MOREIRAS, Alberto Et Alli - Dossiê Infrapolítica

Transmodernity
5.1 (2015)

Infrapolitics

(Order of texts)
Alberto Moreiras
Jaime Rodrguez Matos
Ronald Mendoza de Jess
Maddalena Cerrato
Sergio Villalobos Ruminott
ngel Octavio lvarez Sols
+
A Conversation with Alberto Moreiras

Introduction
After the Ruin of Thinking: From Locationalism to Infrapolitics
______________________________________
JAIME RODRGUEZ MATOS

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Alberto Moreiras announced the exhaustion of the discourse of location as early as
1997. The thought of location, from/about/of, particularly as it came to Latinamericanism,
had seemed to hold the promise of a new beginning: the possibility of thinking Latin
America under the geopolitical conditions of university discourse in the time of post-area
studies; but it had revealed itself as a ruinous thinking, or a thinking in the ruins of
thinking ("Introduction: From Locational Thinking to Dirty Atopianism" vii). Moreiras had
no problem with the idea of a ruinous thinking; the issue was the specific way in which
locational-ism thought of itself as a translational or translative retrieval of the historicity of
resistance as itself a form of power, which for him meant that it had denegated its ruinous
situation in favor of a utopian possibility (vii). In it, nothing less than the total cancellation of
colonial discourse, carried out by the subaltern negation, was at stake. This claim entailed a
process of expropriation as well, since the intellectual work that would be carried out in the
name of utopian restitution would become increasingly harder to distinguish from the work
of the subaltern negation as such. This was University discourse doing what it does best,
rhetorically knotting power and the production of a historical narrative in the name of a
liberation that ultimately only ever means liberating the other from everything but his or her
bare life, if that.
That was the era of post-area studies; the caricature it produced, put everyone
involved in an impossible situation. Moreiras cast it in terms of a staged fight between
wrestling jokers: the intellectual from the south, working on the south, and speaking from
the south, versus his northern counterpart who wittingly or unwittingly was an impeccable
representative of colonial domination in all its forms. These stereotypical images were a joke
not only because what was at stake in the fight was far from the liberation of the subaltern,
but also because in both instances what we find are subjects operating wholly under
| Rodrguez Matos, J. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

university discourse in so far as both were Latinamericanists. Moreiras concluded that the
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fight was a false one: A critical position is no authentic gift of commodified location (vii).
Perhaps today it is easier to say that the time of the post-area studies university was
in fact the beginning stages of a neoliberal university discourse. What changes when we look
at it from that vantage point is not so much Moreirass position as it was set forth then, but
the actual import of what locationalism intended to accomplish: the appropriation of the
whole apparatus of expropriation for the benefit of those whose histories had been wholly
on the losing side of that hellish machine for centuries. Leaving aside its most ardent
dogmatists, who confuse the ideology for its affective power every time, what was brewing
with the crisis of the Marxist narrative of armed revolution, immediately following the fall of
the Soviet Union, was not a more nuanced retrieval of the struggles of the past, one that did
not answer to the grand narratives of the West; no, what was beginning then was the
accommodation and adaptation, not of the discourse on Latin America, but of Latin
America itself to the matrix of global capitalism. In other words, what we were witnessing
was the shift from an uncomfortable and awkward process of formal subsumption to a
phase in which all of that would finally find a smoother plane of real subsumption in which
to make its folds (for more on the issue see Villaloboss contribution to this dossier). We can
call it socialism of the twenty-first century or the communist horizon (as Garca Linera
understand it). It is the time when a high-ranking bureaucrat can cite a Marxian dictum, that
socialisms seeds lie in the development of your means of production, to a Wall Street Journal
that is asking its readership to please understand that this is merely population control on the
part of a very business-friendly government. Real subsumption means, in a very down-toearth form, that you can have your cake and eat it too: that there is nothing that will impede
the smooth functioning of global capitalism in the realm of ideas. You can be a perfect,
Wall-Street-Journal-approved, self-proclaimed revolutionary government; so long as you are
growing your economy.
As such, the critique of locationalism can no longer be limited to the specific
instance that gave rise to it, that is, the politics of identity and the decolonial enterprise.
Rather, it must also include a whole host of new options that have appeared recently as the
new avatars of political correctness. Whether it is in the form of a renewed critique of the
present, of the conjuncture, or of a renewal of materialisms, ranging from the return of
philology, the valuation of the archive, all the way to the rehashing of yesteryears Marxian


