Posthegemony

Can holistic politics do the heavy lifting? On Michalis Lianos’ Direct Democracy: The Change Towards Holistic Politics (2022). by Gerardo Muñoz

Michalis Lianos’ Direct Democracy: The Change Towards Holistic Politics (2022) defines itself as a social manifesto to confront the transformation of the nature of political power, public institutions, and the tradition of political representation inherited from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This is something that Michalis Lianos – one of the most interesting sociologists of social control of his generation – had already alluded to in his writing during the cycle of revolts of the Yellow Vests in France [1]. In more than one way, Direct Democracy: The Change Towards Holistic Politics (2022) is an expansion of this intuition; although, unlike most manifestos, the book does not take up the tone of denunciation and rupture, but rather of extreme prudence to construct and adequate itself to the complexity of our contemporary societies to a new regime of power distribution and individual empowerment. The total political alienation from public deliberation and participation is, according to Lianos, what stands in the way of people’s common interests. Institutions, political parties, the formalist separation of powers, and the legislative bodies (now in the hands of administrative agencies and corporate firms) have been radically disconnected from people’s lives to the point of becoming endogamic in its practices of decision making and public governance.

No one today can doubt the univocal distrust on all things political (a sentiment dating back to the Romantic age if we are to believe Carl Schmitt) which reminds us that the most interesting social insurrections in recent times have been against the democratic neutralization of the specific metropolitan and capital organization of administrative power. In the face of this schism, Lianos proposes a move towards direct democracy that can short circuit these institutional actors and partisan interests in order to revitalize people’s empowerment. The realization of direct democracy presupposes – and this Lianos’ propositional reinvention of the unity of politics – what he terms a new ‘Holistic Politics”, which he understands as a new civic attitude and a culture between citizens in a “holistic away, as a whole” (Lianos 2022, 2). The aim is to empower and lower public and private decision making at the scale of people’s life consistent with “social trust as the key for a happy collective life” (Lianos 2022, 3). The operative notion of Holistic Politics is, then, both a model of institutional design through the problem of scale; and, at the same time, a reassessment of the epistemological grounds of social action. In other words, for Lianos Holistic Politics should not be oriented towards putting the right answers in any social project, but rather to “ask society the right questions each time” (Lianos 2022, 9). We presume that what is “right” in the “right questions” point to an existential need of the whole, since given the plasticity of Holistic Politics, it cannot appeal directly to neither social facts (since these are always changing) nor a stable legislative agenda of higher representatives (there are inexistent for direct democracy). Regardless of these specificities, Holistic Politics does impose a need that the direct democracy will demand a greatest individual and community participation on fundamental issues raised by the social assembly list of objectives as raised by anyone in the community.

Lianos defines the problem of mitigating social issues within the framework of Holistic Politics in this way: “Holistic Politics recognizes that the most basic political process is the equal right of anyone to put forward issues for discussion and decision. So it is constantly vigilant to ensure, with specific measures that wherever exercises power is required to give answers as to the issues and priorities raised but never to ask the questions or influence how they are put. Issues are raised and ranked in order by the citizens themselves” (Lianos 2022, 15). Lianos is aware that every form of established institutional behavior ends up becoming a social habit (it has what some political scientists called, at least years back, “institutional stickiness”) , and this is why rules for immersion in social interaction must change on a regular basis (Lianos 2022, 17). It is true that rules are the infrastructure to limit social actions (this is, in fact, its unlimited possibilities); although, it begs to ask to what extent the regular change of social rules do not become in itself a habit within the very logic of exchange that defines structurally the social. To put it in different terms, it is insufficient to think, as Lianos does, that capitalism is a concentration of all entities into money form; rather, it is because there is an anterior civil form of exchange that the problem of value always emerges as an indirect force against the unit of the political (Lianos 2022, 21). If one changes the lens from strict capitalist exchange to the problem of value, then it becomes clear that what first appears as an alteration of rules in social facts could, potentially, constitute itself as an aleatory imposition of values, where the “happy life” of some could amount to the valorized “hellish life” of others. Holistic Politics in the same way that it does not say anything about values, it remains silent about the problem of institutions, even though institutions are far from being part of the stagnation of representative democracy that Lianos wants to surpass.

The central question for Holistic Politics is whether it can do the heavy lifting that it promises to accomplish. Can Holistic Politics really open up a way out of the current poverty of the species in the wake of social and civilizational collapse? Lianos seems to be aware of this question if only in passing, as he writes on the subdivision on “Foreigners”: “Holistic Politics is an approach for the entire human species at its present stage of development” (Lianos 2022, 41). This ‘present stage of development’ of the human species remains largely unqualified, and Lianos takes the route of geopolitics and the necessity to overcome the classical separation of powers. But to the extent that we are taking recourse to the human species, there is a fundamental topological and territorial dimension that we are sidestepping too quickly. At bottom the human species is a creature that steps on the Earth crust, and which today have been designated in relation (whether included or excluded) to the metropolitan regime of concentrated and amalgamated reserves for production and consumption [2]. We can say that this is the last expression of civil nihilism: the capability of putting to work; or rather, of the power to put into energy certain elements in any given structure of exchange. And we are barely raising the question here that lingers from Lianos’ assumption. It suffices to say that the spatial composition of the human species today is erased from Lianos’ Holistic Politics, which is raises enormous doubts as to whether a social assembly, the rotation of social rules, and the redesigning of democratic voting can really do the heavy lifting for what is required for this “moment” of the human species. If this is so, then Lianos’s Direct Democracy has not moved past the Atlantic republicanist tradition that placed voting and participation at heart of the democratic polity (this is the heart of the Federalist, as Sanford Levison argued a few years ago). Holistic Politics in this outlook is probably the last residue of modern politics now grafted into the regime of social organization. But we would like to be as precise as possible about this affirmation.

Towards the end of the manifesto Michalis Lianos argues that Holistic Politics brings the individual and society face to face (Lianos 2022, 114). But if this is endgame of Holistic Politics it is also where we found ourselves in the gridlock of social denomination as an extensive (and intensive) regime of adaptation; of forever changing norms, of arbitrary rule making and rule erecting, and governing through contingent situation through the balancing of cost and benefit rationality of social cohesion. In this sense, the conception of the “overall point of view of the social experience” can describe the social composition, but it cannot transcend, as alteration and changing based on needs and values is already folded within it (Lianos 2022, 90). I take it that something analogous could be said of the problem of equity and proportionality in relation to adjudication and the rule of law in the paradigm of Holistic Politics, since what has triumphed in advanced societies of the West is not the fossilized conception of the separation of powers and the empire of judges and courts, but rather the expansion of equity and balancing of principles based on a cost & benefit rationalization to adjust and transform always already mutating social facts (Lianos 2022, 105).

Insofar as it is committed to the primacy of principles of equity and balancing, Holistic Politics does not breach the current framework of value distribution for specific ends of social reproduction (Lianos might say that his ends are better and stronger since he has done away with political representation, but we are also aware that there is an autonomy of value that can be operative on the borders of the political, in fact, it no longer depends on the political unit). There is an interesting discussion by Lianos on the question of failure and social expectations in Holistic Politics – to take up failure beyond the economic penalties and social mortification of the current neoliberal regime – that open up new possibilities only insofar as we move then from and against the infrastructure of the civil exchange principle for social action. Perhaps the realism that Direct Democracy (2022) appeals to has also something to tell us here, since the current collapse of the social regime is one in which failure is abundant, regularly optimized, and rendered productive through forms that accrue greater and intensive force of valorization. But can the irruption of failure in Holistic Politics be taken as a hole within the scheme of valorization? Perhaps it is in this schism where the question of the present stage of the human-species and a politics of experience can be posited against the grain of total social subsumption. The task of a different democratic imagination should depart from this void.

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Notes 

1. Michalis Lianos. “La política experiencial o los chalecos amarillos como pueblo”, traducción & introducción por Gerardo Muñoz, eldiario, Noviembre 2019: https://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/politica-experiencial-chalecos-amarillos-pueblo_132_1289123.html

2. Amadeo Bordiga. The Human Species and the Earth’s Crust (Pattern Books, 2020), 30-31. 

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

The core of my present intervention was prompted by a joke recently told by a friend. This friend said: “Alberto Moreiras is Spain’s most important Italian philosopher”. I felt I had to respond to it, in my own sort of way, such as this brief intervention. I will offer at least three hypotheses as why that was said. First, what is obvious: Moreiras’ analytical reflection is irreducible to the dominant Spanish philosophical or cultural reflection, however we take that to be (taking in consideration that Moreiras’ work is hardly defined solely by the Spanish archive or historical tradition). Second, that Moreiras’ reflection is somewhat close to the Italian philosophical tradition, particularly in the wake of the contemporary turn of “Italian Difference”. Thirdly, that Moreiras’ own singular thought shares a vinculum with the Italian philosophical culture as “thinking on life”, as perhaps best defined by Roberto Esposito in his Living Thought (2011). There is probably no way to find out the original “intention” of said friend in terms of the Italian signatura of Moreiras’ work, and it is not my desire defend any of three hypotheses. Rather, in what follows what I want to develop is a preliminary exploration of the way in which Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (2006) could be very well read a horizon of thought that retreats from community vis-à-vis the non-subject that transfigures the “democratic kernel of domination” (Moreiras 94).

In this analytical development I want to ‘actualize’ Línea de sombra’s potential not very rehearsing the arguments against the so called decolonial option, the metaphysical concepts of Empire and multitude, or the critique of the humanism of the politics of the subject, all of them contested in the book. It is not that I think that those discussions are closed, but rather that I want to suggest that a different politics of thought that radicalizes and abandons those very notions – nomos, legacy, and subject – through the practice of infrapolitical reflection. Hence, I will take up two instances of this nomic sites of contemporary reflections in the so called school of “Italian Difference”; mainly, Remo Bodei’s “Italian” entry in the Dictionary of untranslatables (Princeton U Press, 2014), and Roberto Esposito’s articulation of “Italian philosophy” in his Living Thought: the origins and actuality of Italian Philosophy(Stanford U Press, 2011). I would like to anticipate a critique that could perhaps note that I am putting off Italian thought, or even antagonistically clashing two schools of thought. I am not interested in establishing what could well said to be a legislative clash between theories. I am also aware that Italian Difference is a topological heterogeneity that organizes variations of common themes among thinkers, but that it is not reducible to what singular thinkers generate in their own effective elaborations. In this way, you could say that what I am interested here is in the way in which a certain nomic grounding under the name of ‘Italian Thought’ has been articulated, grounded, and posited as a tradition between conservation and rupture. In the remaining of this intervention, I would like to offer some preliminary speculative ideas about the way in which infrapolitical reflection decisively emerging from Línea de sombra divergences from the general horizon of radical democratic politics advanced by Italian theory.

