolitics) is already a duality surpassed by the question of technology.
Of course, I agree with the analytical intuition deployed by Contreras that the essence of concrete domination today is to be analyzed in the organization of infrastructure. The transformation of sovereign power into the molecular and administrative dispersion of control has been invariably present in what infrapolitics has tried to think through in its different approaches. And not only infrapolitics, of course, but also other theoretical positions that refuse the fantasy of hegemonic politics. I do think that infrapolitics does not think this problem factually; what we continue to call “politics” – inherited from the Greek dispensation of the polis, in contrast to the chôra and the Arcadia, just to name two counterfigures – is already functioning as proto-infrastructure of the social community of norms and reproduction and the economy. The meson of the polis is the infrastructural design, to use the terminology of Alejandra Castillo, in which life is only possible as determined by the equivalent. The problem of technology does not begin with the locomotive, “cybernetics”, “Artificial Intelligence”, or what have you.
When Contreras writes that “la pregunta de base seria anterior, sobre que infraestructura técnica produce hoy aquello que todavía seguimos llamando política”, he is inadvertently endorsing infrapolitical thought, with the caveat that infrapolitics is not merely invested in the objective conditions of politics, but on those conditions of thought cannot be absorbed by politics. To say that politics amounts to infrastructure in our time is to say that the “destiny as political” as defined in European modernity can be paragraphed today as “our destiny is geopolitical”. This is another way to say that politics is no longer organized around time and decision, but on space and administration.
To simply call this “politics” responds to the inertia of language that tends to obscure the terms of exchange. Infrapolitics does not claim clarity, but in the wake of the absolutization of infrastructure of the Gestell, it does favor the possibility of thought rather than exerting a new political primer of action or reform. In light of this, it is not the relation between technology and politics what is at stake; the authentic step back is the difficulty presented by the non-relation of technology and thinking. This might be a slight displacement from Contreras’ own position about infrastructure, and it is one that never really wanted to align itself with either politics or culture.
Plato’s Laws remains one of the least read and explored dialogues in the platonic corpus. This is a fact that might be worth pondering upon in the course of a systematic reading of the dialogue. According to André Laks in his book Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws (Princeton U Press, 2022), the very last dialogue of Plato is a substantial rewriting of the core arguments of The Republic in terms of its grounding of politics and the organization of the polis, but also not just in terms of the political question. Laks speaks of a “structural paradox” in Laws regarding the nature of politics that takes an “unusual” (aesthesteron) path “beyond legislation” that constitute the very essence of the nomoi (Laks 2024, 142). We are interesting in exploring this ‘beyond legislation’ that is also a “before legislation” that speaks, either directly or indirectly, to the notions of the chôra and the theological foundation of the legislative enterprise itself, and ultimately to language as it pertains to preambles and argumentation (kalliston kai ariston prooimion). These are difficult questions that also exceed any philological exploration of Plato’s philosophical horizon, and that land on our own preoccupations regarding political metabolism.
So, this “beyond legislation” will be a guiding thread (one of the several) in a systematic reading of Plato’s Laws. In an important and rare observation, Monica Ferrando in Un anno con Platone (Neri Pozza, 2024) has noted that the notion of “chôra” appears more than thirty times in the Laws with all sorts of operative injunctions that speak to space and sensation, distance and cosmos, beauty and music, as well as the dwelling place for life to flourish without unlimited predatory force. How is one to understand the notion of “chôra” as a mediating distance that precedes the ground of politics? What is the relation between chôra and space in light of the isonomic arrangement of the polis? In what sense is having a handle on the notion of the chôra a precondition for a beautiful city, what Socrates calls the kallipolis in The Republic that is also the city of pigs? Is the chôra irreducible to eidos as it enters the polyphony of the Laws? And how does the chôra escape the political field and law’s authority as it appears in Laws? One of the angular goals of a systematic reading of Plato’s Laws is to make some progress in the understanding of the notion of the chôra that has been percolating in many recent discussions.
The fact that Laws has remained on the sidelines or in opacity in the canon of Western political philosophy might speak to its relevance, and to the fact that it has yet to be a text to be confronted and reckoned with. Of course, this does not mean that at stake is an effort to recalibrate its political task to amend the history of political thought; it is perhaps more interesting to approach it from the external perspective of canonical tradition that modern categories project to the past. In his posthumous book on the Laws, Leo Strauss noticed that this dialogue, unlike all the rest in the Platonic corpus, begins and ends with an appeal to “god” (theon). For us today this could mean: what is the status of the gods after the death of god and the end of politics? A systematic reading of Plato’s Laws has the depth to reopen these difficult questions in the present state of our discussions.
One of the decisive lessons of Giorgio Agamben’s archeological examination of Western politics is that the imperative to confront the closure of representation, sooner or later it must also come to terms with the notion of the body (corpo) as a central metapolitical condition in the genesis of modernity. If L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) brought to its final stage the philosophical exploration of Western ontology of politics defined by efficacy and realization; in most recent opuscules, Agamben has shown how the fixation and regulation of the body is also embedded in the regions of language and sensation of human life as well. In this sense, it is impossible not to read Il corpo della politica (Bollati Boringhieri, 2026) along with Il corpo della lingua (Einaudi, 2024), as two parallel commentaries on the defining stature of political representation. If a new beginning is one of the decisive questions of our times, then one of the pending tasks is precisely to think the body (corpo) against the ontotheological assumptions of calculative reason.
Similar to Il corpo della lingua (2024), Il corpo della politica (2026) starts with the treatment of the Copernican revolution of bodies in Hobbes and Newton, which in the face of the cosmological infinity inscribed a notion of two bodies in order to allow for representation within spatial coordinates. In other words, Hobbes’ artificial sovereign represented by the mortal god Leviathan (state normative authority) will have an autonomous colorary in the autonomy of the subject that will become “political” as long as it becomes coterminous with the civic body of the “People”. Thus, to speak of “bodies” is not just to rationalize physicality in space – although it is also this from a technical viewpoint that state legibility will soon demand of the incipient civil society – but more importantly, it entails the administration of energy and movement (in Agamben’s well known lexicon, the domestication of potency to the realization of purposeful ends). For Agamben, Spinoza’s conatus, which appears in the Baroque period in critical dialogue with Hobbesian and Newtonian frameworks should be read precisely a way to think past the body as substance, following the steps of the tradition of ancient Stoicism in which beings are corporeal insofar as they are in tension with the world, allowing the tonos or acoustics to animate being in its movement towards preservation and exposure (Agamben 20-21).
If all beings are traversed by a tonos – a tension that crosses as its medium in virtue of its contact with the world – this means that they are no longer defined by a substance, but as intensity within a field of forces once thrown in the world. As Agamben writes in passing with explicit confrontation with Heidegger’s Being and Time: “…con la tesi perentoria ‘l’essenza dell’esserci giace (liegt) nell’esistenza’. L’esserci è stato “gettato” nel mondo, ma si direbbe che, una volta gettato, non cade in piedi, ma giace (liegen significa innanzitutto essere sdraiato). E questa concezione sub-stanziale dell’essere che il conatus mette radicalmente in questione” (Agamben 23). In an archeological gesture that is already signatura of his work, Agamben reminds us that Hobbes’ substantive and artificial division of the “two bodies” that anchors modern politics can be traced to the corpus mysticum and the theological debates concerning transubstantiation that will later be recasted in the intersecting works of both Ernst Kantorowicz and Carl Schmitt, in which the impolitical dimension of the multitude becomes political through the artifice of decision and representation of a unified and indivisible body (Agamben 25-26).