economism and stageismwhat is at stake remains the same: the discourse of the university
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attempting to magically kill the proverbial two birds with the single stone: the synthesis of
the instrumentalized structure of the efficient neoliberal university with the good
intentions of its progressive or conservative, as the case may be, militant-academics.
What does all of this have to do with Latinamericanism? One way of putting it would
be to point out that what Moreiras was calling attention to in 1997 was that the entire
apparatus of colonial domination had shifted in such a way that it no longer made useful
distinctions between north and south, us and them, the way that it had done until the end of
the Cold War. The upshot is that it is possible now to instrumentalize in the south, the
north/south division so as to fold the narrative of liberation into that of modernization once
again and in a form that can seem plausible from the progressive vantage point. As a result,
now liberation means, in a dialectical turn of events that we thought was impossible after the
postmodern fad took hold, becoming good managers of the local aspects of the global
economy. The ideological battles that ensue can take any number of forms: so long as the
question of power, the production of the narrative of history and the phantasm of liberation
are tied together in a secure knot which we can call governability. From that point of view, a
critique of the discourse of the university as part of a wider apparatus of expropriation
cannot but seem suspect: for it fails to see how we can instrumentalize it, to the advantage of
some abstract non-existent entity like the South, so as to make expropriation possible from a
different location. That was the trap then as it is today.
If what we have been calling infrapolitics, thanks in great part to the work of Alberto
Moreiras, has any bearing on the link between current patterns of global accumulation, the
university, and the history of emancipatory thought, it is because it illuminates the situational
complicity of the three today. That is, infrapolitics as a thinking seeks something more or
other than simply pointing to the ruins of every arch; it is also the thinking of the
impossibility of subtracting any institution from its own history, and, in this sense, it can be
said that it takes seriously Marxs observation that global capitalist society is that which
admits history for everything but its own being. Infrapolitics, then, calls attention to the fact
that no instrumentalization, convenient as it might be when explained as part of a
teleological or prophetic narrative of emancipation, is ever anything other than another
episode in the history of oppression, regardless of its means.

As the essays in this collection demonstrate, each in their own specific way, what is
at issue for infrapolitics is not merely a critique of the present. For the thought of the being
of historicity and of the historicity of being is an attempt to open the way for a kind of work
that is not solely concerned with producing its own political credentials. Allow me to put it
in more concrete and simpler terms. What does infrapolitics say when a militant asks what
bearing can thinking the absence of foundations, the ontological difference, the structure of
the question, the vigilance against the temporality of the present and of presence, what can
any of this possibly have to offer to the group marching down the street protesting the real
and massive injustices being carried out today at every level of existence? The answer is at
least two.
First, it points out that the reaction against power remains as the thinking of the
ruins, and should that ruination serve only to found a different order of power, then, the real
aim of the negation was not the mechanism of power as such, but one of its specific forms.
Infrapolitics says to the militant, whether it is the one in the street or in the halls of a
university department, that the focus on politics runs the risk of blinding you to the problem
of politics. Undoubtedly, the problem of politics is central to all of us. However, what if the
problem of politics is that politics always entails an instrumentalization, an illegitimate
appropriation that is presented as legitimate? And further, what if this problem is only
exacerbated by confronting it only politically? It is not mere coincidence that the age of
revolutions, still part of our common sense, and particularly after the resurrection of the
hard Left in recent years, is also the age in which politics seems to be thinkable only in terms
of the tragic form. The closer you come to achieving your end, the closer you get to your
own undoing. Moreiras used a similar formulation to describe the failure of locationalism:
The maximum accomplishment of translational thinking is also its total defeat: an adequate
integration into the circuits of conformity, when all further translation becomes unnecessary,
when language no longer exists as such (viii).
Secondly, infrapolitics suggests that there is a different path, which we have opted
for calling posthegemonic infrapolitics, as the democratic practice of singularity beyond
equivalence. But we would be remiss to propose that this is something that is readily
available to us as things stand today. For it is clear that what that entails is still a matter for a
theoretical practice that is underway, but which remains, for us, an open question. Thus,
infrapolitics is also an attempt to break down the paralyzing distinction between some


putatively pure intellectual neutrality and a militant thinking that fashions itself as valet for
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real political actors. Infrapolitical thought/action begins by affirming that what goes under
the heading of politics can be contested as such, and also that what the standard meaning of
politics excludes from its own reduced sphere of action is more important in its
politicityeven as this entails a retreat from politics in the business-as-usual sense of the
term.
What went under the title of translation in the post-area studies moment prior to the
return of revolutionary politics was not only a matter of literary or cultural texts; it was that,
but it was also much more. For it was not simply a question of pointing out, then, that
translation is not the final horizon of thinking, just as it would be insufficient to say, today,
that decoding the text produced by real subsumption is the aim of our thinking. To my
mind, the shift between the end of the 1990s and our current situation lies in the following
fact. Then we could think, from the university, that emancipation entailed imparting
knowledge to the other regarding his or her negation of the structure of colonial domination;
and this at the same time that the other represented, structurally, a rest or residuum, which
indicated the limit of the system. That would be one way to explain the overlap between
university discourse and locationalism: the assumption that the other and the rest were one.
Moreirass formulation concerning the total apparatus of domination, which no longer
needed spatio-temporal demarcations because it could operate everywhere, and which
entailed thinking the end or ruin of all the ideals that made it possible to think that the
tradition itself came with a built-in freedom-clause (viable as a mode of resistance), correctly
indicated that the rest was elsewhere, that it was the surplus or remainder of the signifying
operation of the master himself. Today, and this would be the shift, we are no longer in a
situation where this knowledge can serve any purpose. This unmasking that shows to us the
hidden Masterly operation behind a putatively objective or neutral discourse of the university
becomes inoperative when that discourse has morphed, in the most explicit manner, and
become one with the inner workings of the emancipatory, and putatively, integral State of
the South.
This shift does not necessarily have to be seen as an epochal change. It could well be
that it never really mattered. However, I would argue that coming to terms with it as a fact
determines certain possibilities for us. Namely, that any thinking that seeks to grapple with