For reasons that are not just chronological, I think Remo Bodei’s entry in the Dictionary of the untranslatables is preparatory for Esposito’s own take on the territorial and exterritorial force of “Italian Philosophy” in his 2005 book. Indeed, Esposito records in a footnote Bodei’s entry, as well as other recent contribution to the topic such as Borradori’s Recording Metaphysics: New Italian Philosophy (Northwestern, 1988), Virno & Hardt’s Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minnesota, 1996), and Chieza’s The Italian Difference Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (2009). An important predecessor reflecting on Italian philosophical culture – ignored by both Esposito and Bodei – is Mario Perniola’s early “Difference of the Italian Philosophical Culture” (1984), which already establishes the conditions for thinking this nomic specificity beyond the encompassing paradigm of the nation-state, and against the grain of the organization based Italian identity of the Risorgimento. For Perniola, “this is now over, and that natilistic ways, based on a comparison and vindication of identities have completely exhausted their historical function” (Perniola 105). The exhaustion of a national philosophical script is what reversely makes the case for Italian thought to be a thinking measured by civic activism, which entails that the conditions for transmission and interruption of tradition is essentially through a distance between history and language (Perniola 108-09).

sIn a profound way, Italian philosophy is what speaks without historicizing itself, or what speak the non-historiciable to put in Vico’s terms in the New Science. This amounts to an interruption of any philosophy of history, since it discloses a region of what cannot be rendered a science of history. Italian philosophic reflection opens up to the collapse of narration not as consequence of State persecution or constitutive violence, but as a function of a politics incapable of coinciding with the Italian nation-state (as we know this is the symptom of Gramsci’s formulation of the subaltern, and the North-South relations the Prison Notebooks). Perniola’s early essay is an important salient informant of Bodei’s entry, since what arouses the second’s reflection is precisely the drift towards a civil philosophy, or what is the same, a philosophy based on a civic vocation. Thus, writes Bodei:

“From a broad historical perspective and taking into account the limits imposed by its irreducible complexity the Italian language has been character by a constant and predominant civil vocation. By civil I mean a philosophy that is not immediately tied to the sphere of the state, nor to that region of interiority. In fact, ever since its humanist and Renaissance origins, its privileged interlocutors have not been specialist, clerics or students, attending university, but a wider public, a civil society one has sought to orient, to influence, to mold” (Bodei 516). 

Italian language, which for Perloina was constitutive of Italian thought, here takes a civic function that exceeds the proper limits of the philosophical act. This is why Bodei’s most important symptomatic definition is Machiavelli’s ‘verità efffecttuale della cosa’, which is guided by desire at the intersection between tradition and innovation, revolution and rupture. For Bodei’s Italian vernacular language necessarily breaks away from the very containment of the philosophical nomos, spilling over an excess that is anti-philosophical or ultra-philosophical. By proxy of Leopardi’s writings, Bodei argues against the ‘German poem of reason’, defending a poetical space of thought that knows (according to Leopardi) “the true and concrete…the theory of man, of governments, and so on, that they Germans have made none”. The point being is not just that Italian philosophers are ultra or non-philosophical, but that an antiphilosophy of praxis, of what citizens already do. The difference, according to Bodei vis-à-vis Croce, only rests upon critico-practical reflection as the central determination of thinking in Italian (523). 

As it is for Esposito – but we can say also for Agamben in the last volume of the Homo sacer series, L’uso dei corpi (Neri Pozza, 2014) – philosophy is a praxis that provide immanent validation for Aristotle’s treatment of dunamys and energeia, as well as his general typology of causation. What is at stake here is nothing less than the actualization of the question of technology (technê), which Bodei reads in Galileo’s as a contestation to the systematization of maquination (Gestell). The scientific thought of Bruno or Galileo bring to halt the machination that Heidegger understood as the end and realization of epochality through gigantism, by positing the artificiality of the apparatus (of the ‘thing’) as an extension of nature, and not as its mere opposition (Bodei 527). Although he does not explicitly thematizes it on its proper terms, one could very easily read in this argumentation the polarity that structures Italian non-philosophy: the question of civic vocation (klesīs) and the question of nihilism (the co-belonging between technique and philosophy of history). 

What is rather puzzling about Bodei’s argumentation is that at no point does he account for a genealogy of what I would call the non-philosophy of life, or even the life of non-philosophy as the excess of the philosophical life in the Italian republics. In other words, Bodei leaves out the sophist, and it is the figure of the sophist what ultimately lead a positive civic contemplative life outside the constrains of philosophical schools, such as stoicism (Bonazzi & Bènatouïl 2006). Instead, what he does offer and reconstructs is the paradigm of an Italian philosophical tradition that still structures itself between tradition and interruption, thought and action, immanence and life. This is the conflictivity or differend – we could also call its krisis, which Cacciari’s studied in relation to the labor of the negative in his important book Krisis: Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negative (1976)– that in Bodei remains unresolved at the political register, still organized around the concept of the “civil”. 

Roberto Esposito’s Pensiero vivente (Giulio, 2010) shares many of the basic premises advanced by Bodie, but there is little doubt that it is the most sophisticated and sustained reflection on thinking the nature and the political consequences of “Italian Difference” in the wake of nihilism and biopolitics after Michel Foucault’s critique of governmentality. Although unlike Bodei, Esposito pushes the political consequences to its limits on the relation between philosophy and history. According to Esposito, it is on this threshold that a region beyond the impasse of the philosophical and political categories of Western modernity, would allow an actuality of thought with transformative capacities and innovative energy (Esposito 21). Departing from Deleuze & Guattari’s anarchic definition of philosophy as de-territorializing, Esposito affirms not an ultra-philosophy or a non-philosophy, but the development of an uneven grammar that is universal due to its very singularity, that is, it could travel unbounded throughout Europe with arguments, formulations, and images that everyone could make their own and share (20). 

Esposito outlines three different paradigms of Italian difference: a political one that solicits conflict in every instance; a radical historicity of the non-historical; and one of life, which is to be understood as both the worldliness of the modern subject and the deconstructive gesture of the dual theological machine folded on the person.  I want to limit myself to elaborate on the first and third declinations (political conflict and life). Esposito also thinks against the German or English traditions understood as State traditions – the traditions of Locke, Hegel, or Fichte – which he sees as constituting the state knowledge of the political (Esposito 21). Esposito views them as philosophies of history, whose nexus to the political is one of consensus and not of disagreement or antagonism. Instead, “Italian philosophy has shown a critical and sometimes antagonistic potential not commonly found in other contexts. Sometimes, in special situations, and under certain conditions – in the case of a drastic transition between epochs like the one we have been experiencing for some hears now – what appears to be, an is, in effect, a lack or an antimony can transform itself into advance compared to more stable, well-established situations” (21). 

This ‘antagonistic potential’ defiantly avoids the nihilism of acting according to the presenting of principles of the normative order. However, so it seems to argue Esposito, the antagonistic politics feeds off crisis, is born out of transitional or inter-epocal subsumption. The question is similar to the one that one could formulate against the hegemonic principle overriding the populistic logic, which Moreiras frames it in this way in Línea de sombra: “if hegemony is the democratic horizon of domination [because it is not consensual], the search for a politics of the closure of sovereignty begs the question about the end of subalternity in a radically democratic horizon” (Moreiras 94). But the truth of democratic politics is only possible against the condition of hegemonic attainment. Esposito writes this much: “…[against] the Hegelian identification between politics and state, the world of life is cut through by pervasive struggle, in a fight to idea for hegemony: whether like it or no, we are always forced to take a position in favor of one part against the other” (Esposito 25). 

I would not go as far as to say this exhaust the horizon of Esposito’s political thought, from the intricacies of the impolitical to his most recent turn to the impersonal. However, this does mark a fissure from the possible of generating a radical theory of de-theologizing the political, an operation of thought not alien to the infrapolitical horizon (132). Essentially, the problem here is not about the theory of hegemony, or the continuation of hegemonic principle of Roman politics, as what continues to divide and administer life through domination. More so, I would argue, give that we are seeing here a second order of interior domination that posits the life of infrapolitics at the expense of the political and the community (munus). This means, that if one takes seriously the articulation of infrapolitics as the possibility of action outside the subject, that it is not enough to think the politics of Italian difference as a pre-statist that is always already the promise of a democratic or post-democratic infrapower as governed by a counter-hegemony of decision (Moreiras 224). Secondly, this leads to the question of contingency that underlines the very co-belonging between history and philosophy of the Italian Difference. Stefano Franchi is right in noting that the “sporgenza” or protrusions are processes that punctuate the body and archive of Italian thought. Protrusions are also what allow for the development of epochs, constituting the excess and contingent foundation of the historical unfolding as such. Of course, the pressing question is: “and how do we know if ‘Il Pensiero vivente’ as such – not the book Esposito wrote, but though he advocates in its last sentence as a breach capable of renewing contemporary philosophy as a whole – is capable to uncover those events in unprecedented ways?” (Franchi 31). And what is more: how does one establishes a co-substantial difference from an epochal presence of living thought to Esposito’s own thought (impersonal / third person)?

My purpose here is not to resolve this aporia in Esposito’s characterization of Italian Difference, because to cross its nihilism. Infrapolitics has something to say here in regards to location. In the chapter on infrapolitics in Linea de sombra, Alberto argues: “The difference between an imperfect experience and one reducible to an aporia is also the difference between understanding the aporetic as the end of thinking, and that of understanding as a reflexive opening that is the beginning of an infrapolitical practice in the same location where the suppression against the aporia reinforces the exorbitant violence of the imperial biopolitical hegemony” (Moreiras 235). But infrapolitical dwells necessarily in a non-space or alocation, since is very excess is the falsification of life; that is, what is no longer structured around an enemy for political antagonism. Italian Difference necessitates a non-supplementary exodus that is infrapolitical life, what escapes biopolitical life of the community.

Here one must ask, what is the relation between alocationality and democracy? Is there a democracy of the impersonal or the unequal? This is a difficult question to ask at this moment, but it is pertinent if the question about civic duty (Bodei) or immanentization of social strife is constitutive Italian thought. Following the political historian of Ancient Greece, Christian Meier, Agamben concludes his recent Stasis (2015) by suggesting that the politization brought by the isonomic foundation carries the latent possibility of social strife or stasis, which is the obfuscation of the ontology of war (politics) within the polis. This runs counter to Arendt, who in On Revolution attributed non-rule to the principle of isonomy as antecedent to democracy as majority rule (Arendt 30). It also seems insufficient to end at Esposito’s determination of the community based on the logistics of binding-debt (munus), intensified today by the total unification of existence and world, in what Moreiras has called the principle of equivalence (Moreiras 2016). Is infrapolitics then, always, a shadow of civil war? If the non-subject cannot constitute isonomic citizenship; infrapolitics disjoints the mediation between the political and the differential absorption of differences. In other words, posthegemonic democracy prepares a different institutionalization for political relation that no longer covers the empty space of the One at the heart of the civil.     