The catastrophe of modern politics takes place when the body, once reduced to a substance and computable object in space, ceases to be understood as an inteusum or intensity of an irreducible multitude that expressed a generic and universal human species, as it was for Dante: “La politico – il finis totius humanae civilitatis che Dante intende definirie nel suo trattato – è ancora una volta un campo di tensioni interne allo stesso genere umano e questa intensità ha la foram di una moltitudine” (Agamben 39). In other words, for Agamben following the implicit tonus present in Dante’s Monarchia, the political is neither action nor mediation, but what names the very site of the possible. Agamben calls the hypothesis of an “anarchic politics” (politica anarchica), which no longer defines itself in relation to a formal mediation of government and state, but rather as the intensity of the multitude through the generic being (Marx) or the universal humanity (Dante) that takes the form of sensible Empire devoid of principial politics mediated by constituent power (Agamben 47).
Where does the multitude dwell outside the constituted representation of a community of belonging or the social mediation of the state? Already in 1990s Agamben had written a gloss on the politics of exile collected in Mezzi senza fine (1996), and the last part of Il corpo della politica (2026) he returns to philosophical and theological notion of the exile vis-a-vis the historical experience of the Jewish tradition as an errant or stateless people, as Erich Unger called it in 1922, whose existence has been defined by exile or galut (Agamben 48). It is a bit of a misnomer to call the exilic experience a “politics”, since for Agamben the authentic tradition of exile does not entail the right or duty fixed to a community of belonging; rather, what outlives the law is the only path capable of deposing it (in the manner of Paul, that is, as katargeo). In this way, justice is now understood not as a procedure in a normative system, but as a written tradition that can only be studied and reflected upon and ultimately experienced as a state of passivity.
Hence, the exilic experience is the caesura between language and world, in which we touch the exteriority with a renewed intimacy that unfolds the uncommunicative solitude that keeps the mystery of our use of language. Following the neoplatonic formulation “phygé monou pros monon” – understood by Erik Peterson as an expressive mystical relation of a “fuga di un solo presso un solo” – there is intimacy and authentic belonging whenever there is sensible separation in being (Agamben 55). Following Plutarch and Plato, for Agamben the exilic dimension is the very home of philosophy and thought, which confirms, against Crito’s suggestions at the end of Socrates’ life, that there life outside of the polis and the conglomerate of the demos, because life is outside itself once it is assimilated in the virtuality of a divine that nourishes its own potency. In what stands as one of the most precise formulations of the pheugein (exile) condition as a figure of existence, Agamben writes of its precise ascesis:
“La celebre definizione ascetica della fuga dal mondo come assimilazione a Dio andrà resa, pertanto, restituendo tutta la sua forza alla metafora politica: “l’assimilazione a Dio virtualmente un esilio” (kata ton dynaton significa qui, secondo il sense più proprio del termine dynatos, “virtualmente, secondo la potenza). L’affermazione e tanto piu significativa in quanto, con queste parole, Platone rompe con l’insegnamento socratico del Critone, secondo cui la possibilità di phygé offerta al condannato non potrà che essere rifiutata, perché non vi è vita possibile fuora dalla polis” (Agamben 57).
This region that precedes and exceeds politics – in the language of Sophocles, the well known ypsipolis apolis – is akin to the tone that runs to the forgetting of any substantive ontology of politics that seeks to subsumes life into the confinement of external forces. It is in this paradoxical situation of assimilation in exile, and a permanent exile that assimilates itself in God as shared thought that politics can be transfigured as an apodemia that refuses the closure of life into principles of government and dominium, and away from the community form of propriety and rooted belonging. Agamben recalls that in the history of Christianity, it is the time of the parish (paroikias) what allows the soul to live in earth as foreigner and exile, in proximity of the medium of the kingdom, and that only later with Saint Augustine it was transformed into a territorial institution for the communio and communal salvation (Agamben 60-61). In the paroikias, Agamben returns to the kingdom not as a retheologization of the politics, but as a figural parable in which a poetic dwelling is enacted in the measureless passivity of a form of life, a project consistent with the formulation of the singular whatever being articulated in La comunita che viene (1990).
The assimilation in the exile of the divine, which recalls the forgetting of oneself and the god announced by Hölderlin in“Note on the Oedipus”, is refined in the last essay of the book entitled “Il corpo dell’Europa”, which reproduces a lecture delivered in Venice in May 2024 about idea of Europe. As a sort of concluding reflection or apostilla, we are now able to say that for Agamben the only possibility of dwelling in the vestiges of the European tradition and memory is to rescue, from the wreckage of its history, the sediments of a texture of the phygén: to be exiled is not just a vitalist affirmation of this life, but more importantly, it also implies disclosing the possibilities buried in the past with the dead, that is, in contact not only with Gaia, but also in the downward movement to the domus of the infraworld (a figure that receives a novel treatment Agamben’s recent book La lingua che resta). Agamben exemplifies this exile with the dead with three poetic moments of high european modernism: Ezra Pound’ Cantos, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Eric Auerbach’s masterpiece Mimesis written from his exile in Turkey – and of course, we could also think here of Kafka’s parables and Joseph Roth’s narratives of Jewish errancy; as well as Alexandre Lerrnet Holenia’s phantasmatic crumbling of Empire in The Standard and Osip Mandelstam’s “The Fourth Prose”, where the end of the work leads to the human voice as the supreme poetic task in the face of nihilism and political totalitarianism.
It should be clear, however, that the problem is not found a temporary refuge or a last stand in the fortress of modern literature, but of coming to terms with the phygé as a fundamental problem of language that, in virtue of its unique and irreplaceable experience, delivers a world nested in the affection of remembrance. As Agamben asks towards the end of the lecture: “Is there a sensibility and a form of life that we can call European?” (Agamben 82). This question can only be answered when we dwell and assimilate into the exile of thought that harbors the residues, figures, and voices that speak to us from the dead in a tradition because it is no longer transmitted, we can only access it poetically. In the only moment that the word anima (soul) appears in the text, in the very last sentences, it becomes clear that it is only in the intensity of thought that life accounts for the inseparability of the body and the soul that historical abstraction has rendered oblivious and alien from the tonos of presence. We are not yet ready to declare a return to the appearance between being and world, and for that very reason even the presence of the divine, as Agamben says following Isaac Luria, is itself exiled from the creation of the world until the advent of the tiqqun in the night of restitution. The exilic dwelling of life outside itself is marked by this sort of secret unfaithfulness in the absence of the god. In the meantime, the task of an ethical life is to passively reside in an exile where the reality of the soul returns what is possible and breathable to the appearance of the real.