cultural and political artifacts in the present without falling into complicity with the total
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apparatus of domination can no longer assume a number of things:

1) it is not longer possible to imagine that Latinamericanism exists as a field capable of
immunizing itself against its own history, which has been the history of its
instrumentalization for the benefit of power;
2) it is therefore no longer possible to assume that there is a benevolent side to university
discourse, and certainly not under its neoliberal form;
3) any attempt to map out this field, which does not exist (but as a narrative projection of that
which escapes symbolic representation, violently forced into a logic), is by definition a new
form of the apparatus of expropriationit is simply an attempt at presenting the project of
expropriation as a logical and even benevolent necessity.
Thus, we are faced with the need to conceive of ways of thinking that uphold a rigorous
encounter with reality, but with the caveat that reality is exactly what never gives way to its
translative appropriation; that is, if we want to be rigorous, in the sense that this word
implied for the old science (which today has lost all epistemic centrality just as all ideals have
lost their eternal sheen), we must begin by setting the task of daring to stare directly into the
abyss of the real above all others. This would mean assuming that we are at a loss. But also
halting that programmed automatism that allows us to continue as if nothing was the matter
and nothing had happened.
The stakes have never been higher. And the intense politicity of the infrapolitical
proposal we are collectively making here, and elsewhere, should not be missed. Infrapolitics
is not a politics otherwise. Yet it is a question that is posed regarding the path that we are
taking when we opt for thinking that the solution to the problem of politics is more
politicswe could also say: the path that we are taking whenever we say that the problem of
technology is solved by technology itself. I am, of course, alluding to Heideggers saying: the
essence of technology is not itself technological; it requires instead prior considerations
regarding the way in which we wish to live. Now, in Heidegger these considerations were
still tied to a notion of social change that is absolutely incompatible with the infrapolitical
proposal we are making. We do not have the luxury of believing that we can opt, or decide,
for a more authentic way of life. There is no pure language of life or history. What we are
facing, perhaps for the first time within a Latinamericanist genealogy, is the precarious
condition of being out in the open, where there is no field, where there is no map, where


there is no presupposition regarding the conditions of a dialogue between opposing points
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of view, in which when and where we speak, as well as to whom and about what we
speak have no presupposed legitimacy. For, when infrapolitics points to the lack of
legitimacy at the heart of the expropriation ploy, it is also marking its own rejection of the
discourse of the master masquerading as transparent truth or objective knowledge.
We are not interested in proposing an answer to a crisis. Our aim is not to offer yet
another radical theory or methodology for reading texts. We reject any notion that this is yet
another claim to the new or latest, the newest theoretical product for your radical needs
even as we are aware that in an academic marketplace ruled and reproduced by neoliberal
subjects that can only see things in those terms, it will matter little that we repeatedly reject
such an image of intellectual work. It is the rejection of that way of doing, literally, business,
that we reject when we claim that our questioning, even in its most radical form as a
question regarding the possibility of questioning itself, is post-academic: an orientation in
thought that does not offer foundations for clear end result cannot by belong to a university
that is still to come, a post-university. In a neoliberal university that is ever more concerned
with quantification and indexation, a discourse that seeks to open questions can only occupy
a paradoxical position. We accept the risks.

Works Cited
Moreiras, Alberto. Introduction: From Locational Thinking to Dirty Atopianism.

Dispositio/n 22.49 (1997 [2000]): v-ix. Print.
Infrapolitics: the Project and its Politics. Allegory and Denarrativization.