* A version of this text was written on the occasion of a roundtable on Alberto Moreiras’ book Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (2006, 2021), which Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and I organized for the ACLA 2016 at Harvard University. I am actualizing it here with minor changes in light of the first discussion on “Italian theory” in the framework of the Foro Euroamericano, at 17/instituto, which I am co-organizing along with José Luis Villacañas, Benjamin Mayer Foulkes, and José Miguel Burgos-Mazas. The first session is mow available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BjW4euQduE

Bibliography

Alberto Moreiras. Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (Palinodia, 2006).

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

Giorgio Agamben. Stasis: civil war as a political paradigm (Stanford University Press, 2015).

Hannah Arendt. On Revolution (Penguin Books, 1986).

Mario Perniola. “The difference of Italian philosophical culture”. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 10, N.1, Spring 1984.

Mauro Bonazzi & Thomas Benatouïl. Theoria, Praxis and the Contemplative Life after Plato and Aristotle (Brill, 2012).

Reiner Schürmann. Broken Hegemonies (Indiana University Press, 2003).

Remo Bodei. “Italian”. Dictionary of untranslatables (Princeton University Press, 2014), 515-527

Roberto Esposito. Living thought: the origins and actuality of Italian Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2012).

Stefano Franchi. “Living thought and living things: on Roberto Esposito’s Il pensiero vivente“. Res Publica: Revista de filosofia politica, 29 (2013), 19-33.

Nota sobre el “centrismo” de Carlo Galli. Por Gerardo Muñoz

Varios amigos que estimo han reaccionado con algo que dice Carlo Galli en el intercambio. El momento en cuestión es el siguiente: “Una democracia carente de un centro político y de la capacidad de analizar sus dinámicas y de poder responder a ellas, se encuentra a la merced de cada crisis y de cada amenaza.”

Es cierto que es una sentencia que no escatima su buena dosis de schmittianismo. Pero en ningún caso es reducible a “filosofía política ni al “acuerdo consensualista”. Al contrario, es  todo lo que le antecede: la energía misma de la política. En otras palabras, es la mirada realista en torno al poder. La filosofía política tradicionalmente ha sido un deber-ser y una teoría de la jurisprudencia (como dice J.G.A. Pocock); mientras que la teoría del consenso se ha expresado como parlamentarismo de lo neutro. (En Estados Unidos, por citar una de las “democracias residuales de Occidente”, no es difícil imaginar cómo sería la política si no existiera el Congreso).

¿Qué es el centro? Obviamente, el centro nada tiene que ver con lo que hoy entendemos por “centrismo”, esa forma más o menos grotesca de apoliticismo. No quiero hablar por Galli, pero mi impresión es que un centro político es la capacidad de actuar en el momento en el que somos arrojado al espacio volátil de lo político. Yo no pondría el acento en “crisis” ni en “centro”, sino en amenaza o riesgo. Dicho en otras palabras, la política siempre se da en función de la naturaleza del riesgo que, por su parte, abre el conflicto.

Esto es lo que yo llamo la postura madura. Y ese es el an-arcano de todo centro. La asignación de una habilidad debe tener presente que el riesgo se genera no sólo en el contenido de las precauciones, sino también en el diseño que se elevan para contenerlas. Ya si Carl Schmitt representa la postura madura o una decisión decidida de antemano (‘el mandato es lo primero, luego vienen los hombres’, como dice en el temprano Aurora Boreal) es otro tema.

The Paradox of the Void at the End of Hegemony: on Maristella Svampa’s Debates Latinoamericanos: Indianismo, desarrollo, dependencia, y populismo. Notes from Presentation & Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. By Gerardo Muñoz.

debateslat2017Maristella Svampa’s most recent book Debates Latinoamericanos: Indianismo, desarollo, dependencia, y populismo (Edhasa 2016) is truly a significant book. It is the result of more than a decade of archival research and theoretical elaboration, with deep implications in the sociological and political scholarship of the region. In a recent workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania this week, Prof. Tulia Falletti referred to Svampa after the publication of Debates Latinoamericanos and Maldesarrollo (2014) as a “new Guillermo O’Donnell” given the long-lasting impact that her systematic work will produce for so many fields of investigation both in the United States and in Latin America. Framed through four competing analytical problems – indigeneity, development, dependency theory, and the Latin American populist tradition – Debates Latinoamericanos engages and assesses the limits of the political reflection of the region in the last half a century. Furthermore, the book is beneficial for both specialists and students, since it covers a large bulk of historiographical debates in a polemical fashion. And I say polemical here not just in terms of its heterodoxy, but also in terms of a polemos relief that moves thought forward, inviting further reflection and contestation.

In the space of a brief commentary on the book, I cannot attempt the impossible, and offer an substantial summary of such a massive book. Rather, I want to take this opportunity to advance some of the questions that we juggled a few days ago when I presented this book in a workshop. I also want to have in mind Maristella Svampa’s brilliant keynote on populism and the end of the Latin American Progressive Cycle, which she delivered the day after and that was linked to relevant problems elaborated in the book [1].

Svampa writes Debates Latinoamericanos facing the ruinous space of the political in the Latin American tradition. But what and where is the origin of this catastrophe? To what extent can we offer a counter-imperial explanation for imperial domination against a marginalized locality in the world system of modern capitalism? Svampa does not say that the counter-imperial position is insufficient as a model to explain internal expropriation and continuous democratic deficit, but she runs a scan through the different four paradigms that shed light to what is, certainly, the meaty question of Latin American political reason: why has there not been democratic legitimacy in the region for the last two hundred years? I want to pause briefly in a moment that seems to provide a good starting point for conversation, and that I think should be cited at length:

“En ambos países [Argentina y Chile] el espacio ocupado por los indígenas era visto como “desierto”, “espacio vacío”, o para utilizar libremente la imagen de David Viñas, como la “contradicción de lo vacío que debe ser llenado” (1981:73). En Argentina, la metáfora del desierto creaba así una determinada idea de la nación, que tanto había obsesionado a la Generación del 37: más que una nación para el desierto, se trata a de construir un desierto que justificara la expansión de la nación. En Argentina, la expansión del capitalismo agrario y la consolidación del Estado nacional (mediante la estrategia de control territorial y afirmación de la frontera con Chile), se realizaría a través de la violencia genocida contra las poblaciones originarias en diferentes campañas militares, en la Patagonia y en el norte del país, entre 1870 y 1885. Dicha violencia tuvo un efecto demoledor sobre los diferentes pueblos indígenas.” (Svampa 43)

At first sight, it could well be that this passage is just a strict gloss of Tulio Halperin Donghi’s Un nación para el desierto argentino (1989) juxtaposed with David Viñas ’ Indios, Ejercito, y Frontera (1983). But I want to suggest that Svampa is doing something else here too. Whereas for Halperin Donghi the Dessert Campaign commanded by General Roca was the consolidation and crowning of the national state, for Svampa it marks the void at the center and origin of the political in Argentina. The extermination of the indigenous population as a form of ongoing originary accumulation, to say it with John Kranaiuskas, is what is common to the historical development in neoliberal times. But I do not think that Svampa is in agreement with David Viñas’ thesis either. According to Viñas’ narrative, the military defeat of the indigenous community is equivalent, a mere repetition, to the desaparecidos of the military dictatorship during 1976-1983. This repetition points to an originary and symmetrical violence that must be overcome by revolution. As I have studied in my work on Viñas, this critique of historicism of the Argentine state remains within the horizon of revolutionary violence as transcendental excess for liberation [2].

Svampa seems to tell us that this paradox or contradiction at the void makes us aware of a different problem, but also of an alternate reasoning beyond national consolidation and subjective militant liberation. A few pages after this moment, Svampa writes: “Cierto es que la “invisibilización no los borró por completo, sino que los transformó en una presencia no-visible latente y culturalmente constitutiva de formas hegemónicas de la nacionalidad”. Tan hegemónico ha sido el dispositivo fundamental en la representación de la Argentina como nación que muchos argentinos que se lamentaron de la brutalidad de la Campaña del Desierto, incorporaron el dispositivo invisiblizador, contribuyendo a reproducir la idea de que lo indígena ya no es parte de la nación” (Svampa 45). This is telling for a number of reasons. But I mainly want to suggest that the paradox of the void is integral to the labor of hegemony, both as an apparatus of exclusion, but also in its function as a spectral and residual transport.

Whereas both Halperin and Viñas, one from the side of Liberalism and the other from Sartrean Marxism, subscribe a hegemonic closure of history, Svampa’s paradox of the void concerns the very articulation of hegemony as what is installed as the central problem of accounting for the democratic deficit of the region as well as for the exceptional and fissure legitimacy of sovereignty. It is in this way that documents as important as Alberdi’s axiomatic principle of “gobernar es poblar”, Rodolfo Walsh’s “Carta Abierta a la Junta Militar”, or even Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the empty signifier of populist theory, are just different variations the same problem; that is, heterogeneous ways of coming to terms with the paradox of the void, but only to legislate the time of its ruin. What is Laclau’s theory of hegemony if not the assumption that there is a void, but only to the extent that we must find an equivalent filling to constrain the cavity that is constitutive of its origin? Take, for instance, what Laclau says in a moment of his posthumous The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (2014):

“”…the precise relationship between ’empty’ and ‘floating’ signifiers – two terms that have had a considerable currency in contemporary semiotic and post-structuralist literature. In the case of a floating signifier…while an empty signifier on the contrary, would ultimately be a signifier would a signified. All this leads to an inevitable conclusion: understanding the workings of the ideological within the field of collective representations is synonymous with understanding this logic of simplification of the social field that we have called ‘equivalence’.” [3]

In her talk on the end of the Latin American Progressive Cycle, Svampa mentioned three analytical models of populism. First, there is the weak version associated with Loris Zanatta’s analysis which obstinately, and in my opinion erroneously, conflates populism and theological irrationalism. This allows for outrageous comparisons, such as that of Eva Perón with Marie Le Pen, or even Juan Domingo Perón with Trump or Eastern European fascism. Secondly, there is Laclau’s model as first elaborated in his early Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and later in his On Populist Reason (2002), which tried to advance a coterminous elaboration of hegemony theory with the political vis-à-vis discourse theory and lacanian topologies. Third, is the sociology of populism, which Svampa inscribes herself, in particular elaborated in her book La plaza vacía: las transformaciones del peronismo (1997). This model is also shared by political scientists such as Margarita Lopez Maya, Carlos de la Torre, and in a different way with Benjamin Arditi. This third option is what Svampa offered as a model of “ambivalent populism”, which is in constant struggle with the problem of democracy. But just like the label suggests, ambivalent populism remains just that: ambivalent, which amounts to an impasse and limit. Can we move beyond it?

I read Debates Latinoamericanos as a timely opportunity to pose this problem, and think further. In response to my question about the possibility of a democratic populism without hegemonic closure and charismatic leadership, Svampa mentioned that in Latin America there has been only populisms of hegemony and nothing else. It is also clear that in Latinamericanist reflection, the narrative has been thoroughly populist, but only disguised as “cultural studies”, which was argued already late nineties by Jon Beasley-Murray. It is time to move beyond hegemony theory, in particular if it has proven catastrophic in short and long terms across the political spectrum. Populism with hegemony cannot fly very high, and there is no need to carry heavy burdens of a time long gone [3]. It is time to abandon it. If times have changed, and the composition of the national popular or integral state is no longer the main restraint of politics in the external global networks or even in the internal expansion of the administrative law, it only makes sense that we move towards a demotic populism for posthegemonic times.

