schism

Why is Nelly Richard afraid of infrapolitics? by Gerardo Muñoz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Notes 

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

2. Ibid., 99.

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

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

The strain of waiting in the desert. by Gerardo Muñoz

How to overcome the consummation of rhetorical force and the privation of language integrated to the transparency of the present? This is a question that weighs heavily on those that remain too attached and mesmerized by a present that ultimately remains unmoved, alien to any epochal breakthrough. Hence, the almost fetichistic fascination of seizing the “new”, even though the price to be paid is always on the side of an overachieving cynicism and hypocrisy mediated by discourses of all kinds. At one moment of his dialogue Eupalinos or the Architect, Paul Valéry claims that whenever deep reflection is pushed by raw force, this unnatural attitude almost always misses truth: “The truth, the discovery of the new is almost always the price of some antinatural attitude. The deep reflection is forced…we must do or suffer violence to see better or differently” [1]. The claim to see clearly beyond the immanent veils of the rhetorical commonplaces is still our question, although rarely posed. If our suspended epoch is that of formless rubble and extinction, one way in which this question could be reformulated today is to ask what does it mean to envision and live in the desert? Is not the desert condition, its suspended and dead temporality that gathers existence in the void, the only authentic event of posthistorical time? 

This is the problem that haunts Dino Buzzati’s novel Il deserto dei Tartari, (1940), in which the waiting for an invasion and hoarding armies is conflated to the event of a wait that is infinite and excruciating, very much like the video art of Douglas Gordon at the end of the century. The steppe is a form of deserted land without forestation and depth; it is the very triumph of the symbolization of time stretched into a unified surface that recalls the emptying momentum of every form. It is nothingness as an absolute event, as Buzzati writes:  “….the ramparts, the very landscape, breathed an inhospitable sinister air…At this moment Drogo was looking at the northern world – the uninhabited land across which, or so they said, no man had ever come. No enemy had ever out of it; there had been no battles; nothing had ever happened” [2]. How to account, and how to live, beyond mere survival, in a world nothing happens; that is, where the “nothingness” is the very schism between existence and world? When speaking hyperbolically of the Fortress in the steppe where the protagonist Drago is stationed, Buzzati will refer to this mundane condition as a “thankless world”. 

It goes without saying that a world beyond “thanking” is a world that is unworldly in its sensible and intelligible mediations, because it no longer appears to grasp the irreductibility of presence; it needs to repress what appears figuratively in its disclosure. This is why in the vast openness of the steppe, in its blinding clearing of legibility, there is only blindness and hallucinations that are always compensatory to the pain endured by the nihilism of a disjointed time. The waiting of the barbarians does not longer hold the concept of prefiguration once held by situated or concrete politics (Turgot’s high-modernist axiom comes to mind: “we always perceive events too late, and politics always needs to foresee, so to speak, the present”); it is rather the impossible, contingent and retroactive narration that fictive communities need to elaborate to endure the ongoing pain at the end of the social bond. This is the price to be paid to survive in the glacial habituation of nihilism.

It might be very well that what can be glimpsed in the temporal wreckage of the steppe is nothing but the mute language of pain that brings presence near without political translation, because it is always an excess to the stabilization of forms. In an interview published in Milan’s Il giorno in 1959, Buzzati referred to the landscape of the steppe as “Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier…it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting”. But this strain of waiting is the thrownness of existence and its absolute distance from the world. In fact, towards the end of the novel we read a condensation of this inconspicuous tonality: “It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are from their affection for reach, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence, the loneliness of life” [3]. 

What remains is language not because it can describe or narrate, but because only the voice can measure up to the tonality of pain. In his short prologue on the Spanish edition of the novel, Borges claimed that Buzzati’s desert is both real and symbolic of the void, although the symbol no longer transmits any legible sense of totality; it prefigures a certain exhaustion of symbolization. The truth of language in the absence of form can no longer adequate itself to events or situations; it is now the voice that gathers the turbulence of pain in the waiting of the coming of presence already inhabited. Whenever that voice fails to speak, as René Daumal observed in his unfinished Mount Analogue (1952), life amounts to an empty carcass and a restless cadaver of oblivion. As presence fails to materialize in the world of forms and events, the only realist position is the conjuration of life as a form of expressive self-exile refusing to participate in the hallucinatory social pressure that desperately masks the serenity of a static and inapparent landscape – it is the passive eye that contemplates the plain silence of the steppe while preparing the schism for a possible transfiguration [5]. It is perhaps this passive contemplation what Andrew Wyeth’s faceless Christina laying on the grass has always been yearning for.