A Note on Posthegemony
______________________________________
ALBERTO MOREIRAS
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
The first part of what follows was written for the Columbia University Political
Concepts Conference, organized by Stathis Gourgouris, and held in March 2015. During the
discussion that followed my presentation, a number of interlocutors made the point that
they were mystified by the perhaps abstract tone of what was proposedthat they would
have liked to see it contextualized within political struggle proper; that, while they recognized
that what I call infrapolitics does not propose itself as a form of politics, but rather as a
peculiar withdrawal or retreat from the political field, the retreat is still itself politically
significant, and such significance needed to come through more forcefully in my talk. Such
reactions, while entirely legitimate, already spring, it seems, to a certain extent, from a
misunderstanding concerning the specific work infrapolitics sets out to do. But merely
appealing to the fact that misunderstandings may or do happen, that infrapolitics runs the
risk of being misunderstood structurally and consistently, that infrapolitics is precisely the
choice to dwell in a particular, murky zone of ambiguous indistinction, is hardly
satisfactorynot satisfactory for the listeners or readers, and equally unsatisfactory for me.
I thought of addressing the misunderstanding as suchnot to solve it, but to make it
thematic, hence necessarily more complex. This led me to another paper I prepared a couple
of weeks later, this time for a seminar series on Allegory and Political Representation
organized by Jacques Lezra for the American Comparative Literature Association meeting in
Seattle in April 2015, which is now the second part of this essay. I think it does address the
political struggle within which infrapolitics finds itself, even though, arguably, still in a
general, necessarily not specific enough way. But this is unavoidable, which is precisely the
point I would like to make. There is no amount of precision that might dissolve the
constitutive ambiguity of the infrapolitical prospect, of the infrapolitical exercise, and that
might undo its refusal of the political in favor of merely a new form of politicality. In other
words, the affirmation that infrapolitics is not a politics, which I make in the first part of the
essay, must be left to stand, even if in order to critique it. It is my hope that the second part
| Moreiras, A. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

of this essay might either clarify or further obscure the issuewhich is then presented,
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frankly, as an issue for discussion. But the grounds of the discussion would not be properly
in place if I did not include at least a practical intimation of what is meant by posthegemony
and posthegemonic democracy in the first part. This is the purpose of the third part of this
essay, which was originally read at a panel of the 2014 meeting of the Modern Language
Association organized by Ignacio Snchez Prado. The reader may experience a certain
disjunction between the first and second and third parts. It has seemed to me that a
contrived erasure of itcertainly possible through writing, since writing is always already
erasingwould not do. Instead, I optand it is, obviously enough, a rhetorical ploy, even
an infrapolitical ployfor letting the disjunction remain. I have also chosen to retain the
traces of the three different oral presentations taking the introductory character of this issue
of Transmodernity into account.
I. Infrapoliticsthe Project.
The thought of infrapolitics started to circulate about ten years ago in discussions
within the field of Latin American Studies. Of course, it was already a known term, from
James C. Scotts theorization, but we were looking for something else, which does not
preempt intersections. 1 There was a long period of latencyinfrapolitics would be
mentioned here and there as a placemarker, as a hint, but we were not ready to launch into a
sustained discussion of its potential. In 2014, we decided to form a group on the issue. We
have it now, it is a fairly complex group that, in its larger avatar, comprises about forty
scholars of all ages and from several countries (Spain, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Italy, the
United States), while its core is composed of 10 to 15 unherdable cats. Most discussions are
conducted, when not at workshops, through a private social network, and our public
interface, the WordPress blog named Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective, has been
fairly active since September of last year. There are several books, dissertations, and
monographic issues in preparation either touching on the subject or centrally confronting it.
There are some recently published essays on it, conference panels have been presented, there
has been some buzz or noise, tidings of something developing. So, I think there will be talk
about it in coming years outside our group. It is a great pleasure for me to present the term,
or its idea, outside the blog, outside our own group, perhaps only for the second time as far
as I know (the first happened last year, when Jorge lvarez Ygez made a presentation on it

at a conference in Madrid). 2 Of course, I have to say right away in order to prevent
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misunderstandings, I am already slightly misplacedthis is a Conference on political

concepts, and infrapolitics is not a political concept. Or perhaps we could say that it is and it
is not political, or that it is political to the extent it seeks to glimpse and reflect upon a
certain outside of politics. And it is perhaps not even a concept.3
So what is infrapolitics? Or better put, less ambiguously, what does one talk about
when one says infrapolitics? But even so: is talking about something or other what one
attempts through infrapolitics? Or is it rather a matter of speaking from a place or a site
we would rather not thematize in order not to turn it into an object of research, which
would imply the sort of structuration of things, the sort of image of the world we are
trying to pull ourselves out of in the first place? If language can hardly speak
representationally about language without turning language into a representation, then
infrapolitical language refuses, if it can, to turn infrapolitics into yet another mechanism for
representation, another brand of thought in the marketplace of ideas, another political
option in the university, for instance, another flavor of academic discourse.4 We are not
interested in thematizing infrapolitics, in turning it into another form of computation of the
world. So what is our interest?
In his 1983 Letter to a Japanese Friend, Jacques Derrida responds to a demand to
offer a schematic and preliminary reflection on the word deconstruction (1), and he says:
What deconstruction is not? Everything of course! What is deconstruction? Nothing of
course! (5). We could perhaps say the same thing of infrapolitics, a nothing that is also at the
same time not everything, but that might be hardly placating. In any case, like
deconstruction, infrapolitics may turn out to be not a good word (5), simply something
that one can only use more or less casually, not systematically, seeking specific effects, in
highly determined situations (5). That being so, there is more in the Derridean text about
the bad word deconstruction that we can use, casually and unsystematically, for
infrapoliticswithout attempting in any way, and at any rate not yet, not for a time, to
indicate that deconstruction and infrapolitics may be the same thing or come to the same
thing.
Derrida complains about the sheer difficulty of fighting off the truism that
deconstruction was negative, mostly negative, negative for the most part. True, there were