This displacement will make a crucial difference between, on one hand, a posthegemonic populist experiment, and on the other a reactionary populism. Whereas right-wing charismatic leaders such as Le Pen or Petry promise a popular nationalism, they do so on the (false) premise that something other than factual globalization is still possible and better. The same could be argued in terms of the rule of law. According to Bruce Ackerman, there are moments of popular expansion of unmet social demands, and there are reactionary constitutional moments that restrain or betray these goals (take the Shelby County vs. Holder case of 2013 decided by the Roberts Court against the constitutionality of two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965) [5]. Neither delinking from the global economy nor a remote imperial past is desirable as the political fate for millions of citizens and social communities of the West. Such a demand, if called upon, could only be part of a decolonial neo-imperial fantasy. On the reserve of reaction, we could think about Errejón’s important political program “Recuparar la Ilusión”: here we have a great populist proposal that is based neither on charismatic presidentialism, nor in delinking from the Eurozone. Errejón openly sketches a program based on democratic transversality and European integration. In fact, the defeat of Errejón in the Second Congress held in Vistalegre earlier this year was a political catastrophe for those hoping for democratic revival in the European zone.

But we can also look at the so-called emergence of the Right in Latin America. Svampa correctly pointed out that Mauricio Macri’s government has not defunded the main welfare programs of the state during kirchnerismo. This is consistent with Pablo Stefanoni’s hypothesis a couple of years before the meltdown of the progressive cycle, that suggested that after a decade out of power, the Right might have learned to move around the structures of the state in tandem with global multinationals, avoiding the conditions of possibility that early in the millennium, led to the overthrow of several presidents in Argentina, and to the political rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela [6]. In a strange way, the Right knows better than anyone that the situation is no longer that of the 30’s or 40’s (or even the 90’s!), and that in order to foster new and stealth forms of domination, there is a need for constant adjustment. It is time for the Left to also learn from its mistakes if it wants to avoid the pendulum movement that bestows the dismantling of the social gains of the regulatory state in a time of decentralized administrations. Thus, it is not exaggerated or immodest to say that only by affirming a posthegemonic politics does a new progressive project have the capability for a democratic reinvention in Latin America, and across Europe where the future is even gloomier.

 

 

 

Notes

  1. Maristella Svampa. “Latin American Populisms at the End of the Progressive Cycle”. Talk given at the University of Pennsylvania, April 5, 2017. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/lals/event/lalses-seminar-2
  2. See my “Gloria y revolución en David Viñas: sobre “Sábado de Gloria en la Capital (Socialista) de América Latina”. La Habana Elegante, Mayo de 2012. http://www.habanaelegante.com/Archivo_Revolucion/Revolucion_Munoz.html . Also, John Kraniauskas, “Gobernar es repoblar: sobre la acumulación originaria neoliberal” (2003).
  3. Ernesto Laclau. “The Death and Resurrection of the Theory of Ideology”, in The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso, 2014.
  4. The idea of hegemony as heavy weight that leads to disaster has been recently posed by Moreiras when reading Podemos in Spain, See, Alberto Moreiras. “The Populist Debate in Spain after 20-D”. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2017/01/02/the-populist-debate-in-spain-after-20-d-draft-paper-for-mla-2017-by-alberto-moreiras/
  5. Bruce Ackerman. “Reactionary Constitutional Moments: Further Thoughts on The Civil Rights Revolution”. Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies (2016) 13: 47-58.
  6. Pablo Stefanoni. “La lulización de la izquierda latinoamericana”. http://www.eldiplo.org/notas-web/la-lulizacion-de-la-izquierda-latinoamericana

*This a commentary related to a two-day discussion with Maristella Svampa that took place at the University of Pennsylvania, April 4-5, 2017. The two events were organized by the Latino and Latin American Program & Political Science Dept. This is a work in progress for a forthcoming publication [DNC].

Ius imperii: on Roberto Esposito’s The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? By Gerardo Muñoz.

Vicenzo Binetti and Gareth Williams’ translation of Roberto Esposito’s The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? (Fordham U Press, 2017) fills an important gap in the Italian thinker’s philosophical trajectory, connecting the early works on the impolitical (Categorie dell’impolitico, Nove pensieri) to the latest elaborations on negative community and the impersonal (Terza persona, Due, Da Fuori). Origins is also an important meditation on the problem of thought, and Esposito admits that had he written this work today, he would have dwelled more on this question central to his own philosophical project up to Da Fouri and the turn to “Italian Thought” (pensiero vivente). Nevertheless, The Origin of the Political is a unique contribution that crowns a systematic effort in mapping the rare misencounter and esoteric exchange between two great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil.

In a sequence of thirteen sections, Esposito dwells on the question of the origin of the political in light of western decline into nihilism, empire, and modern totalitarianism. He is not interested in writing a comparative essay, and this book could not be further from that end. Rather, Arendt and Weil are situated face to face in what Esposito calls a “reciprocal complication”, in which two bodies of work can illuminate, complement, and swerve from instances of the said and unsaid (Esposito 2). Albeit their dissimilar intellectual physiognomies and genealogical tracks, which Esposito puts to rest at times, the underlying question at stake is laid out clearly at the beginning. Mainly, the question about the arcanum or principle of the political:

“Does totalitarianism have a tradition, or is it born of destruction? How deep are its roots? Does it go back two decades, two centuries, or two millennia? And ultimately: is it internal or external to the sphere of politics and power? Is it born from lack or from excess? It is on this threshold that the two response, in quite clear-cut fashion diverge.” (Esposito 4).

Whereas for Arendt the causes and even the texture of the political is extraneous from the totalitarian experience that took place in the war theaters of the central Europe, Weil’s response solicits a frontal interrogation of the ruinous catering of the political, going back at least to the Roman Empire. But Esposito does not want to exploit differences between the Weil and Arendt too soon. In the first sections of Origins he brings them to common grounds. First, Esposito notes how important Homer’s Iliad was to both Arendt and Weil in terms of the question of “origins”. In fact, the Iliad does not only represent a ‘before of history’, a poem that cannot be reduced to the narrative of the event; it is also an artifact that allows for truth. Esposito writes: “It is precisely the defense of truth through the name of Homer that most intimately binds our authors” (Esposito 8). Whereas totalitarianism emerges once politics is only a legislative instrument for seeking ends, truth for the an-archic Homeric poem praises both accounts; that of the victor and the defeated. Thus, any an-archic (beyond or before origin or command) is always, necessarily, a history of the defeated, which remains a demand in the order of memory. This is what Arendt’s admires and defends in “Truth and Politics” regarding the Homerian telling of both Hector and Achilles. But it’s also what Weil in her pre-Christian intuitions accepts as the survival of the Greek beginning in the commencement of Christianity without mimesis. To recollect truth in history beyond arcana (origins and commanding force) is to take distance from the force of philosophy of history, and its salvific messianic reversals. This is far from the negation of history; it is the radicalization and the durability of the historical, which Esposito frames with a cue from Broch:

“How can something conceived in terms of a caesura lay the foundations for something enduring? How can one derive the fullness of Grund from the emptiness of Abgrund? How to stabilize and institute freedom when it is born literally from the “abyss of nothingness” This is the question that returns with increasing intensity in Arendt’s essay on revolution…However, revolution cannot be an inaugural caesura and constitutio libertatis simultaneously” (Esposito 17-18).

This explains, perhaps only implicitly (Esposito does not say so openly), Arendt’s convicted defense of the American Founders over the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, which has only been an achievement in history due to the enduring progressive force of living constitutionalism. Esposito does not take up the fact that, Weil also responded critically to the Jacobin rule in her influential “Note sur la suppression générale des partis politiques” (1940). Esposito does claim, however, that any historical an-archy, insofar as it remains incomplete and evolving, must not resolve itself in genesis or redemptive messianism of the “now-time” [1]. This clearing allows for a passage through the origin that brings to bear the proximity of war to politics, which for Arendt delimits the antinomy of polemos and polis, as well as the difference between power and violence elaborated in her book On Violence.

Esposito lays down three different levels of Arendt’s positing of the origin of the political: a first one predicated on the space of the polis for the action of the citizen (polis becoming a theater); a second one, in which the agon is manifested without death; and a third, a Romanization of the Greek physis into auctoritas. For Arendt, Rome becomes a sort of retroactive payment for what was lost and destroyed. It is an after Troy in order to experience “beginning as (re)commencement” (Esposito 31). Rome is the possibility of another polis after the incineration, a tropology for amnesty within the historical development of stasis or social strife. Once again, the hermeneutics of memory over forgetting is placed above a philosophy of history that absolutizes the valence of the political. But it is in this conjuncture where Weil’s thought announces itself as an interruptive force in Arendt’s ontological conversation of the polis.

Esposito immediately tells us that for Weil the “origin” of the political does not run astray due to accumulation of historical catastrophe. According to Weil, the Fall is already original in the sense of being grounded in the event of creation (Esposito 36). Here Weil’s neoplatonic Christianity carries the weight. Weil posits an understanding of contradiction in Christian Trinitarian thought, although unlike the Carl Schmitt of Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), she does not substantialize this split through the reciprocity of its division into decision in the name of legitimate order. Weil, as it is well known, affirms a moment of creation grounded in its own abnegation. This revolves in the concept of de-creation that Esposito defines as: “a presence that proposes itself in the modality of absence, as a yes to the other expressed by the negation of self in an act fully coincident with its own renunciation” (Esposito 39). Conceptually consistent with Eckhart’s kenosis and later in modernity with Schelling’s philosophy of revelation, decreation is the Weil’s stamp of unoriginary foundation.

At stake here is the question of impersonal life, which in different ways, Italian thinkers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben, Elettra Stimilli, Davide Tarizzo, or Roberto Esposito himself have articulated in multiple ways in a debate that has come to us under the label of biopolitics. To the extent that decreation is an an-archy of this neoplatonic theology, Weil remains a thinker of the non-subject or of the trace of the finite that is irreducible to any modality of the political [2]. At this point, Esposito exposes the problem of force. Without fully embarking on a phenomenology of the concept in Weil’s reading of the Iliad, Esposito notes that force has the character of a total encompassing sensation that strips life unto death, belonging to no one, and viciously bypassing all limits. Here Weil cuts away from Arendt’s agonistic impulse of the polis.