Every book has a history of its own, its subterranean itineraries, and oblique paths that are only disclosed when entering in contact with its future readers. There is no question that Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) has plenty of merits that we cannot begin to elucidate. For one, it is a monograph that should be of interest to students of Latin American studies, but also to any fellow travellers wanting to confront and think through the problem of writing at the wake of the epochal crisis of the state form and the exhaustion of the historical subject. Can thinking overcome the deficiencies proper to cultural studies and populist hegemony to understand the ongoing fragmentation visible everywhere? One can start by saying that Le Calvez’s books points to a positive direction from this impasse, avoiding the shortcomings of sociological epistemology and the auratic reflexes of subaltern subjects as the master oppositional category to State form in the becoming of modernist development and global neoliberalism. In Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) the object of study is the irruption of EZLN or Zapatismo, and more specifically the scene of writing of the Zapatistas through the genealogy of their declarations, public letters, gestures, and signatures of all kinds that speak to the persistence of a writing of defacement; a scene of writing beyond the social function of the author, and on the margins of the legitimacy of the “lettered city” of the Latin American criollo uneven modernism. In the space of this commentary, I would like to list three levels of Le Calvez’s arguments that hope will further contribute not just to the themes proper to her study, but more fundamentally to a constellation of problems that exceed Latin America as a region of studies.
First, Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) withdraws itself from understanding Zapatismo as a sociological political phenomenon of the late Mexican State, or a belated product of the shortcomings of the Mexican Revolution and its process of modernization. Unlike other studies of Zapatismo in Latin American studies Escriturassin rostro (2025) is not invested in the restitution of new political subject of resistance in the face of global war and the anarchy of political action; rather, what is presented is the redrawing of a genealogical scene of writing subsumed by its excess and dislocation, stubbornly out of place that evidences the negativity of the collapse of the autonomous spheres of actions that once defined the apparatuses of historical development and legibility. As Le Calvez convincingly points out, the defaced and non-authored writings of the Zapataistas are neither literature nor political manifestos, and they also refuse the autonomy of literature and its incorporation into the objective ornaments of the Avant Garde projects. The defacement of writing for the Zapatistas is neither Avant Garde nor kitsch, because it is no longer interested in weighting itself on the rhetorical scale of social compartmentalization. In my terms, which are not those of Le Calvez, one could say that “escritura” or writing in this study is the vortex of flight from rhetorical submission; that is, what cuts through the enthymemes to refuse ossification and reproduction of language. The freedom of writing is always measured by the possibilities that is able to generate against rhetorical abstractions.
Secondly, because there is no justification in social or political principles, Le Calvez argues that Zapatista writing and negative gesture is a refusal of hegemony, and thus properly posthegemonic. If “escritura sin rostro” makes no demands, seeks no identification, and avoids the prefiguration of rhetorical subsumption, it means that Zapatismo openly rejects the articulatory nature of hegemony as the last avatar of the administration of identity at the end of metaphysics. As Le Calvez claims succinctly, the dispersal of writing cannot adequate itself to Laclau’s theory of hegemony and its “rhetorical foundations” of the social (Le Calvez 67-68). In this sense, posthegemony is not merely what interrupts the closure of politics in the neutralization of a new social consensus, but what transfigures language into its autographic, experiential, and faceless excess that overflows every identity and every place of enunciation. In very subtle and elegant ways, Le Calvez’s hermeneutics of the Zapatalistas’ Declaraciones confirm that the solicitation of hegemony in both discourse and political practice is an inversion, almost an hallucination in political form of the money form and the general equivalent in the historical process of real subsumption of capitalist value. If Zapatistas are indeed a “realist” political formation it is not because they parody of modern guerrillas or enact a new communal organization; the realism at its best is grounded in the capacity to discern that hegemony in the wake of end of the modern liberal state only serves to deepen the ongoing process of the capitalist utopia.
Thirdly, and more surprisingly, is the fact that Gaëlle Le Calvez’s Escrituras sin rostro (2025) does not just reconstruct moments of the Zapatista inscription, it also considers its intensity to its very end. And to think something to the end means to reveal its limits, disclose its fissures, and open a site to move pass the object of reflection. This maximum point of reflection is when philological exploration outlives itself in the intensity of an uncharted path. Thus, the story that Le Calvez tells us about Zapatista writing concludes with a series of aporias and contradictions that announce a certain “decline” and eclipse of its poetic intensity. This is a moment where its poetic elevation begins to deflate; and, in its decline we are confronted with a persistent drift to “civil society”, “self-critique”, the appeal to plurality of “indigenous people” (what Gareth Williams once called “fictive ethnicity” as master representational fiction), or an internationalist appeal in order to generate a “counterbalance” to global neoliberalism (Le Calvez, 106-108). And we are putting aside the nomination of Marichuy for the 2018 Mexican presidential election. Does not this recomposition of social recognition, both global and national, seek to replenish the void in representation as it appears in the third Declaración that evoked “para nosotros nada”? (Le Calvez, 93). The waning of the poetic moment of Zapatista appears to project a flickering shadow of its dependency to political movements.
Does this mean then that the “rise and fall” of Zapatismo ends in a tenuous archē embedded in the ‘movement’? In his Latinamericanism after 9/11 (2011), John Beverley projected his unfiltered Leninism towards antiquity and Ancient Christianity when stating that the central political question for our times in the face of Empire, is to find ‘who are the real Christians today’ [1]. But ideological Leninism distorts the past, since as we know well, the central question for the Christians of the Early Church of the desert, such as Origen, was not who was going to mobilize the masses in the material world, but rather in what way to retreat and avoid worldly political power [2]. Zapatistas as the new and last Christians, then? It is a tempting question, but one that will only contribute to the Leninist reduction of historical political fictions. Our times is not one for Leninism and the Vanguard Party to carry a breakthrough. But perhaps Zapatistas are residually Christians in another country way; that is; in the internal dynamics of its own language. I would like to suggest that this language can be understood especially in the last phase of the Declaraciones, a late rhetorical style of the sermo humilis. As Erich Auerbach has shown, the sermo humilis was the rhetorical innovation of the early Christian community at a moment of the political decadence of the Roman Empire, at the entrance of the interregnum. The sermo humilis appeals to a low or popular style, seeking legibility and pathetic understanding of the difficult mysteries of faith. The humilis also designates the ground level of the land, the humus, which elevates through the persuasion for the humble and the humiliated common men of this world [3].
In other words, the sermo humilis could be said to be a sublime of the everyday life that is refractory to the mystery. It is obvious that if we now turn to the Zapatista late writing, something like the sermo humilis codifies a symptom that is no longer the mystery of revelation, but rather in its secularized form of the revolution. Does not the sermo humilis functions as a secularized artifice to guard and elevates hopes (all too human, alas) on behalf of the “revolution” to come? However, it is precisely political revolution, just like hegemony, what cannot longer account to the effective revolutionary force of the autonomization of capital. If according to Le Calvez the formation of the Zapatista is analogous to an “artificial movement” (masa artificial) like the Church, then one could say that the rhetorical construction of the sermo humilis functions as a linguistic prayer for the revolution whose only certitude is the apophatic metaphorization in the name of the “people”, the “homeland” (la patria), or the antagonistic and oppositional “we” (nosotros), or any other compact grouping. Of course, this is the terrifying question for the sermo humilis in its secularized form: to what extend the communitarian and autonomous ideal, through its appeal to the humiliated and subaltern class, does not transform itself into an apotropeic instrument devoid of true redemption? [4].