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Notes 

1. Paul Valéry. “Eupalinos or The Architect”, in Dialogues (Princeton University Press, 1989), 75. 

2. Dino Buzzati. The Tartar Steppe (Canongate Books, 2018). 31. 

3. Ibid., 220-221.

4. Jorge Luis Borges. “El desierto de los tártaros”, in Biblioteca Personal: Prólogos (Alianza Editorial, 1988), 22.

5. Endnotes in the recent essay on Jacques Camatte, “Time is an invention of men incapable of love” (2025) express it in the following way: “But it is not enough to feel foreign to this whole; one must break with it, create an irreductible discontinuity and schism”, Endnotes, December 2025: https://www.endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/jacques-camatte/time-is-an-invention-of-men-incapable-of-love

Dialogue with Jacques Camatte (1935-2025)

The passing of Jacques Camatte (1935-2025) a week ago from the writing of this text recalls a life that ostentatiously lingered in thought, and a thought that was entirely enmeshed and intertwined in the irreducibility of life. For some of us that had the good fortune to interact – however briefly and momentary, although every contact is always destinial and inescapable – Camatte transpired generosity and authenticity, and his voice evoked an almost Adanic happiness that has become rare among human beings. A common friend these days has recalled that somewhere in Camatte’s writing there is an endorsement of a capacious phrase from Chernyshevsky that could very well serve to remember his enduring ethical pursuit: ‘we have finally understood that the Earth is a place of life rather than judgement’. The opening the Earth as a dwelling place for life forms means that it is insufficient to conceive of domination as an organization of modes of production, since capital is first and foremost a spatial-temporal arrangement towards the future of the human species, and thus of a certain conquest of the world sensuous life. 

This was the outstanding triumph of real sumption: the modulated and ongoing alienation of the human community (Gemeinwesen) into a community of capital that has arrested time of life to the point of adjusting it to homogenized agony of historical time. Against the dynamic of revolution and counter-revolution that theologically exported the polarity of the eschaton and the ho katechon, already in the inception of 1970s Invariance Camatte called for an exteriority of any philosophy of history in order to rework of “a new relationship between human beings and nature”, and “breaking the lock that inhabits the creation of a new form of life”. The two citations in dialogue with each other come from “Against domestication” (1973) and the introduction to Urtext: frammento del testo originario di Critica dell’economia politica” (the 1977 Italian edition curated by Gianni Carchia), although these are variations from the depth of the emergence of the invariance of truth as a vantage point of the world. At the center is a form of life that renews the world that transitions beyond all forms of metaphysical logistics of appropriation, mere standing reserve, and the general arrangement for the mobilization of production. Any point of departure against domestication measures itself against the totality of this fluctuating dominion.

As it has been said of other great thinkers, Camatte’s ultimate passion was rooted in thinking one idea to the end and not of endorsing a system of concepts. For him it was the schism, that is, how to undo the historical process of domestication of a fictive community against the absorption of the increasing autonomization of fictive capital. The schism against the capitalist general equivalent also demands advancing a secondary schism against all humanism and its originary separation from nature. In schism, there is something of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers’ “thought of the word alone” that is receptive to the movement of the soul tries to account for the perceived voice. This precisely what Camatte carried as the lesson from Bordiga’s idiosyncratic original communist program: a movement against the historical benchmark of the development and political economy of growth, which will entail the exhaustion of the revolutionary horizon driven by an ideological political technification that tends to deepen the power towards the positionality of epochal nihilism expressed in the revitalization of strife and the ‘errancy of humanity’ (contrary to Martin Heidegger’s notion of errancy as a play between unconcealment and truth, for Camatte errancy is another name for the civilizational narrative that exemplifies the withering of the  human community into organized and protracted social reproduction and historical abstraction). Hence, as for Bordiga, Camatte conceived the ontology of communism as a world view (not as a political program oriented by concrete historical subject or distributive economic reproduction; not a soteriological dogma nor a transhistorical material idea); that is, broadly speaking, thinking the relationship between the human beings and the earth. A question more pressing than ever given the current planetary conflagration, which exposes the civilizational course that has lead to an inhospitable world where the survival of the human being has become the byproduct of an effective hostis of the community of capital integrated to the global surplus value accumulation.