The maximum distance with Arendt also emerges at this point: whereas Arendt conceived the Iliad of glory and claritas, for Weil it is “a nocturnal canto of mortality, finitude, and human misery” (Esposito 52). The uncontained force, the true and central protagonist of Homer’s epic, unfolds a negative community that Esposito calls, after Jan Patočka, a community “of the front”. Although Weil’s utmost divergence from Arendt becomes effective in the question of Roman politicity, which for her amounts to a juridical idolatry and a theologico-political glorification, as well as a prelude for the modern totalitarian experiment. In a key moment of this treatment of Weil’s critique of Roman law, Esposito writes:

“But what is even more significant for Weil’s arguments, and this is in contrast to Arendt, is that Roman law – ius, whose intrinsic nexus with iubeo drags the entire semantic frame of iustitia far from the terrain of the Greek dikē – is annexed to the violent sphere of domination. While the latter alludes to the sovereign measure that subsides parts according to their just proportion, the Roman iustum always belongs to he ho stands higher in respect to others who for this very reason are judged to be inferior, or, in the literal sense of the expression, “looked down upon”. This is the principle of a “seeing” that in the roman action of war is always bound to “vanquishing”…” (Esposito 56).

For Weil, Rome was representative of imperium and ius that subordinated the transcendence of its uncontested rule above citizenship equality, such as it existed in the Greek polis through isonomia. Devoid of citizenship, the Roman ius imperii is necessarily a dependent on slavery. Esposito notes that Weil’s anti-roman sense is more consistent with Heidegger’s critique of the falsum of the Roman pax as well as with Elias Canneti’s understanding of roman perpetual war, than with the Romantic anti-roman verdict. In its decadence, Roman politics as based on fallare opens up Christian pastoral power in a long continuum that later reproduces the basis for supreme hegemony. At the same time, Rome never truly stands for war, since it negates by declining conflictivity to peace in the name of domination. That is why for Weil the greatest discovery of the Greeks was to abide by strife as the mother of all things, while realizing its destructive nature. This makes Weil, as Esposito is aware, a figure of ignition, and a “combative thinker”. There is a sense in which the imagination of warring also colors Weil’s reading of Love in Plato’s Symposium, which positively informs her deconstruction of Roman ius.

But is this enough to leave imperial legislative domination? Should one accept Love as contained in war, as a form of warring and as a sword? (Esposito 72). The question that emerges at the very end of the Origins is whether Love can be at the center of a elaboration of a third dimension of the political, traversing both Weil and Arendt’s thought, and establishing perhaps a new principle for politics. It is to this end that Esposito argues: “…justice – love and thought, the thought of love – requires that what appears to others be sacrificed to what is, even if it remains obscured, misunderstood, or despaired (and this is precisely what Weil’s hero also proposes)” (Esposito 77).

Esposito writes just a few pages before that perhaps only Antigone succeeded in facing this differend, but only at the highest possible cost of destruction. It is at this crossroads where we find the last attempt to reconnect Weil and Arendt. However, love (eros) stops short of being a legislative antinomy and premise for a politics of non-domination beyond sacrifice or the payment with one’s own life. One should recall that Arendt’s doctoral work on Saint Augustine and love sheds light on Weil’s pursuit of love in facticity of war [3]. And if love always retains a sacrificial and Christological trace, then it entails that at any moment the condition of eros could dispense towards the very falsum that it seeks to undue. Could there be a politics predicated on love as an origin, capable of obstructing imperial renewal?

This is the question that Esposito’s book elicits, but that it also leaves unanswered. While it is surprising that the question of ‘the friend’ goes without mention in The Origins of the Political – the last twist in the book is on the figure of the hero or the antihero – it begs to ask to what extent friendship, not love, becomes the “deviation of the political” into an post-hegemonic region irreducible to the negation of war? This region is not possible to subsume in the impersonal reversal of the lover, the enemy or the neighbor. Perhaps the “He” that Esposito analyzes in Kafka at the very end of the book cannot be properly placed as an amorous figure, since the friend always arrives, quite unexpectedly, at the game of life. We abide to this intimate encounter beyond ethical and the political maximization. Moreover, we care for him, even when we do not love him. It is the friend, in fact, a figure that finds itself in a hospitable region, in a city like Venice so admired by Weil, where “he can rest when he is exhausted” (Esposito 78). This is a region no longer ruled by imperial politics, nor by its exacerbated modern perpetuity.

 

 

 

Notes

  1. The target here is messianism as represented mainly by Walter Benjamin and other representatives of salvific philosophies. Esposito notes that Hannah Arendt was critical of Walter Benjamin’s messianism in her “Gnoseological Foreword” of Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama. For a devastating critique of messianism and philosophy of history as a dual machine of political theologies, see Jaime Rodriguez Matos’ Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time (Fordham U Press, 2016).
  2. For the non-subject, see Alberto Moreiras’ contribution to the debate of the political in his Línea de sombra: el no-sujeto de lo político (Palinodia, 2006).
  3. Giorgio Agamben makes the claim that love in Heidegger, as informed by Arendt’s early work on St. Augustine, stands for facticity. See his “The Passion of Facticity”, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford U Press, 1999). 185-205.

Retreating from the Politics of Eternity: on Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. By Gerardo Muñoz.

snyder-on-tyrannyWe often cite James Madison’s acute observation from Federalist 10: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm”. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), is written keeping this political conviction in sight, so indispensable to the democratic aspiration of the framers more than two centuries ago. Snyder, however, is no messenger of good news. In line with those that have taken seriously the rise of presidentalism, and the expansive politization of the executive branch in recent decades, Snyder is making the case for a timely warning against a potential threat for tyranny in the wake of Donald J. Trump victory at the end of last year.

On Tyranny is informed by Snyder’s expertise and research as a historian of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, which have resulted in landmark contributions such as Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2012), and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015). In both of these books, Snyder has shown quite convincingly, how the erosion of institutions and the rule of law, due to both communist and fascist planning and dismantling over the control of the eastern region, paved the way for absolute anarchy and systematic destruction that made the Holocaust a juridical and political reality. Snyder does not mean to say, by way of an easy equivalence, that Trumpism amounts to a repetition of this historical period. Rather, On Tyranny is a precise warning on two levels: on one hand, it is a plea to rethink the necessity of institutions in the times of the rise of what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the imperial presidency; and secondly, to learn as much as we can from History, particularly from the historical evidence that confirms that every republic has always combated and affirmed itself against a latent imperial drift. Snyder’s thesis, presumably informed from a historiographical position, also suggests a political anthropology. In other words, the battle against an empire solicits an abandonment of the voluntary servitude that only feeds the incremental force of reaction. Our present shall not be indifferent to this.

After the 2016 election what is really at stake is whether the Federalist warning against the rise of factions is enough to contain an unprecedented alignment of vertical hegemonic power. There have been scholars, such as constitutional lawyer Eric Posner in The Executive Unbounded (2013), who have said farewell to Madisonian democracy in light of the exceptional upsurge of the executive branch [1]. On Tyranny does not go this far, but it is obvious that its purpose is not to engage in the aporias and intricate developments of constitutional law in order to render feasible an argument in favor of a retreat from hegemonic politics. Non-hegemonic politics always entail breaking the spell of a given set of coordinates that have produced an impasse. Snyder provides an array of historical examples: Rosa Parks in 1955 or Winston Churchill in the darkest moment when Hitler materializes his territorial expansion. It is in these perilous moments that the retreat from hegemonic politics does not mean renouncing political action. It means, first and foremost, abandoning the hyper-political consistency that defines the eternity and enmity of the political. But I do not want to get ahead of myself while briefing Snyder’s book. Havel, Parks, Churchill, Arendt, these are names that metonymically index Snyder’s plea for a politics of vocation in a time when rhinoceros are roaming through the landscape. The reference here is, of course, Ionesco’s well-known 1959 play Rhinoceros, which Snyder introduces when discussing the submission to politics of untruth:

“Ionesco’s aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangles of what was actually happening. The Rhinoceri are roaming through our neurological savannahs….And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share. Post-truth is pre-fascism” (Snyder 70-71).

The rhinoceros are the political converts, which are always one step too close to the work of hegemony and its delirious power. It is then entirely consistent that Snyder also makes the claim for the protection of a new sense of privacy (sic) that could contain the boundaries between oikos (private) and the polis (public) against the drift towards totalitarianism (Snyder 88). Tyrannical politics is also a politics without secrets. It does not necessarily emanate from this position that a new egotist sense of privacy will act as a modality in an existence that is now beyond risk, guarding its own skin from the wild beasts. Snyder recognizes that there is no politics without factions, as Madison would have also said. Hence, there is no real politics without a minimal corporeal investment (Snyder 83-85).

But we have moved away from the level of hegemonic thirst for domination, conceiving a relation with politics that is not exhausted in the singular existence. Or put in different terms, only in existence could a politics of lesser domination be allowed to emerge against the threat of factions. Politics should not be oriented towards the end of the administration of life, which always amounts to a biopolitics. A republicanist politics is the orgazanition of public and social life that prevents both, the intensification and nullification of life in the polis.

What becomes troublesome, as Snyder makes clear, is that the administration of politics is today justified under the name of terror. In fact, Snyder states: “Modern tyranny is terror management” (Snyder 103). This is, indeed, an actualization of the schmittian withholding of the state of exception now normalized at the heart of democratic systems. Hence, the new danger is not just juridical, although it is also that. Snyder presses on the fact that current governments and parties – from Putin’s Russia to Le Pen’s Front National to Trump’s populist rallies in Florida or North Carolina – are borrowing props and gestures from the 1930s, a decade that Steve Bannon has labeled “exciting”. It is no surprise to anyone that we are currently living in times justified by exception in the name of the “crisis”. It is this time of excitement that provides a grammar of historical teleology and inevitability, and further, of judgment. However, the passage from inevitability to something darker is what Snyder calls the politics of eternity, which is really the core of his book, and the sign under which neo-fascism abides:

“…the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, freed from with any real concern with facts….Eternity politicians bring us the past as a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood, all of them equally distant from the present.” (Snyder 121).

If there is no real concern with facts, it is because all politics of untruth are politics to cover the Real, or what Jaime Rodriguez Matos has recently called the formless thing [2]. And for Snyder, national populists of the far right are eternity politicians providing a form that at the end of the day is just sending signs of smoke (Snyder 122). What is being covered is the void that leads to a point of no return: mainly, that there is no “greatest moment to return to”, since it is impossible to resurrect Empire. This inevitable untruth provides illusory grounds to radical right rhetoric in Europe. Although, we must infer that this is also the moment where Trump appears in its maximum existential danger to us.

It is uncertain if the institutions of the West will withstand this immanent threat. Although it is in this conjuncture that the rule of law becomes as central as ever before, and to discard it, is perhaps one of the greatest acts of moral decrepitude. It is here where we awake from the sleepwalking of eternal politics, as we are confronted with the historical sense that gives us the phantasmatic company of those who have perished, and that have suffered more than us (Snyder 125). It is in this affirmation, we agree with Snyder, that we find a substantial push against all tyrannies.

 

 

 

 

Notes

  1. Eric Posner & Adrian Vermeule. The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  2. Jaime Rodriguez Matos. “Politics, Trace, Ethics: Disciplinary Delirium—On Trump and Consequences”. Paper Read at USC Conference, November, 2016. https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com/2016/11/14/politics-trace-ethics-disciplinary-delirium-on-trump-and-consequences/

Respuesta a las respuestas de Alberto Moreiras. Por Gerardo Muñoz.