Is writing, and witnessing through writing the practice where the possibility of redeeming human experience is lodged? This is the fundamental question that Le Calvez’s book puts forth to us as readers, without entirely coming to an effective resolution. And yet, in the last part of Escrituras sin rostro (2025) seems to offer us another possibility through the writings of Cristina Rivera Garza, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Sergio Gónzalez Rodríguez in the face of a fragmented and disarticulated social body and the night of history in which social protection and protracted civil war become indistinguishable (Le Calvez 186). This writing is no longer tailored in the Christian shops of the sermo humilis, but in an open plain where the voice becomes “un anhelo de prosa”, or a longing for prose, crossed by the finitude of being and the collapse of mediating forms of totality (Le Calvez 174).
This longing for prose as it appears in Cristina Rivera Garza’s work – in the Spanish anhelo one can also hear the echo of breathing that is constitutive of life’s exteriority with the world, to conspire – is not the letter of the law as in Hegel’s spiritual prose of the world (“in the slave prose begins”, we read in Aesthetics), but the clearing of a voice that can register the world because it speaks from the witnessing of the ruins of representation, and the conviction that there is no political mystery high above, but only the irreductibility of writing in spite of it all. In the shipwreck of perpetual global war, writing’s redeemable elevation is the caritas that puts us in a permanent exodus from the order of representation (Le Calvez, 186). Writing, escritura becomes the passage of the chiasmatic and breathable imagination that, because it has cleared a via poetica, it can name what can also be properly inhabited.
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Notes
1. John Beverley. Latinamericanism After 9/11 (Duke University Press, 2011), 26.
2. David Nirenberg. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (Norton, 2014), 108.
3. Erich Auerbach. “Sermo humilis”, in Literary Language & Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1993), 39.
4. Gianni Carchia. “Eros y Logos: Peitho arcaica y retórica antigua”, in Retórica de lo sublime (Tecnos, 1990), 29.
I remember that around 2007 there was a graffiti in Venice that read: “Non c’è nessun Virgilio a guidarci nell’inferno”, which can be rendered as “There is no Virgil that can guide us in this hell”. Many street graffitis come and go, and are easy to forget, but not this one. What does it mean that we live in an epoch without the company of the Roman poet Virgil? The suggestion prima facie is quite clear: if our voyage in the present entails a concrete hell (the subjection into economic domination and nihilism), it is an evermore so repulsive voyage as we lack the presence of the poet who can bear witness to the passing of an epoch and the possibility of the coming of a new earth.
But why Virgil? As Erich Auerbach already noted, for Dante the historical Virgil is both the poet and the historical witness, given that the Roman poet’s exemplary descent into hell was the preparation of a “terrene Jerusalem (earthy Jerusalem), the universal peace that came to pass during the Roman Empire, proposed and glorified in light of its future mission…Virgil led the way as a poet because of his description of the realm of the dead; he was thus a guide through the afterlife because he knew the way. But it was not only as a poet that was destined to lead. He was destined because he was a Roman and a human being” [1]. It would follow that an age dominated by the realization of absolute indifferentiation – this is the frame of nihilism after all – highly repressive of any proximity with the dead, can have no use of any Virgil even if one would offer to open a path to leave hell behind. The artist will not be understood or recognized as either human or poet, but rather taken as fully inhuman and incomprehensible. And this perhaps speaks to the tonality of terror and blindness that defines the undifferentiated suspended posthistorical time.
That there are no Virgils to cast a forward light outside the epocal hellish condition entails that we are left with an absolute politicization over life and death that takes the form of a novel technical imperium. We know that in Antiquity, political unhappiness and disarray was a common state of affairs (and also exile from civil life); life was conditioned, although not totally subsumed, by cycles of domination and insubordination during volatile civil stasis. But still in that historical epoch, a poet like Virgil, as both human and poet, was able to turn away from the “harsh and evil world, and sets out for Arcadia where he allows no hope, not even any desire to do something about the suffering world, to lighten his sorrow and despair” in the communion of friendship and concordia to retreat from static political absorption [2]. When we say that our predicament is that of a a world without Virgil, this should not be understood as a reiteration of Max Kommerell’s paradigmatic Jugend ohne Goethe (“a youth without Goethe”); but rather, more fundamentally, as the impossibility for the human species to imagine a sense of redemption in world that reduces itself to exchange and strife. In other words, the absence of the memory of Virgil speaks directly to the ever-increasing incapacity of existence to dwell beyond the imperatives of a calamitous attenuation of destruction and oblivion. We should keep in mind that Dante’s memory of Virgil was a symbol for the poetizing myths of a new life; and, in turn, Virgil’s own Arcadian nomos was the confabulation of reality and myth expressed in a language that measured itself against the orderability of imperial force. The triumph of total politicity, which is to say the coupling of the political into effective dispensation of technology, mutes not only the voice of the poets, as much the contact of speech and the passing of the world into nothingness.
In The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch describes this very passage through the mystical death and cosmic transcendence of the Roman poet himself, who now enters “a primal darkness which had held itself hidden behind the furthermost starry orb and now, independent of the arching path of lights, indeed, without putting out a single one of them it filled the dome of existence with impenetrable darkness: the essential world-darkness burst forth, that uncreated darkness which is infinitely more than the mere loss of light or absence of light…” [3]. For Broch, the passing of the world in the wake of the death of the poet does not coincide with the silence constitutive of speech, but with the severability of a language transformed as fully transparent and unmediated, in Broch’s words “all understanding, consummating, might and commanding; the world of pledge, the pure word, becoming so overpowering that nothing could withstand it” [4].
Extrapolated to our times, the liquidation of language takes form of absolute theatricality of the word, ascending to rhetorical and computational transparency. And in this unnerving cacophony, where everything is communicated, is realized in the historical project of cybernetics and automatized languages. The ethical texture of speech becomes unattainable for both humans, as poetizing beings, as they become incapable of inhabiting the dislocated abyss between myth and reality, now pivoted to a linguistic closure that commands them into the high noon of despair. An endless despair that has relentlessly lost with the inception of the divine.
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Notes
1. Erich Auerbach. “Figura” (1938), in Selected Essays: Time, History, and Literature (Princeton University Press, 2014), 108
2. Bruno Snell. The Discovery of the Mind (Dover Publications, 1982), 293.
3. Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil (Vintage, 1972), 471.
In the section of the unclassified “pensées”, Pascal’s meditation on the notion of “opinion” is so incandescent that it is hard to imagine that this was, in fact, written in age of deep religious conflict, an epoch increasingly transformed by the fascination of bodies in space (this is the substance of the counter-reformation and the Newtonian thematization of the limit afterall). In particular gloss 554 strikes a tenor for our current epoch: “Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes an opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say that there is nothing fine about it” [1]. In the world after the fall, the intramundane system of felix culpa, is already one of dual power.