some ostensible reasons for that, as people simply could not figure out what it was that
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deconstruction aimed to offer. For instance, Derrida says, deconstruction could not propose
itself as an analysis, since the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a
simple element, toward an indissoluble origin (3). And deconstruction could not propose
itself as a critique, since the instance of krinein or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment,
discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the essential
themes or objects of deconstruction (3). And, Derrida says, the same thing can be said
about method, which has the pleasant/unpleasant corollary that deconstruction, therefore,
is not a methodology for reading and interpretation and can therefore not be
reappropriated and domesticated by academic institutions (3). Finally, but not really,
Derrida says that deconstruction is also not an act or an operation (3), because there is
something more passive about it than the passivity that is customarily opposed to activity,
and also because deconstruction does not return to an individual or collective subject (3).
The most that can be said, therefore, for deconstruction, is that it happens, there is
deconstruction, ca se dconstruit, and the se bears the whole enigma (4).
There is a case to be made that infrapolitics, as we think of it or as we let it think us,
is neither an analytic tool nor a form of critique, neither a method nor an act or an
operation, that infrapolitics happens, always and everywhere, and its happening beckons to
us and seems to call for a transformation of the gaze, for some kind of passage to some
strange and unthematizable otherwise of politics which is also, it must be, an otherwise than
politics. In the brief Letter, there is a hint of this strangeness that infrapolitics and
deconstruction would share, which comes when Derrida, quite unexpectedly, I think, for
most readers, says, abruptly and without elaboration, that deconstruction is, therefore, and
this seems to be a definition or the beginning of a definition, a discourse or rather a writing
that can make up for the incapacity of the word to be equal to a thought (4). Infrapolitics
is also a region, or a site, as we called it before, where some incapacity of the word to be
equal to thought, to a thought, an unfillable gap or a fissure between language and
thought, also happens, but infrapolitics cannot even claim the status of a discourse or rather
a writing (infrapolitical reflection is, of course, both, but not infrapolitics as such, if there is
or could be an as such of infrapolitics.) So what is its interest? Can infrapolitics make up
for an incapacity, a lack, a gap between language and thought?
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I will give you something you can destroy, with the caveat that my act of giving it to
you may already be a destructionsome contradictions will inevitably occur between what I
have just said and what I will say, and I will try to deal with them in subsequent paragraphs.
Those contradictions are in fact hardly avoidable, though, from the basic fact that
infrapolitics cannot speak about itself without betraying itself. So I will jump into it right
away, in the abstract, skipping all the other preliminaries, as one does when one jumps into a
cold pool, a decision and exposure to judgment, since the occasion demands it, and
infrapolitics is nothing but its occasion. Infrapolitics is, minimally, a field of reflection open
to the exploration of conditions of existence at the time of the accomplishment of the ontotheological structuration of modernity. At such a time, now, we understand that experience,
everyones experience, is crossed by politics, that politics marks and determines and frames it
in irreducible and fundamental forms, but we also understand, or think we understand, or
would like to understand, that politics cannot exhaust, and does not exhaust experience.
Experience exceeds or sub-cedes politics, and it can therefore be thematized and studied
infrapolitically.
At the time of the self-accomplishment of the onto-theological structuration of the
known world, politics cannot merely be understood as a taken for granted, natural event, or
procedure. Politics is itself subject to historical conditions of manifestation, quite apart from
obvious intrahistorical divisions such as left/right, or liberals/conservatives, or
populists/technocrats. Politics, in its present range of manifestation, still responds to a
particular historical epoch and to a particular structure of civilization. In other words, the
nature of politics is not itself political, but rather historical through and through. There is no
intemporal politics; rather, politics happens once every time, even if it is a matter of a
program being implemented, but the manner of its happening is not independent from a
basic social ideology that frames the range of its occurrence. At the time of the selfaccomplishment of onto-theology, politics is onto-theological through and through, even
when it finds itself playing a so-called counterhegemonic or resistant role, and the fact that
such determination may have been forgotten is no obstacleit simply furthers its ideological
nature.
But infrapolitics does not seek to determine the nature of politics, not even in its
contemporary dispensations. Infrapolitics is not a critique of politics. Its interest, and we can