En su segunda respuesta al comentario de Germán Cano, Alberto Moreiras hace una afirmación sobre posthegemonía con la cual queremos discrepar. Me permito citar ese momento hacia el final de su réplica, donde Moreiras escribe lo siguiente:

“Mi referencia es no solo la obra de Laclau, a la que me remito críticamente, sino también el trabajo que sobre ella están haciendo Yannis Stavrakakis y su grupo de Salónica. Son estos últimos los que establecen las condiciones mínimas del populismo en esos términos: transversalidad y antagonismo. Y a mí me parecen persuasivos. Sin esa base propiamente política en un populismo de condiciones mínimas…la posthegemonía se hace desdentada e irrelevante”.

Lo que me causa alarma en esa elaboración tan contundente: “sin base en un populismo la posthegemonía se hace desdentada e irrelevante”. ¿Por qué sería irrelevante la posthegemonía sin populismo? Acaso, ¿porque de esta manera lo ha venido elaborando Yannis Stravakakis y su grupo de Salónica? No, hay mucho más en juego en lo que afirma Moreiras. Para mí, lo que esta elaboración sugiere es una subordinación conceptual del republicanismo, mediante la coyuntura política, a la irrupción populista. Pero no hay razón para hacerlo más allá de la inmediatez coyuntural que es siempre pasajera. Yo podría decir, girando la mesa, que el populismo necesita de un republicanismo mínimo. Y que sin eso no habría nada por medio. De hecho, esta es la tesis que mueve muy ágilmente el hilo especulativo de En Defensa del Populismo (2016), de Carlos Fernández Liria. Pero no voy por ahí tampoco.

Me interesaría interpelar a Moreiras, pero también a Stravakakis indirectamente tomando en cuenta esa definición de populismo a partir de sus dos condiciones mínimas (transversalidad y antagonismo): ¿No estaríamos inflando un globo de aire que, como ha dicho en una conversación reciente el Profesor Jorge Yagüez, nos aleja de la precisión? ¿No se pierde especificidad conceptual y se deja de lado la materialidad real de tiempos posthegemónicos? Y si estas son las dos condiciones, ¿por qué no otras? Uno pudiera contra-argumentar diciendo que es porque hay un movimiento populista en curso, y que está dado en su formulación más feliz en el documento político de Errejón y su lista. Pero también habría una posibilidad alternativa, y es decir que la diferencia sustancial está en poner el acento en un republicanismo de fuerza, institucional, y de políticos vocacionales. Y ahí también caería la tesis de Carolina Bescansa, que pretende ignorar la pugna entre errejonistas e iglesistas rebajándola a una pelea de machos. Al contrario, estamos de acuerdo que aquí hay un problema de “error en la teoría”.

Ya de entrada, hablar de populismo confunde. Decir que puede haber populismo posthegemónico es una confusión al cubo. No hablo aquí de confusiones conceptuales o académicas, sino en el orden del discurso público, como el que circula en estos días por los medios españoles. Anoche veía la entrevista a Errejón en el programa “El Objetivo”, donde se hace muy visible las limitaciones retóricas de “entrar en razón” en cuanto a la diferencia entre errejonistas y pablistas. Y la verdad es que Errejón no hizo el mejor trabajo para desmarcase. Esa diferencia, como hemos dicho, es la hegemonía.

Pues bien, menciono esa entrevista, porque me parece que una parte fundamental de este debate pasa por la función retórica, si el objetivo es finalmente ganar votos y construir una gran mayoría capaz de desplazar el bipartidismo español. No le estoy pidiendo a Moreiras un lenguaje mediático ni nada por el estilo (¡estaría de más!), sino tan solo extrapolar un problema “real” que me parece análogo a este diferendo. Hablar claro (parraísticamente) es condición de posibilidad de la posthegemonía en última instancia. Y soy de los que cree que, al menos por el momento, no puede haber populismo de la ‘verdad’, como mismo no puede haber filosofía o pensamiento de “opinión”.

Voy al grano. A mí me parece que al decir “populismo anárquico” llegamos a confusiones aún mayores, a un callejón sin salida. Primero, porque los anarquistas piensan que has dado en la clave, y que se trata de armar una participación directa, más asamblearia, hasta llegar a trascender el capitalismo. Mientras que, por el otro lado, los populistas hegemónicos te toman como enfant terrible. Yo sigo siendo de los que piensa que las condiciones actuales son capaces de dejar desarrollar un discurso parraístico, esto es, republicano y necesariamente posthegemónico. Pero Moreiras escribe: “Si la posthegemonía es una contribución al pensamiento republicano, lo es sobre esa base populista mínima, pero también desde su antagonismo hacia todo verticalismo identitario y hacia todo identitarismo verticalizante”. Estamos de acuerdo en lo segundo, pero no necesariamente en lo primero.

El énfasis no lo pondría en ‘el populismo’, sino el pueblo, el We The People de la constitución viviente. No hay duda que, sin pueblo viviente, no hay transformación institucional capaz de atender las necesidades de cualquier presente. Pero esto ya deja atrás el populismo, porque el pueblo (en el populismo) siempre necesita apelar al líder. No así el republicanismo, cuyo pueblo solo tiene la materialidad de sus necesidades (siempre disímiles en cada época o momento), atendidas por  políticos de vocación, o lo que me gustaría llamar políticos posthegemónicos.

¿Hay populismo sin líder? Confieso ignorar si el grupo Populismus de Salónica ha desarrollado algún análisis sobre el liderazgo en el populismo (fuera de Laclau), pero tengo para mí que es ahí donde habría un verdadero ‘quiasmo interior’, muy similar al que se está produciendo hoy entre Iglesias y los errejonistas. Si el populismo requiere un líder, entonces esto implica que el populismo es solo un valor estratégico. Lo cual no está mal, pero no tiene por qué pretender agotar la posthegemonía. Yo diría de momento que mis dos condiciones para una democracia posthegemónica (no populista) serían: 1. un político poshegemónico (que J. L. Villacañas, siguiendo a Weber, llama de vocación), y 2. Institucionalidad (que es siempre más que instituciones estatales, y nunca republicanismo caduco).

El relato del bastón torcido: sobre En defensa del populismo de Carlos Fernández Liria. Por Gerardo Muñoz.

fernandez-liria-popEn defensa el populismo (Catarata, 2016), del pensador Carlos Fernández Liria, es un libro espinoso que busca instalarse con vehemencia al interior del debate en torno a la política española de los últimos años. Por supuesto, es también un libro abiertamente comprometido con el ascenso de Podemos, y su líder Pablo Iglesias, y sobra decir que su defensa de la ‘centralidad del tablero’ no se presta a equívocos. En efecto, en el prólogo del libro, Luis Alegre Zahonero celebra que Fernández Liria brinde su apoyo a la disputa por los nombres del enemigo, y que recupere para la izquierda nociones como democracia, ciudadano, derechos, o institución en línea con la obra elemental populista: la construcción de un pueblo. El punto de partida de Fernández Liria es volver sobre la textura del lenguaje, y desde ahí colonizar su gramática hasta efectuar un ‘nuevo sentido común’. Aunque Fernández Liria sitúa el problema en un arco de larga duración: al menos desde Platón y Sócrates, el lenguaje siempre ha obedecido al habla en el lenguaje del otro, léase del poderoso, y solo así ha sido capaz de generar escucha.

Según Liria ésta sería la lección decisiva de algunos diálogos socráticos, pero también de los sofistas, en la medida en que ambos discursos lo que se juega no es la verdad, sino su recursividad efectiva. Entonces, de la misma manera que Platón o los sofistas habrían derrumbado la verdad de los poetas, para Liria hoy no hacemos nada en decir verdades a orejas que no lograrían escucharla, puesto que son orejas que están blindadas a la verdad. Por lo tanto, es fundamental jugársela dentro de los límites impuestos por el falsum colectivo si es que se quiere llegar a un mínimo de veracidad. Pero, ¿qué nos dice esto del populismo? En una primera instancia que el discurso populista no depende de una aclamación de la verdad, y todo esfuerzo por desplegarlo en realidad terminaría atropellándose contra el blindaje que el ‘macizo ideológico’ (sic) de la mentira ha superpuesto en su economía general del sentido. El populismo tiene que entrar necesariamente a jugar el juego del sofismo. En un momento significativo para el argumento de Fernández Liria, éste recurre al relato leninista del bastón torcido que conviene citar íntegramente:

“Althusser recurría siempre a una cita de Lenin que hablaba de que para enderezar un bastón torcido no se podía sencillamente mojar la madera y atarla a una guía rectar, porque al soltar la guía el bastón quedaría menos torcido, pero seguiría torcido. Para enderezarlo, es preciso que la guía esté torcida en sentido contrario. Una idea falsa no se puede combatir sencillamente diciendo la verdad, hace falta otra idea falsa de signo contrario para que la verdad tenga alguna oportunidad. Una mentira se corrige diciendo la verdad. Pero en este mundo las ideas están impregnadas de una materialidad que pesa como el plomo, llevan adherido verdaderos sistemas de pasiones y afectos autorreferenciales y tautológicos…En esos casos, mover del sitio una mentira se parece a la tarea de intentar arrastrar un iceberg remando en una pirgua. Si hay que hacerlo es, por el contrario, para que verdad tenga alguna oportunidad en este mundo” (Fernández Liria 37-38).

Estaríamos ahora en condiciones de señalar la segunda dimensión del populismo que maneja Fernández Liria; a saber, que el populismo sería el mejor de los artificios posibles para el rendimiento de la política en un mundo de dilatada mitomanía. Y es esto lo único a lo que el populismo puede aspirar en su inserción social. Aunque según Liria es lo que debe aspirar toda política en tiempos de fin civilizatorio (sic) a causa del ascenso del principio general de equivalencia. No hay más fuera de esto (Fernández Liria 221). No se nos escapa en el fragmento citado anteriormente una cierta traslación leibniziana, donde el gesto de hipostasiar la imaginación política a una combinatoria lingüística es compensatorio de la crisis general de la política misma. Y tampoco es casual que Fernández Liria glose algunas fichas especulativas de Crítica de la Razón Política de Regis Debray, para dar cuenta cómo la maximización de la globalización, así como los experimentos por consolidar el socialismo real durante el pasado siglo, terminaron generando arcaísmos políticos y una perdurable proliferación de mitologías a contrapelo de la racionalidad moderna. De ahí que, si la política moderna de la secularización estuvo siempre caída hacia el nihilismo, entonces no queda otra opción que sostener cierta dosis de religiosidad edificante para retener cierta ‘calderilla antropológica’ (sic) contra el perpetuo ‘desnivel prometeico’ de la maquinación neoliberal. En estos trámites de compensación, la opción es solo una:

“Hace falta un populismo de izquierdas que, consiente de la necesidad de pertenencia tribal del ser humano, conocedor de que el mundo político tiene sus propios resortes y sabedor de que no se puede eliminar la superstición, sino, todo lo más, contribuir a su civilización, sea capaz de enderezar las energías populares a favor de instituciones republicanas” (Fernández Liria 159).