In many respects, this image is stronger than that of nihilism as the oblivion of walking upwards gazing at the abyss, because it connects the social pressure of “opinion” to that of the common ground that makes out of blindness the legitimacy of vacuous enlightenment. In the very void that truth will carve out for authority, Pascal seems to imply that the imperium of opinion will reign as a dual power of administration and mediation with the world. This is why for Pascal, force without opinion is indocile; but opinion without force amounts to the persuasion of solitude of the last man in the earth. At the heart of the groundlessness of modern legitimacy there is the necessary organization of opinion or doxa that will regulate the community of the living and the dead because ultimately its end is to master the mystery of language in its inability to name.
Of course, Pascal thought that language could overcome the fictive empire of opinion, which in its modern avatar of propaganda is meant to design apocalyptic tendencies towards self-destruction in the course of historical development. As a “properly speaking wholly animal”, the human can only dwell in a poetic region “entre-deux”, that is, between the abhorrent light and the infinite depth of darkness, where language endures through the symbol well beyond the experience of the fallen corruption of nature. As Lezama Lima reminds us in a short essay on the French thinker, the poetic region in Pascal is ultimately the experience of language as a mystery of creation that refuses to accept the post-mythic condition of nature and human boredom that will euthanize the use of linguistic creation [2]. Now it can be said that the intrusion of the infinite chatter of opinion takes place precisely in the logged forest of speech, which consolidates its rhetorical autonomy of language away from the possibility of distance and self-constrain of the sayable. The statecraft of rhetoric is the infrastructure of the reign of opinion, because here the draining of the depth of being is supplanted by alienated voluntary participation at the very ground of nothingness. Nihilism takes a decisive step forward when language can become any differential sign to communicate what has become impossible to be said outside the cubicle of the enthymeme.
Paraphrasing the ancient wisdom of Pindar’s famous opening verse in Fragment 169 (“Law, νόμος, the king of all”), Pascal assures us of the fragility of this imperium: “An empire based on opinion and imagination resigns for a time, and such an empire is mild and voluntary. That force reigns for ever. Thus opinion is like the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant” [3]. Is it possible to separate, nevertheless, the reign of opinion from that of force; and, secondly, the circulation of force as grounded in a fabric of language that has already descended into the empire of opinion without any trace? In a way, there is no modern politics without the presupposition of the autonomy of a field of opinion integrated into “rational control”, to use the expression of American political theorist Harvey Mansfield. And even if Carl Schmitt could state in his Constitutional Theory (1928) that no democratic secular state could effectively exist out without opinion as a diffused and disorganised form of acclamation, it is now completely obvious to us that the post-liberal state configuration, persists in a constant state of the fluctuation, compartmentalization, and archic steering of opinions. What survives the utter collapse of the category of political modernity is the flattening of language into “opinion” that provides standing to the epochal anomia.
Following classical philologists we are tempted not to ignore that in the word anomia entails not just the suspension of legislated norms and positive commands, but also the decline of the distance between existence and the divine that in antiquity, in the age of Pindar, subsisted under the notion of eunomia as harmonious attunement of the very lived experience. In other words, the consolidation of opinion is a long historical effect of the erosion of distance and perspective that restricts the capacity to “ascertain a spiritual excitement…and if worth anything, a language, a witness to reality” [4]. To bear witness in language is a poetic enactment that, at heart of its solitude, refuses the glacial ripples of the force of opinion vested in reality.
The highest poetic moment in Michel De Certeau’s La culture au pluriel (1974) appears in the concluding pages where the historian resorts to a hunting image: “Culture is an untold night in which the revolutions of earlier times are dormant, invisible, folded into practices – but fireflies, and sometimes great nocturnal birds, cutting through it – as thrusts and creations that trace the promise of another day to come” [1]. This is De Certeau’s trope that stands for culture as opening of possibilities, the shoreline where administrators and technicians (his own terms) do not dare to cross and will probably never adventure. This is the site (the night, la noche oscura, which has a ringtone of the mystical tradition that the author knew perfectly well) where De Certeau wants to posit the possibilities of new struggles of cultural alterities [2]. A book in 1974 means many things, but for De Certeau it is an incursion into the collapse of his historical present, already showing full fledged signs of the crisis of legitimation, erosion of institutional trust, and the decomposition of social forms across Western symbolic realities. It is the nascent confirmation of the ascent of real subsumption, a term that does not appear in De Certeau’s book, although it informs it, even if negatively (the Italian Fiat wildstrikes makes a surprising cameo in the last paragraphs). Where to look, then?
De Certeau’s answer read today does bring much naivete: cultural alterity. But this notion, which is reworked and contested in concrete fields of human activities (the university and schools, the new technological society and communication, social practices intertwined in popular and elite culture, power relations and post-statist configurations) do not appeal to the identitarian cosmopolitan horizon prima facie anchored in the diversity administration of a well integrated, albeit exploited planetary humanity. One senses that for De Certeau the nineteenth century “Social Question” has become the “cultural question” as the unit of the national sovereign state wanes and reacts. With the crisis of legitimation as backdrop, De Certeau sees the rise of a new subjectivity that he calls the new “militants without a cause”, a battalion of “exiles” that will only tacitly accept credible cultural imprints [3]. He wants to work with “culture” because at bottom De Certeau is both a historian and a realist. This new erosion of civil society-State relations entails a “new exile is in the works” [4]. And for De Certeau the exile, since biblical times, is seeking a new Earth where to “land”.
In 1974, De Certeau’s invitation was to create the conditions for pluralist cultural landings that will foster, in the night of waiting, a new politics. But, could the same be said today even assuming concrete situations and the infuriating image of migration as a token for the workings of hegemonic politics? Does Gaia not alert us that we must “land” somewhere else on Earth? The anger and dissatisfaction that De Certeau cautiously predicated head on is already here in the form of what some of us have theorized as ongoing social stasis that is integrated in every social mediation. In the global metastasis of the 1970s De Certeau could claim that “behind anger there is the desire to create a polis and a politics; there is a desire to organize the conditions of life….” [5].
We are far removed from this desire, and even the most prominent cycle of revolts of the decade have refused in the solicitation of a new politics or a political horizon; and, even if, almost like weeds in cracks of piled urban ruins, we see again and again the last residues of the desire for hegemonic representation of the totality (the People, the Movement, the Class). In this light – now it is our own epoche – culture can only be compensatory, and still very much a symptom of the closure of exteriority. “Where there is no longer an imaginable outside we lose the possibility of an inside”, Moreiras wrote at the turn of the century against every form of culturalism [6]. Of course, De Certeau was well aware of it, which is why his proposal to cultural alterity retains zones of hermeneutical ambiguity many decades later [7]. For instance, he writes when commenting on neo-nationalist regional movements (Quebec, Catalonia, Occitania) that “cultural claims appear to be a reminder and a compensation” [8].