call it hermeneutic, phenomenological, or deconstructive, is to be found in the attempt to
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delimit the political determination in favor of its excessor its sub-cess; at any rate, its
difference. Infrapolitics dwells in the difference from politics. Infrapolitics, as a field of
reflection or a site for reflection, reflects on the sub-cess of politics, that is, not politics as
sub-cessed, rather the active infraexcess of the political, whatever underflows politics as we
know it. As a sub-cess, that is, as an excess that precedes, as a site for reflection not
circumscribable or determinable by any political determination, which must remain blind to
it, infrapolitics may reach a critical dimensioninfrapolitics thinks of politics insofar as it
thinks the otherwise-than-politics, but its primary exercise is not politico-critical, but
rather interpretive, or hermeneutic. Infrapolitics lives and opens up in the withdrawal or the
retrait of the political field, which means it does carry along an intense politicity, but it is the
impolitical politicity that suspends and questions every apparent politicization, every instance
of political emergence, every heliopolitical moment, and places them provisionally under the
sign of a destruction.
We have reserved a name for the impolitical politicality of infrapolitics: we call it
posthegemony, or even democratic posthegemony. Infrapolitics meets in posthegemonic
democracy, or in its praxis, which is posthegemonic democratization, the supplementary
interruption of its own sub-cessive praxis. I will try to be all too clear on this: infrapolitics is
not a politics, but posthegemonic democratization is a political praxis, and it would be hard
to have one without the other. There can perhaps be infrapolitics without posthegemony,
but there is no praxis of posthegemony without infrapolitical reflection. Both infrapolitics
and posthegemony attempt to think the gap between epochal politics, as it can be available
to us, and its difference from itselfthat in the human experience, or in existence that, while
marked or even covered over by politics, is itself not political, is not itself political, while it
subtends politics. We may have forgotten about it, which makes bringing it back up more
and not less urgent.5
How did this come about? If the project of the Infrapolitical Deconstruction
Collective has a common genealogy, and it must have it, although it is lived differently by
every one of its members, we must find it in our provenancethe common link is the
university, and the specific field of Latin American Studies in it. Of course the older
members of the Collective have more scars than the younger ones, but this is all a matter of

disciplinary history and can be traced back to texts and specific discussions, and even events.
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After the late 1990s, in our perception, the general cultural studies paradigm, which had
already been used by us as an escape from the constrictions of disciplinary life as we knew it,
hit a wall and became unproductive. At the same time, the so-called political turn in cultural
studies, which was no more than an intensification of claims of political salvation through
academic work, although it included in principle a critique of identity politics in the name of
universalism, became mechanical and dogmatic, and it still is. A critique of the history of the
left, quite neglected by the representatives of the so-called political turn, who seemed to be
much more invested in a mere repetition of the history of the left in modernity, provoked a
general or even terminal dissatisfaction with available or dominant theoretical paradigms
both in the larger field of the Humanities and in the smaller field of the Latinamericanist
humanities, including, by the way, subalternism, which, in retrospect, had been the last
illusion or delusion of the field.
All of this had effects, and for a very long time effects that were mostly disorienting.
But finally, as Sergio Villalobos recently put it in a set of Seminar Notes, there was a need
to move forward towards the constitution of a horizon of problems that could articulate a
posthegemonic understanding of the political understood as a-principial thought [in Reiner
Schrmanns sense] and infrapolitics, understood as a reflection on existence beyond
political demand
(Notas 2). 6 In the meantime, the university was evolving into its
neoliberal avatar, and ceased to be particularly interesting as a usable institution, except in