De esta manera, los capítulos “Razón y Cristianismo” y el epílogo “Progreso y Populismo”, apuestan a un registro mítico del populismo como interface o suplemento arcaico capaz de sostener lo mejor del Republicanismo, su ideal institucional, y estado de derecho. Estamos muy lejos, o casi en la posición contrapuesta a la invitación de José Luis Villacañas explicitada en Populismo (Huerta Grande, 2015), a la cual Liria alude, pero tan solo para subordinarla a su lógica principial de populismo. El sustento que alienta la teoría de Liria remite explícitamente a la lógica de hegemonía como vehículo monoestático para alcanzar y finalmente conquistar el llamado ‘sentido común’. Escribe Liria: “El mayor error que podría cometer un populismo de izquierdas sería renunciar a la defensa de esta objetividad republicana. Es más, esta defensa de la objetividad república es más bien lo único que puede convertir al populismo en un populismo de izquierdas” (Fernández Liria 109).

Si para Liria el populismo es más cercano a la Ilustración que al jacobinismo, no es porque tenga como referente último la legitimidad institucional y los derechos del hombre, sino porque el vaciamiento de estos principios hoy hace posible que el populismo les dispute el campo semántico a categorías de peso en la tradición. A diferencia de Villacañas, para quien el republicanismo pudiera aflorar como posibilidad poshegemónica y breakthrough del impasse del ‘momento populista’; en la defensa del populismo de Fernández Liria, el republicanismo y la institución son significantes y estructuras que permiten hipostasiar el pensamiento en nombre del sentido común en tanto hegemonía. En otras palabras, mientras que la deriva republicana de Villacañas busca pensar la política democrática para tiempos de interregno, el llamado ‘populismo-republicano’ de Liria funciona a la palestra de extender el presupuesto schmittiano de la enemistad. Este es, al fin y al cabo, la pieza última de la ‘defensa populista’, por la cual a pesar de todas las piruetas por distanciarse de Laclau – y que quizás implícitamente es uno de los flancos de un tipo de discursividad que ‘no convence’ en tiempos poshegemónica para Liria – reaparece acoplada sobre los mismos términos. De hecho, Liria no cambia nada de la matriz de la hegemonía entendida como reducción culturalista enchufada a la voluntad de poder. Veamos:

“…la hegemonía se ejerce, fundamentalmente, apropiándose de lo que solemos llamar el “sentido común”. Es allí, en el sentido común de la población, donde se produce la secreta mutación de los intereses particulares en intereses generales de la colectividad. Es por lo que los marxistas repitieron tanto eso de la ideología de una sociedad era siempre la ideología de la clase dominante…Es ahí donde se disputa lo que podríamos llamar “la ficción de una voluntad general”. Así pues, la lucha política es, ante todo, una lucha por la hegemonía, una lucha, por tanto, por instalarse en el sentido común de la población de manera que los propios intereses hagan pasar por los intereses de la voluntad general” (Fernández Liria 51-52).

El llamado a más hegemonía, a pesar de su apelación a la Ilustración o a la posibilidad republicana, desafortunadamente termina siendo una variante más del voluntarismo político propio del cierre onto-teológico, donde la estructuración del contrato social y la factura culturalista terminan por agotar las opciones de otra política. Y así, lo que solicita Fernández Liria, al igual que la que ha venido pidiendo Alan Badiou, es desde un principio una política para convencidos, o para militantes, o para quienes quieran creerse ‘el cuento’ [1]. Pero es también aquí donde el juego sofista entra en aprietos, puesto que, si la subsunción real del capital genera la más densa mitología del consumo y la publicidad, ¿qué puede hacer la hegemonía, sino fracasar ante ello, o bien ofrecer un contra-mito siempre limitado o insuficiente? O simplemente arribista, acotado a la ‘coyuntura’ sin más. Sin duda, la apuesta por un contra-mito tampoco es novedosa, y no habría muchas diferencias a la solución de Carl Schmitt en su conocido ensayo sobre la instrumentalización del mito en el nacional-socialismo contra la neutralización ejercida desde la ‘habladuría’ parlamentaria [2].

Pero estos fueron esfuerzos por una totalización de la política que se ha arruinado en nuestros tiempos, y sin embargo es la condición mínima para que Liria pueda echar a andar la fuerza apropiativa de la hegemonía como motor de conflicto, y de existencia en común durante tiempos de crisis. En cualquier caso, Liria no logra avanzar más allá del esquematismo constitutivo entre Ilustración y crisis que encuadra el gran relato de la soberanía popular desde la revolución francesa, y del cual la teoría de la hegemonía tendría que hacerse cargo de manera más delicada. De otra manera los sofismos antropológicos serán mellados por el tiempo efectivo del capital sin muchos reparos por las fantasías equivalenciales diagramadas sobre las lenguas comunicacionales.

Pero Liria no hace concesiones, y hacia el final del libro sentencia: “En todo caso, un auténtico cosmopolitismo no podrá jamás suprimir algo así como el Estado nación. Siempre seremos seres humanos y naceremos por ‘el coño de nuestra madre, aprenderemos a hablar en algo así como la familia y tendremos una identidad personal y tribal que tendrá que ser gestionada políticamente” (Fernández Liria 236). La pregunta que tendríamos que hacerle a la ‘defensa del populismo’ de Liria es si acaso, su ‘nuevo’ ‘populismo-republicano’ podría ser algo más que una tribulación antropológica entregada al pastoreo gubernamental, una contra-hegemonía de la dominación desde una metapolítica del pueblo. Y si así es, el relato del ‘bastón torcido’ es una teoría de ‘bandazos’, como le ha llamado recientemente Villacañas, ya que no puede convencer ni atraer a nadie en tiempos poshegemónicos [3]. Liria exige que mantengamos la vista fija sobre el listón de madera mientras el abismo que desfonda la política sigue su curso por debajo. El bastón, entonces, es principalmente un fetiche y la exigencia una plegaria.

¿Pero no sería hora de arrojar el bastón? Luego de la lectura de En defensa del populismo queda muy claro que hegemonía como suelo que agota la política es el principio ineludible del sentido común. Y es esa la razón por lo que Luis Alegre tilda de “pensadores perezosos o cobardes” a quienes se afanaban por inventar ‘cosas mejores’ (sic), esto es, cualquier cosa que no sea hegemonía (Fernández Liria 13). O bien pueda Liria exhibir a aquellos que, en lugar de ofrecer sus vidas a la teología de la liberación, “estaban intentado descifrar a Derrida o dándole vueltas y vueltas al insondable misterio que ellos llamaban el dilema del prisionero” (Fernández Liria 149). Aunque quizás la inventiva de ese hombre perezoso y poshistórico, tal y como lo pensaba Alexandre Kojeve, sea la que menos rebusque en los basureros intelectuales de la izquierda. Ese perezoso hombre poshegemónico, es cierto, no ofrece proezas salvíficas o descalificaciones altisonantes, pero tal vez remitiría a un tiempo de democracia más allá de fábulas antropológicas que hoy solo pueden sucumbir a la indiferencia generalizada, o bien a rechineos para espabilar solo a unos cuantos.

 

 

 

Notas

  1. Es lo que propone Badiou con su noción de “nueva gran ficción” en “Politics as a nonexpressive dialectics”, en Philosophy for Militants (Verso, 2012).
  2. Carl Schmitt. “La teoría política del mito” (1923). Carl Schmitt: Teólogo de la Política (Orestes Aguilar, ed., 2001).
  3. José Luis Villacañas. “Podemos, la hora decisiva”. http://www.levante-emv.com/opinion/2016/12/13/hora-decisiva/1503555.html

‘Chasing the hare with the ox, swimming against the swelling tide’: Towards a Posthegemonic Institutionality. by Gerardo Muñoz

*(Paper read at the workshop “Left Behind: The Ends of Latin America’s Left Turns”, held at Simon Fraser University, December 5, 2016. Organized by Jon Beasley-Murray.)

In an important moment of Alberto Moreiras’ new book Marranismo e inscripción (2016) we read: “La sospecha de no ser lo suficiente correctos en política, con todo el misterio terrífico que esa determinación tiene en la academia [norteamericana], pesó siempre sobren nuestras cabezas como una grave espada de Damocles y todavía pesa…” (Moreiras 125). It might be a good ocassion to say upfront that the waning of the progressive cycle in Latin America will most likely revive old affective demands and well-known pieties that the Left never affords to give up. Someone will be blamed for the broken plates, and the burden of those “left behind”. But this moment should be seized to think not what ‘politics’ should or must do (in Latin America and beyond), but rather how to think politics in what already is taking place. Or to question if perhaps the political today amounts to nothing more than what Arnaut Daniel said of the poet: “[He] chases the hare with the ox, swims against the swelling tide”. Can the paralysis of politics be something other than hunting or resistance?

As this 2016 comes to a close, we have witnessed a series of drawbacks in the political landscape of Latin America: from the outcome of the referendum in Bolivia to the electoral victory of Mauricio Macri’s PRO in Argentina, not to speak of Dilma Rousseff parliamentary impeachment in Brazil. There has been other lesser-known events, although no less disturbing, such as Roxana Pey’s arbitrary dismissal as First President of Universidad de Aysén by the current Chilean Minister of Culture after proposing a debt free and non-corporate public education. The sense of ‘exhaustion’ is at the thicket of the progressive cycle and has only deepened in the last two years, although this prognosis is more than just a motto of ‘ultra-leftistism’. Recently, high profile figures of the so-called Pink Tide governments have also voiced a sense of political stagnation and defunct space to reignite the original rhythm that took place at the turn of the century.

Just about a week ago, in a conversation that took place at Columbia University between philosopher Étienne Balibar and Vice-President of Bolivia Alvaro Garcia Linera, the latter stated that we are now in turbulent times where no horizon is in clear sight. It might be true that the unsettling remark might have partly been influenced in the wake of Fidel Castro’s death as the symptom of Latin American Left’ symbolic orphanhood, although Castro died far from leaving a relevant political legacy. I think many will agree that the guerrilla warfare, the Partido Único, or the concept of ‘struggle’ plays no role in the future of the Latin American Lefts. Yet such announcement from the Vice-President of the Bolivian Plurinational State seems to put to a halt the deep political conviction for transformation that he himself theorized in a wide range of orienting categories such as ‘creative contradictions’, ‘planetary ayllu’, or ‘communist horizon’.