And recent events have proven De Certeau correct: what is Catalan nationalism – whether left or right, although ideological division is not a substantive difference – if not a compensatory rhetorical ruse to mobilize regional political elites to feed off the stagnant resources of a waning state form? The rhetoric of “political foundation” in the Catalan case created an “cultural alterity” that depended on the high illusion of hegemonic politics; a politics solely based on the “bad faith” of escalating and superposing values (“Spanish” v. “Catalan”) as the combustion of a fractured political social contract that ultimately deepens its fragmentation. De Certeau noted – cited with the long Augustunian tradition of political liberalism – that politics cannot bring happiness, but only create its conditions. However, today even this liberal ideal fails to account for its true source: our metapolitical collapse at the twilight of secularization means that the revival of the “social bond” is not to be found in the demand of new political principles, however narrowly or broadly defined. De Certeau in 1974 aspired at giving politics one more chance pulling it to the facticial heterogeneity of culture: “a politics that discovers in the diversity of the sky a generical….linked to the ambition of beginning over again, that is, of living” [9].
And indeed, we must begin all over again, but is really the only possibility? I believe that there are symptoms elsewhere in La culture au pluriel, and these concern language. In the second chapter, referring to the crisis of speech, De Certeau refers to the “denaturing act” of speech, as communication enters the regimen of commercial language and new computational masteries (what Jaime Semprún called neo-language) [10]. The crisis of language in the ascent of a new expressivity renders communication obsolete and obtuse; parasitic, or mushroom-like, as Hugo Von Hofmenthal had already noted in his Letter to Lord Chandos. Speech becomes a new form of blasphemy, something confirmed in recent years in the United States, which takes itself also as the homeland of “Free Speech” is increasingly under heavy surveillance by constitutionalism of codified parameters of “time, place, and manner”.
De Certeau shows himself highly consternated about blasphemous language, which is also conspiratorial language; the language that dwells on the reverse of social normativity and legal codification. But this perhaps the only language today can properly speak of pain without recurring to the transactions of violence; especially of the numbing violence of a neo-language that can communicate “everything” insofar as it ceases to communicate to no one. Could the “untold night”, that is also the night of the “unthought”, be the site of the preservation of another use of language, of nurturing language, descending into the hymnic sources of the sayable – thus, inverting the denaturing of historical severability – a language embedded in silence, in the protofigure of the mystic, assuming “the immediacy of nature and experience, to contact of things, one by one, in their primal disorder”? [11]. Ultimately, whatever the night will tell will only be possible through and in language.
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Notes
1. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 138.
2. Ibid., 11.
3. Ibid., 7.
4. Ibid., 8.
5. Ibid., 11.
6. Alberto Moreiras. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Duke U Press, 2001), 21.
7. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78.
8. Ibid., 70.
9. Michel De Certeau. Culture in the Plural (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 100.
10. Jaime Semprún. Defensa e ilustración de la neolengua (Ediciones El Salmón, 2018).
11. Nicola Chiaromonte. “An Age of Bad Faith”, in The Paradox of History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 148. On the hymnic dimension of human speech, see the study undertaken by Nicoletta Di Vita, Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell’inno (Neri Pozza, 2022).
The sudden and uninvited intrusion of Gaia in our world is something rather strange, and yet consistent with the closure of the metaphysical tradition. The call of the outside takes place at the threshold of our reflexive capacities, habits, and mental propositions in our relation with the world, which demands everything to be thought from scratch. The historical imbalance in groundlessness now requires a new task for thinking – the imperative that runs through Alberto Moreiras’ most recent book Tiempo roto: vivir el antropoceno (Palinodia, 2024). The theoretical constellation deployed over the course of a decade now comes to the forefront with extreme urgency – I am referring to marranismo, posthegemony, aprincipial anarchy, and of course, infrapolitics. Tiempo roto (2024) is not a systematic culmination of Moreiras’ philosophical (or antiphilosophical) project of thought, but it is definitely a mature elaboration insofar as the field of problematization enters a hitherto unexplored thematics of late heideggerianism. All things considered, the emerge of the anthropocene as an explicit planetary endgame and the new beginning necessarily move pass the conditions of both political and scientific praxis, which today can only effectively adequate itself into positionality (the so-called Gestell) and objectivity of a world that slowly seems coming to its end.
It might be worth remembering that the notion of “other beginning” (“otro comienzo”) in the wake of civilizational decline was already proposed in the book Sosiego siniestro (2020), but it was far from being thoroughly explained [1]. Following Heidegger’s philosophical scene, representational thought in the tradition of adequatio of the Thomist gnoseology coincides with technological administration of every living entity (Moreiras 14). But Heidegger’s suggestion in the Parmenides that calculative representation fails as grasping the essence of the polis might also have its own limitations, insofar Gaia appeals to an excess beyond or below the politics. As Jacques Camatte also understood it, the civilizational invariant of revolutionary breakthrough departing from the historical subject of the working class can seldomly do the work except as an article of faith in the myth of the autonomy of the proletariat within real subsumption. This means that we are in the terrain of infrapolitics or the chora, which point to ontic regions of thought towards a new beginning at the end of principial metaphysics. But the other beginning can only emerge within conditions of transforming existence against the closure of political technicity.
I do not desire to reconstruct here all the refined analytical movements that lay out the transformation of existence in Tiempo roto (2025), but there is a maxim from Pindar’s Third Pythian Ode that stands out as an emblem for the appropriation of the non-humanity of the world. Moreiras cites Pindar’s “me, phila psycha, bion athanato speude, tan d’emprakton, antlie makanan”, which can roughly be translated as “do not seek, dear soul, immortal life, but do try to carry out the fullest the use of the possible” (Moreiras 61). Moreiras correctly notes that the ultimate difficulty lies in the “emprakton makanan”, or the use of the possible, which metaphysical Humanism and effective general equivalent can only exacerbate towards the planetary production and extractive valorization. The corruption of the use of the possible is the realization of hybris, and in this sense all representational humanism is always already a form of self-deification and induced hallucination, even when it tries to claim to engage in the opposite in relation to nature (Moreiras 65). Moreiras suggests that the pindaric maxim discloses a second relation of the “use of possibles” that does constitute a lacuna in the metaphysical tradition, and that is understanding a praxis tied to sophrosyne or phronesis that abides to the prudent inclination of the non-human (“es una actividad sometida a la vergüenza de lo in-humano”) (Moreiras 65). Giorgio Agamben’s defense an ontology of possibility against the hegemony of metaphysical realization and representation also comes to mind, although Moreiras might not feel at ease at explicitly calling for a positive ontology nourished in the waters of a transfigured metaphysics of the tradition of scholastic Averroism [2]. Although both Moreiras and Agamben come at their closest proximity in terms of the notion of the chora – and more directly the space of the chora against the primacy of the polis – which serves the ontic condition for the non-spatial surfacing of the abode or region that is necessarily infrapolitical, because it’s never determined by distributionist political isonomia or meson (Moreiras 73).