the most trivial sense (a relatively secure job, not to be dismissed). I would add that all of
these negative or critical predispositions developed in the wake of a certain congenital
marranismo, which we came to understand as the productive side of the Hispanic intellectual
and existential tradition, or at least the side of it we were interested in continuing to preserve.
This last thing is perhaps what makes our project not exportable to everyone, and not even
likable by everyoneit is simply what we do, from a certain understanding of things, and in
the wake of many historical failures, which are by no means only ours. Others are welcome
to continue to do what they do, and there is nothing further from our interests than any
proactive spirit of persuasion. We simply take the right to do what we think is feasible, given
timewhich is not a right, we know, the professional field will generously provide for us.
But so be it.
16
For the fact is that the project of infrapolitics is only derivatively an academic
practicemost of us work at the university and we do our work in the context or the ruins
of the university apparatus. But we understand all too well that the university is today
subjected to conditions of production and reproduction, themselves derived from the ontotheological self-accomplishment of modernity, that are incompatible with the future of the
infrapolitical project. Infrapolitics is postinstitutional to the very extent it seeks its necessary
radicalization. We could see it as a modality of savage thought, or of what Catherine
Malabou calls the irruption of the fantastic in philosophy, which of course overwhelms us
as much as it calls us, and destroys us as much as it informs us.7 But the fantastic in
philosophy is about the time of life against the time of work. We are not looking for
inscription, for celebration, we are not looking for a community or a filiation, we are
countercommunitarian and hostile to any capture formation. And our wager is for a long and
incalculable time of reflection against every kind of excellentist or salvific productionism.
It must have become clear already that our project places itself in a tradition of
thought marked by the work of Martin Heidegger, which it seeks to interpret or reinterpret
by learning from a number of thinkers in his wake: from Reiner Schrmann to Cathrine
Malabou, from Simone Weil and Luce Irigaray and Mara Zambrano to Felipe Martnez
Marzoa, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Massimo Cacciari, Mario Tronti, Miguel
Abensour, scar del Barco, Agustn Garca Calvo, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, or
Davide Tarizzo, including, of course, many others. There is nothing too original here, except
that we aim to keep alive a certain simplicity in Heideggers thought that he himself covered
up at timesa problem that has repeated itself in its reception. If infrapolitical reflection is a
sustained attempt at working out the sub-ceding passage from politics into a region of
existence politics occludes, this is not be taken as a flight from politics, but rather as an
attempt to determine, even to thematize, the conditions under which an alternative
conception of the political could perhaps become manifest. In Overcoming Metaphysics, a
text written between 1936 and 1946, Heidegger indicates the possibility of a historical
opening into explicit infrapolitics when he says:
The struggle between those in power and those who want to come to power: On every side
there is struggle for power. Everywhere power itself is what is determinative. Through this
struggle for power, the being of power is posited in the being of its unconditional

dominance by both sides. At the same time, however, one thing is still covered up here: the
17
fact that this struggle is in the service of power and is willed by it. Power has overpowered
these struggles in advance. The will to will alone empowers these struggles. Power, however,
overpowers various kinds of humanity in such a way that it expropriates from man the
possibility of ever escaping from the oblivion of Being on such paths. This struggle is of
necessity planetary and as such undecidable in its being because it has nothing to decide,
since it remains excluded from all differentiation, from the difference (of Being from
beings), and thus from truth. Through its own force is it driven out into what is without
destiny: into the abandonment of Being. (100)
One may not like the tropology of Being, the ontological difference, or other aspects
of the Heideggerian jargon, but there remains the fact that an alternative politicality is
announced that would not be blindly based on the will to will, of which in another section of
the essay we are told that it can only bring about a collapse of the world and a desolation
of the earth: Man wills himself as the volunteer of the will to will, for which all truth
becomes that error which it needs in order to be able to guarantee for itself the illusion that
the will to will can will nothing other than empty nothingness, in the face of which it asserts
itself without being able to know its own completed nullity (86). We call all of this, in
political things, hegemony, and the search for hegemony, and the hegemonic
conceptualization of politics, of which one of its greatest interpreters, Ernesto Laclau, has
said that it necessarily exhausts politics tout court. We disagree: hegemony cannot exhaust
politics, as there is posthegemonic politicality.
At the same time, even if Infrapolitical Deconstruction aims to continue to let itself
be inflected by the Heideggerian schematics concerning the history of being, the completion
of metaphysics, the end of epochal history, the completion of principial thought, it is not our
intention to be in favor of any valorization (or, indeed, de-valorization) of particular
historico-cultural horizons or specific human profiles. The former list of genealogical
conditions of our project should make it clear. The notion of value, or any form of cultural
value, was denounced by some of us as incompatible with a subalternist approach even at its
most superficial. Our marranismo has a few teeth, but not to chew on the exaltation or
denigration of any form of human life. The ongoing publication of Heideggers Black
Notebooks makes it clearer than it ever has been that our project must also affirm a radical