The deficiency of a visible political vista means that we are in times of interregnum; a time when the modern epochality is left behind and a new one that has yet to materialize. The interregnum describes an extraneous temporality that fissures the antinomies of architectonics of modern politics – autorictas and potestas, constituent and constituted power, legitimacy and legality – carrying the very economy between thought and action in a threshold of indeterminacy. At the closure of epochality we are obliged to rethink once again the limits of the Latinamericanist conditions of reflection in light of the contemporary transformation of the space or object of knowledge that we call Latin America. A few years ago, John Beverley made an attempt to propose a new paradigm in his Latinamericanism after 9/11 (2011) under the preliminary notion of post-subalternism, which he defined as an alliance between subaltern and the new progressive State:

“The question of Latinamericanism is, ultimately, a question of the identity of the Latin American state…I would like to suggest here an alternative that is post-subaltenrist, ‘post’ in the sense that it displaces the subaltenrist paradigm but is also a consequence of that paradigm in that it involves rethinking the nature of the state and of the national popular from the perspectives opened by subaltern studies. …This possibility has a double dimension: how can the state itself be radicalized and modified as a consequence of bringing into it demands, values, experiences from the popular subaltern sectors, and how, in turn, from the state, can society can be remade in a more redistributive, egalitarian, culturally diverse way (how hegemony might be constructed from the state, in other words). (Beverley 110-116)”.

The post-subalternist option largely depends on the temporalization of the State-people alliance, which leaves pressing questions relative to State form and patterns of accumulation untouched, or any excess that disrupts the culturalist consensus at the heart of every hegemonic articulation. The problem that arises from this specific conceptual design is that with the rise of the New Rights, which continue to operate on the basis of the expansion of social inclusion through consumption, the hegemony of a ‘non-State that acts as a State’ (another way through which Beverley defines postsubalternism), will be set to accomplish two simultaneous tasks: on the one hand, contain and polish the heterogeneity or savage dimension of ‘the people’ into the metaphoricity of national-popular representation; while on the other, reducing the State’s structures and institutions to the management of geopolitical processes and rent distribution. In a rather counterintuitive way, the post-sulbanternist option reenacts the decionism from the instrumentalization of the state as the exception to post-sovereign capital in the name of the people.

At the same time, facticity is now fully post-subalternist, but for the opposite reasons as those imagined by Beverley: hegemony’s de-hiearchization and economic administration convergences with the neoliberal general equivalent as real subsumption of capital renders hegemonic politics obsolete for substantial change. Ultimately, post-subalternist alliance curbs posthegemonic temporal intrusion, which forces a relentless displacement of its object of identification to disregard the constitutive tragic repetition of the fissure in its closure.

Post-subalternism is an attempt to reawake the specter of hegemony from the ruins of the political: from the inside it stands politics of subjectivization by the State, and from the outside, as a metapolitical form of order (katechon) to detain internal social explosion (Williams 61).

In recent years the post-subalternist paradigm has been somewhat displaced by what I have called elsewhere a ‘communal or communitarian turn’ (Muñoz 2016). Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, a key thinker of communal horizontalism and also the author of the influential book Los ritmos de Pachakuti: Movilización y levantamiento indígena-popular en Bolivia (2008), at the end of last year conjured a radical turn towards the “communal” as the site for a new political program. In a more urgent tone, Huascar Salazar Lohman in Se han adueñado del proceso de lucha (2015) defines the position as following:

“Lo relevante es afirmar que la transformación heterogénea y multiforme que emerge de los entramados comunitarios implica la capacidad de dar forma a su reproducción de la vida social, trastocando, trans-formando o reformando la propia forma de la dominación…La manera en que los entramados comunitarios enfrentan al capital es a partir de vetos que permiten conservar, establecer, o restablecer relaciones sociales para reproducción la vida. En este sentido, el telos o el horizonte de deseo que media la lucha comunitaria es el despliegue de su propia forma de reproducir la vida, es decir, ampliar su capacidad de formación” (Salazar Lohman 35).

For both Gutierrez Aguilar and Salazar Lohman, the communitarian horizon requires breaking away from the dichotomy of civil society and State in order to relocate the temporal vitality of an autonomous re-production of life and the re-appropriation of that which the state has expropriated from communal property. However, if the communitarian form is not determined a priori by domination and capital, why is the emancipatory potential of the communitarianism emphasized solely on the basis of re-appropriation of what is valorized in the State? Salazar Huascar himself provides the answer to us when alluding to Bolivar Echevarria’s reconceptualization of the notion of use-value as yielding something like an inner exception within the logic of exchange. Communitarism, then, re-translates use-value as locational propriety.

Ironically, this is not very different from Álvaro Garcia Linera’s own attempt to “restore the communal (ayllu), against the logics of subsumption, through a re-functioning of culture and democracy and the recent juridical-political attempting to contain the ‘cunning of capital’ as it imposes its logics through its others…” (Kraniauskas 48). Although it seems the polar opposite of Huascar’s position, Garcia Linera’s instrumentalization of the communitarian through use-value mediates an indianization of the subject of social emancipation in the ‘community form’” (Kraniauskas 48). In fact, communitarianism ends up offering yet another exceptional particularism legitimized by the normative assumption of propriety and properness via-a-vis collective decision-making ( as ‘participacion directa y obligatoria’), and an alternative biopolitics of the ‘reproduction of life’ (reproducción de la vida). Communitarianism as a locational politics of resistance is already contained in the State’s shadow of community use-value, which is inverted on behalf of communitarian decisionism.

A similar paradox is at the heart of Diego Sztulwark and Veronica Gago’s essay that expands the temporality of the ‘end’ of the Latin American progressive cycle from below. On the one hand, they note that neoliberalism runs parallel to constituting a governmentality from above, and is also “inextricably linked to popular consumption, apparatuses of indebtness, and new forms of violence” as two dynamics that permute and sustain one another” from below (Gago & Sztulwark 610). While discerning the spectral dimension of contemporary flexible capital, they immediately move on to claim that it is on this plane where new counter-powers are transformed, modes of weaving together a resistance and a set of practical actions for political efficacy… (Gago & Sztulwark 612). However, counter-hegemonic subjective vitalism is already captured by the plasticity of financial subjectivization. Thus, this new vitalism framed solely as resistance only lifts political imagination to the domain of stasis or civil war already taking place in the territories, in which the struggle for subsistence takes the form of a neo-Francicanism eschatology (minimal relation to propriety) immanent to the financial subaltern bodies.

I would like to suggest that the two reflexive options sketched above, that of a post-subaltern state and the particular communitarian horizon, coincide in fashioning a politics of resistance after the closure of hegemonic principles. At the same time, the failure of hegemonic theory in the region is in this sense neither accidental nor limited to the temporalization of the so-called progressive cycle, since it also characteristic of the phenomenology of the originary fissure in the State form over the last two hundred years.

Hegemony or hegemon as an ultimate ontology of the political constitutes itself as a phantasm, which following Reiner Schürmann, denies the tragic dimension of the singular, translating norms and legislating laws in the name of its own sovereign principle. A phantasm is hegemonic when an entire culture relies on it as if it provided that in the name of which one speaks and acts. Such a chief-represented (hêgemôn) is at work upon the unspeakable singular classifying, inscribing, and distributing proper and commonality (Schürmann 22). In this sense, communitarianism and state hegemony are not just contending procedures of political decisionism, but more importantly, the two poles of a same structure waged on life as ultimate referent.

This is why, according to Schürmann, there is a “kind of joy of violent submission to it. Perhaps the intoxication they wish for us, or that we wish for ourselves through them” (Schürmann 29). To the extent that is waged on life, there has always been hegemony, although only as a phantasmatic economy to flatten and systematically erase the time of the tragic, whenever it appears to interrupt and ascend into the political principle. This is the time of the singular that is neither reducible to a subject in the eventfulness of history (a movement, a people or a multitude), nor a cultural schematization of identity and difference.

The challenge for thought is necessarily post-hegemonic, which I define as the potentiality for institutionalization of the tragic (singularity) in the anomic epoch of neoliberal administration. It is no coincide that both communitarian and hegemonic options define themselves against institutions, and they both respond to the moment of crisis of political epochality. A reformulation of an institutional form can mediate the ever-present pendulum movement that oscillates from neoliberal deregulation to the populist anti-institutionalism and back. But it so happens that populism does not posses a theory of institutionality, therefore is in no condition of providing a strategy to cope with the movement of the pendulum (Villacañas 2016). Since populism is always a decision on a concrete existential situation, it always remains attached to the perpetuity of the state of crisis as a decision made on and for life (understood in the Greek sense of krisis as judgment). As such, populism is the temporality of expropriation, and its process of abstractation into finite demands coincides with the money form (general equivalent) that structures the contemporary financial body of the living.

In the introduction to their edited volume Left Turns (2010), Beasley-Murray & Cameron & Herschberg noted that “if the Latin American states are to survive their current crisis of legitimacy they then need to be better funded, more efficient, and more reflexive of public preferences…the entire political class confronts the challenge of refunding the Latin American State” (Cameron & Herschberg 6). This was the promise and the stakes .Since then, the Latin American Progressive Cycle’s extreme presidencialism led to the withering of institutionalization making it easier for an accelerated restructuring of the State’s institutions by the New Rights technocrats. As the populist interpellation between friend and enemy evaporates in each political cycle, the price to be paid is life as thetic communitarian identity formation or as counter-hegemonic biopolitical vitalism. Constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman alerts in his The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (2010) that the expansion of the powers of the ‘most dangerous branch’ (executive) effectively prepares the ground for an ominous neoliberal anti-institutionalization. This is what lurks in United States’ political future after the President-elect Donald Trump, and more generally, what haunts the spatial configuration of every western state’s void of legitimacy.

A posthegemonic institutionality for post-hegemonic times seeks the thinking of another relation with the political that is not reducible to the principle of a hegemonic phantasm as the oblivion of its own excess to equivalence. But perhaps more importantly here is how to think a posthegemonic institutional form that that would break away from the indeterminate concrescence of law as always already short-handed for internal exceptionality in order to redirect and put in motion the temporality of development. Thus, a posthegemonic institutionality will thrive to move beyond a notion of interruption or an insurrectionary moment dispensed in the phantasm of hegemony.

How can we imagine a form of life instituted not only in its irreducibility to the movement of vital ‘rhythm’, but in the arrival of the day after, when the last lights have gone off, after everyone has returned home, and mobilization gives way to demobilization? In his book on the Spartacist uprising, Furio Jesi says that the ‘decisive day of freedom’ is that which takes place the day after tomorrow, in which the time of living is not exhausted in life or death (Jesi 134). The crucial distinction here is a temporal one: living against life or death.

To institutionalize not life in the frame of biopolitics or communitarism, constituent power as passage to constituted power, but a destituent time of the living. The day after tomorrow is posthegemonic demobilization as distance from political ontology and its conversion into metapolitical community. Only by institutionalizing the temporality of an improper singularity could something like an inequivalent and ungraspable form of democracy and radical freedom could be conceived as the new truth in and beyond politics.

Bibliography

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Beverley, John. Latinamericanism after 9/11. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Cameron, Maxwell & Herschberg, Eric. Latin America’s Left Turns: Politics, Policies, and Trajectories of Change. Boulder: Reinner Publishers, 2010.

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