In Camatte’s unrealized thought – but perhaps all forms of thinking are so – the bordigist gesture persists in locating the schism at the threshold of the force of real subsumption of the anthropomorphization of capital, where the notion of revolution itself is transfigured since, unlike Delacroix’s paradigmatic romantic painting, ‘liberty’ no longer guides the spirit of the “living”. Its redeeming voice also carries downwards unto the depth of the souls of the dead. Amadeo Bordiga himself in “Dialogato coi morti “(1956) writes that “The Revolution…it is always, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it opened and where it promised, where it has an appointment with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: they knew that it never fails, never deceives”. True life can also take place with the nearness of that which seems remote (as Gustav Landauer once claimed: “For me, the dead also live”).

If both the collapse of the future and the increasing adaptation of social life has entered a gnostic dialectic of endless self-legitimation, it is paramount to capture not just the insurrectionary, but the resurrection flight in Camatte’s gesture that opens possibilities lodged in the dead as an emblem for the return to the world “full of joy and exuberant life”, as he wrote in an apostrophe in “Scatologie et résurrection” (1975): “I will draw from mother earth the vital and infinite power and I will resurface full of wisdom, joy and an exuberant life which will allow me to reach this human community…I will have left your world and been resurrected!” Does holding on to the unity of the Gemeinwesen require a theological undercurrent? Is not the passion for schism, and by the same token the stazion, the energy within the very dispensation withheld between mystery and revelation that has prompted the congenital forms of formal mediations and institutions for the political community? These are the questions that we are exposed to in the enduring task if we are to take seriously a continuous ‘dialogue with Camatte’, which carries the voices of the dead. Ultimately, any authentic conversation that dwells in thought does not have to invent anything new; we are depositories of an endless communication that is handed over, interrupted, and transmitted to anyone willing to hear and capable of being traversed by the shared word. 

In his last year of thinking, Camatte insisted on the notion of “inversion” in the wake of the civilizational phase of extinction, which would require deposing all forms of hostilities and bringing to an end the partisan positions invested in orienting technology and morality (nature) in their seditious defense of the real dominium over the passing of the world. For the current depressing (and depressed) times, writes Camattes in “Instauration du risque d’extinction” (2020), what could very well be a prelude to a return to the repressed allowing a return to the past to initiate an inversion that would allow liquidation of lall exhibition abandoning enmity. This is why, as he told me in an exchange that we undertook five years ago, “inversion cannot be a strategy, as it is totally outside of politics, which is the dynamic of organizing people, of controlling them”. A breakthrough, then, only as a mystical downwards leap into the past? Absolutely – but only insofar as the mystic is the ethical witness to his own openness to the word, and whose exodus from the social machination prepares a return to the world beyond the flattening and dominant language molded by rhetorical dishonesty or passive narcissism of the subjectivity.

This is why according to Carlo Michelstaedter to have courage in the world means to decide between two irreducible figures: the dishonest trickster, or the mystic in the desert. There are no third terms in between. And whereas the dishonest subject knows how to play the hand to his best outcome in each given moment; the mystic knows that his decisive moment is always commencing because the genesis of the human species has yet to take place. This beginning is always at the brink of an untimely auratic experience. And aura names the incommensurable distance from the rational containment of the world — unlike Teilhard de Chardin’s internal introspection in the noosphere that will bring the fullfilment of a spiritualized humanity upon Earth (realized in part by the unification of the sciences by cybernetics); in other words, an exodus from the temporal nominalism that inhabits another life attuned to its genesis: “devenu-devenant ce monde et sur cette vie autre au moment où s’effectue sa création”, he writes in “La séparation nécessaire et l’immense refus” (1979).

The visitation of Jacques Camatte in the world bears witness to that invisible freedom of the human species ready to jump and traverse the catastrophic trumpeting into the living and the dead, making possible the refractions of thinking as original texture of existence. From now on, the exodus from the immanence of this world will embrace a disempowered but perpetual dialogue with Camatte’s demure schism of the living. Indeed, we are always on the path to an earthly beginning.