There are important nuances here to say the least: whereas for Agamben the notion of chora appeals to the gods of place (theos aisthetos), and thus a dejointed form of divinization decoupled from the legitimacy of every politico-theological archein; for Moreiras, the chora is a praxis of thought towards desecularization that lacks theology, and thus capable of exceeding the onto-theological reduction (Moreiras 74). But Moreiras says about the tendency towards nihilism of “possibility” in the historical dispensation of positionality (Gestell) could also be said about ‘de-secularization’, as the ultimate consequence of the decay of political legitimation in Ernst Bockenforde’s famous formulation. This might not be the space nor the moment to reach a verdict between Moreiras and Agamben’s position regarding the very complicated problem of the Platonic site of the sensible, since what is presented to the reader as a ‘phenomenology of excess’ or the inapparent (something merely alluded in the Zahringer seminar), might be the condition of an atopic mediation that prepares – or that has always prepared since the times of Orphic myths – the tonality of a coming philosophy under the sign of transformative thought (Moreiras 110) [3].
The dispensation of the Gestell open up and also step back (a folded movement that does not have a declension into a synthesis) into the genesis of the beginning (Moreiras 115). And the anthropocentric epochal dispensation, says Moreiras, is no longer the site of the polis, but “the planet as a the historical site of humanity, although we are still unaware of it (“aunque sigamos desconociéndolo”) (Moreiras 116). This uncanny phenomenology of the primary, traversed by the discharge of the entstehung, is the infrapolitical site par excellence, because it is in the atopic region where destiny is both affirmed and displaced. This is why, as Moreiras recalls Heidegger saying, the dialogue with Parmenides never exhausts itself, and yet it prepares a destiny (Moreiras 134). I take this to mean that there is an experience of the transfiguration of language for the emergence of an “ethics” (ethos), but this might be beyond Moreiras preliminary conditions for an existential breakthrough; that is, something possible further along the path.
Tiempo roto (2024) closes with a couple of undeveloped pages that take Massimo Cacciari’s old essay “Confrontation with Heidegger” (1977), in which the Italian philosopher makes a plea for a direct confrontation with Heidegger and Nietzsche’s teachings on nihilism and the closure of metaphysics if there would still be any hope for the composition of the working class during the stage of anthropomorphized dimension of capital defined by Jacques Camatte also during those years. But much has changed since the hot Italian summer of 1977 and the formulaic conjunction of “left Heideggerianism” might not do the work anymore, as if the totality of materialist political economy could be amended by a radicalization of the historical question and the ontological difference. Political economy plus metaphysical critique is still relying on a conception of the political as a technique, which today has transformed into what some have called the “new regime of ecological accumulation” as mere stabilization of green ecological spheres of life [4].
But there is a second register to Cacciari’s programmatic thesis that remains open. And these might be Moreiras’ most important words in the concluding part of the book: “Espero haber mostrado que Hiedegger señala la posibilidad de dejar atrás la explotación y el consumo en la era del Antropoceno a través de una comprensión alotrópica de nuestra relación con el mundo. Por lo tanto, vivir en el Antropoceno debe basarse en el abandono o desplazamiento de la metafísica como modo dominante de aprehensión del mundo en la actualidad” (Moreiras 151-152). Marx’s materialist dialectic through the critique of political economy – even as a destitution of political economy through its own vectorization – might be insufficient to face the unprogrammed presence posed by planetary anthropocene.
Perhaps we can still repeat Dionys Mascolo’s words that the coming communism will owe more to Hölderlin than than Marx, not because of an idealist dispute over concepts, but rather because of what Cacciari called in his essay, also citing the German poet, the historical “affinity of conditions” [5]. And in the age of the Anthropocene and positionality, those conditions are kept in the pattern of economic decline or stagnation in which the law of rate of profit encounters its own limit, folded unto the ongoing destruction of the life forms in the world. The allotropic praxis endorsed by Moreiras finds traction in Hölderlin’s poetic dwelling in language at the heart of decline so that something other might emerge within and beyond life, from Gaia to Ctonia. This is the most difficult task to depart from, but it is also the path that saves from the current inhabitable passage of the Earth.
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Notes
1. Alberto Moreiras, Sosiego siniestro (Guillermo Escolar, 2020), 24.
2. Giorgio Agamben. L’irrealizzabile: Per una politica dell’ontologia (Einaudi, 2022), 112-146. Kindle Edition.
3. For more on orphism and the limits of the site of the Greek polis, see Gianni Carchia’s Orfismo e tragedia (Quodlibet, 2019), epilogue by Julien Coupat.
In a fragment from 1919 entitled “World and Time”, written around the time of the elaboration of the essay on the question of violence, Walter Benjamin offers his most succinct definition of politics: “My definition of politics: the fulfillment of unelevated [ungesteigerten] humanness” [1]. The ontological reduction is compact, and the three terms in it are carefully chosen: fulfillment, unelevation, and humanness, which indicates a ‘preparation for a profane politics’ at the threshold of secularization and its negation in a new “spiritual ornamentation”, as he would claim in the notes of “Capitalism and Religion”. The stress on the refusal of “elevation” (gesteigerten), however, does bring to bear that Benjamin’s refusal of a political ontology constrained in subjective and objective representation, which is why in the same fragment he connects the abutting of politics to a “living-corporality” [Leiblichkeit] of the human species. To retract from the cycle of civilizational violence, politics had to be reformed from the groundlessness of the energy of the living.
Hence, for Benjamin there is a metapolitical condition or archipolitics that plays out in refusing “elevated humanity”, which for him was at the source of the romantic response to the impasse of the critical enlightenment, placing the subject of knowledge and its self-reflective faculty at the center of the developing self-rationalization of the spiritual transcendence of the world in this new critical religion: “…the ideal of humanity by rising up to…that very law which, joined to earlier laws, assures an approximation to the eternal ideal of humanity” [2]. Hence, neither trascendental representation nor spiritualized immanence of order could, but unelevation of the “human possibilities” (Menschhaftigkeit). But such possibilities could only be disclosed beyond the pretensions of spiritual elevations of a unified consciousness, as Erich Unger had proposed in his Politics and Metaphysics (1921) around the same time to enact a “politics of exodus” for a common psychosocial regeneration.
Benjamin’s proximity and distance from Unger’s position could perhaps inform why instead of writing a promised book that was going to be entitled True Politics (Die Wahre Politik) – allegedly containing two chapters “The destitution of power” and “Teleology without ultimate goal” – evolved into the landmark essay “Towards the critique of violence”, in which the frame of domination and the ontology of politics was recasted as a mediation about the folding of secularized annihilating violence, substance intrinsic to the philosophy of history and indestructible life of the soul (“annihilating only in a relative sense…never absolute with regard to the soul of the living”) [3]. Thus, one could say that accounting for the groundwork of “politics” meant accepting the constitutive verticality cosigned to modern philosophy of history, and its bipolar schematism between moral principles and sacrificial production. If Peter Fenves’ assumption is correct, Benjamin was not only inscribing a distance from Unger, but, more importantly, from Kant’s Toward Eternal Peace who defined his “true politics” as dependent on moral determination: “The true politics can therefore not take a step without having already paid homage to morality, and although politics by itself is a difficult art, its union with morality is no art all, for as soon as the two struggle against each other, morality into two cuts the knot that politics cannot dissolve – The right of human beings must be held sacred [heilig], however great a sacrifice this may yet the dominant power” [4].
The Kantian liquidation of politics to morality is hyperbolic to the modern epoch and its crisis – the crisis and enmity against the concept of the political, Carl Schmitt would claim in Political Theology (1922) – rendering modern politics and legitimacy hollow; something that Benjamin had understood well he saw to retract from the question of “politics” to that of a critico-metaphysical exploration waged on morality “as nothing other than the refraction of action in knowability, something from the region of knowledge…Morality is not ethos” [5]. Elevation could only have meant the production of a subject of knowledge and the specific (technical) arrangement of knowledges for subjection. On the contrary, the ethos was the necessary condition no longer for any “coming politics”, but rather for the disclosure of “the coming world” [die kommende Welt] itself. This means that working through the redemption of the world solicits a reversal from morality to ethics only to later transform the conditions of politics.
Let us return to the definition of politics as “unelevated [ungesteigerten] humanness”. What defines “unelevation”? From the ethical point of view it conjoins with the notion of “inclination” [Neigung] that Benjamin favors because of its unconditional valance that disarms the cycle of violence of the human community and its willful hostilities. The inclination rejects the paradigm of force because it an erotic mediation, that is, an affection of donation and love beyond exchange [6]. But inclination is only possible through language, as Benjamin had expressed in his “concept of politics” in a letter to Martin Buber from 1916: “I understand the concept of politics in its broadest sense…in this sense, therefore, language is only one means of more or less suggestively laying the groundwork for the motives that determine the person’s actions in his heart of hearts. Only the intensive aiming of words into the core of intrinsic silence is truly effective action” [7].
Thus, the suspended elevation of the subject and higher order meant that its persuasive purity allows the inception of the “divine” as a «teleology without a goal» validated by the suspension of judgement of appearance. The intensification of the unelevation opens life to an ethical demand of a “living corporality” that roams the world’s crust beyond depredation where the force of autonomy of social practices does not risks the world of life forms and the soul. Indeed, at this point Benjamin does join Unger’s cardinal thesis: “Overcoming capitalism through wandering”. Or as he wrote even earlier about Hölderlin’s poetics: “[In the world of Hölderlin], the living are always stretching of space, the plane spread out within which destiny extends itself…it already comprehends the fulfillment of destiny” [8]. A politics oriented pending dowards to “unelevation”, inhabits the ground level of co-existence and cultivation dismissing the ontological derivatives or principles (archein) of ‘politics’ in order to conquer every possible destiny in the lawless fulfillment of the world.
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Notes
1. Walter Benjamin. “World and Time”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 74.
2. Walter Benjamin. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism”, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 138.
3. Walter Benjamin. “Toward the Critique of Violence”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 58.
4. Peter Fenves. “Introduction”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 18-19.
5. Walter Benjamin. “Ethics, Applied to History”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 74.
6. Walter Benjamin. “On Kantian Ethics”, in Walter Benjamin: Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2021), 71.
7. Walter Benjamin. “Letter to Martin Buber” (1916), in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 79-80.
8. Walter Benjamin. “Two Poems by Fredrich Hölderlin”, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926 (Harvard University Press, 1996), 26.
The techno-administrative organization of the world that is showing off its force these days is only possible thanks to a previous devastation of the opacity of language, which ultimately connects human beings and the world. It is also the mysterious vortex of the breaking point of humanity into being, of which today there is only remembrance and scholastic teaching but seldomly authentic expression. When politicians, engineers, and social functionaries stubbornly distract us with open attempts to decimate secondary languages, prohibiting the annunciation of words through the legal enforcement of “place and manner” norms, and elevate abhorrent structures of linguistic commands and information as units of social interaction, it is obvious that the collapse has already happened. It also means that in terms of “Social” planning humanity has ceased to exist under the shadow of speech, to use an expression from Helene Lubienska. Hence, it is all the more absurd to confront this transformation with a strategy of multiplication of rhetorical codified languages that merely deepen the schism between the expressivity of language and their worlds. It suffices to say that any recognition of a para-official language of social interaction plays into the fictitious polarity of homogeneous globality and reified nationalism – the constitution of print nationalism being the historical destruction of minor and dispersed languages of remote places and villages for the sake of the organization of a productive fictitious historical subject.
We must ponder what it means that the current imperial world order is one that does not offer a language, let alone the flourishing of minor or ‘vulgar’ languages as in the Latin Middle Ages, but rather an exit from language, which is the cybernetic project of codifying flows of information and looping inputs in which asymptotically humanity surrenders their languages. In past imperial adventures, language was either a tool to subordinate the world of the colonized, or it was a lingua franca of elites (administrators and the clergy) that allowed for the real existing languages in the territories integrated precisely by their exclusion or subalternity to the civilizing regime guided by literacy. The sharp contrast with today it is striking, since it is all too clear that the project of cybernetics, and its most recent avatar “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), is fundamentally an Empire that does not even require to rule and neutralize the “civil war over words” that Thomas Hobbes repudiated in the European confessional state, since its ultimate goal is not political statecraft, but the regulation of unworldly bodies of social reproduction.
This is why some contemporary engineers have said that AI requires “a reconfiguration of the social contract”, with the caveat that it would necessarily be a “social contract beyond language and thus without politics”. The last social dispensation at the hands of engineers is the human soul, as it has been said. For this conception of language, it matters to only understand it as a semiotic reduction of the expressive human being to naked animality as the general form of the posthistorical being in the present. It is noteworthy that a great North American writer, Cormac McCarthy, while working on this problem of language at the Santa Fe Institute scientific research program (a central hub of American developments for artificial science and the unification of the sciences), reached the conclusion that language must be understood in relation to a virus: “a virus nicely machined. Offer it up, Turn it sligh, Push it in, Click. Nice Fit. But the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit…The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that” [1]. The “unruly nature” of language, precisely because it does not fit into the biological pattern of virological model, must be mastered into an accompanying narrative of the social world, taking the copula and grammar as the final functionalization of the fictitious community. The artificiality of language is a civilizational decay that takes place not as heteronomic cooptation by technological advancement, but within its own internal abdication of its voice and mystery.
It is precisely this internal threat that the American sinologist Ernest Fenollosa sought to expose in the most polemical moment of his posthumous tract The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (Stanley Nott, 1936) – an essay that was restituted, let us not forget, by Ezra Pound precisely to confront the pauperization of ‘Basic English’ as the standard of linguistic use – in which he writes the following observation about the extreme filing of words: “Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning. Nature would seem to have become less like a paradise and more and more like a factory. We are content to accept the vulgar misuse of the moment. A late stage of decay is arrested and embalmed in the dictionary” [2]. Fenollosa could not have foreseen that the posthistorical epoch – an epoch of the most furious abandonment of thinking – there was nothing else to file in terms of the expressivity and poetic soil of speech. The course of American artificial humanity is not a human with a pocket-dictionary; it is something way more grotesque: an animal that can repeat and chatter sounds and symbols severed of its proximity with any linguistic inherence and the sensorial worlds. And it goes without saying that the engineering plan against the poetic soil of speech, as North American poet understood well, means that this war is waged against the last reserve; that is, the ethos understood as ‘the cave of everyone’s inner being’.
Infrapolitical Reflections 