anti-Heideggerianism as well. If we take the Heideggerian scheme on the history of being as
18
a variation on the Hegelian one, hence a non-renounceable part of the history of thought,
the explicit, intentional undertones revealed by the Black Notebooks affirming an ontic or
existentiell plunge into both anti-Semitism and an overvaluation of German destiny in
the preparation of a transformation of thought, must be rejected not just in themselves but
also as a master tropology for any kind of alternative cultural-historical valorization.
This adaptation of what was originally a pro-Nazi tropologyone can qualify this in
various ways, but the overwhelming fact unfortunately remainshas been a rather endemic
problem in the so-called Heideggerian left, as can be seen for instance in Massimo Cacciaris
1976 Krisis. 8 Infrapolitical reflection must affirm the radical suspension of any culturalhistorical valorization as just another form of principial thought, which, as principial
thought, is and would be always already committed to hegemonic power and hegemonic
accomplishment. The Heideggerian thematics of the end of epochal history can only be
referred by us to the end of the hegemonic/sacrificial structuration of history and historical
life. Infrapolitical reflection abandons power as principial forceas the will to will
understood as the final principle of metaphysical historyfor the sake of an an-archy whose
foundations can be traced back to Heidegger as well, mediated by Emmanuel Levinas,
Reiner Schrmann, Mara Zambrano, and others.
There are two false exits from the Heideggerian schematic structuration of the
completion of onto-theology, both of them favored by Heidegger and by, in Heideggers
wake, the Heideggerian right: one of them is the rupture of the principle of general
equivalence, as the dominant structuration of all hegemonic thought in our time, in favor of
an alternative hierarchization, that is, a new hegemony, a new establishment of order and
rank. But there is another false exit, and I will merely hint at it. I will do it with another
quotation from Heidegger, this time from Contributions to Philosophy. Of the Event. There, in the
first section, in the Prospect, under the heading Historicality and Being, Heidegger gives us a
notion of double sovereignty that, we contend, is the very possibility of a continued
hegemonization of the time of life. This is what Heidegger says:
Sovereignty over the masses who have become free (i.e., groundless and self-serving) must
be erected and sustained with the shackles of organization. In this way can what is thereby
organized grow back in its original ground, so that what is of the masses is not simply

controlled but transformed? . . . Still another sovereignty is needed here, one that is
19
concealed and restrained and that for a long time will be sparse and quiet. Here the future
ones must be prepared, those who create in being itself new locations out of which a
constancy in the strife of earth and world will eventuate again . . . Both forms of sovereignty,
though fundamentally different, must be willed and simultaneously affirmed by those who
know. (49-50)
The second false exit is the pretense that thinking or poetizing could change the
nature of hegemony, that is, of sovereignty, that is, of a politics of the will to will finally
become conscious of itself. In Contributions, Heidegger is clearly addressing his remarks to
Nazi Germany, but there is a sense in which every structural compromise, such as the one
Heidegger is proposing here, of the thinker with the party, the principle of organization, the
leading arm of hegemonic power, will always result in the demand for a double structuration
of sovereignty. Many leftist thinkers have shared this demand, which ultimately has to do
with the connection of thought and governance, over the last two centuries. We think,
however, that there is no non-somnanmbulist hero of thought that can or should claim
infrapolitical sovereignty. There is no infrapolitical sovereignty, and infrapolitical reflection
claims no edge, no advantage over anything else. It is simply a wager for an otherwise of
thought. We continue to reflect on this otherwise, which we have sometimes called transfigured infrapolitics, but it is not yet the proper time to discuss it.
II. Infrapoliticsthe Politics. (Allegory and Denarratization.)
In 2004, the Argentinian journal La Intemperie published an interview with former
revolutionary militant Hctor Jouv, who had been a member of the Revolutionary Army of
the People at the time the guerrilla killed (executed or murdered, take your pick) two of its
own members after having determined that they had broken down, or simply broken, as
revolutionaries. Shortly after the publication of the interview, scar del Barco, a senior
figure in the Argentinian intelligentsia, a philosopher, a poet, and a painter, himself a former
member of the Argentinian Communist Party and a sympathizer and collaborator of the
guerrilla movement, sent the journal an open letter entitled No matars (Thou Shalt Not
Kill). This gave rise to a fierce and profound controversy in Argentina.9
Let us assume from the outset that the description of the murder of Rotblat and
Groswald in the famous interview could be taken to be, at least in Del Barcos rendering, an

allegory or an extended metaphor of the political, itself understood in a certain way. And let
20
me assume that the allegorization is not innocent, but itself a political intervention meant to
indict that said certain understanding of politics (which in other texts Del Barco has
referred to as the politics authorized and framed by the System, which is his way of
referring to the system of modernity or the system of onto-theological metaphysics)in
other words, my initial contention is that scar del Barco, through his open letter, at the
same time allegorizes and denarrativizes, or, if you want, narrativizes and de-allegorizes,
revolutionary politics as understood by a considerable sector of the Argentinian, and by
extension, world left intelligentsia after World War II if not also before.
Beyond the open letter, the notorious polemic that followed itself allegorizes the
fundamental breakdown, hence a terminal denarrativization, of revolutionary politics in
modern society, that is, in the society we know, perhaps the only society we know, or believe
we know. From Del Barcos letter, and from the responses and counter-responses it gave
rise to, well beyond what has been published, we can infer the becoming-true, the entry into
full historical consciousness, of a rumor that has long plagued the left: the disturbing, indeed
deranging possibility that the effective triumph of political revolution, far from constituting a
new historical time, could only mark what Felipe Martnez Marzoa, in his book La filosofa de
El capital de Marx, called the abstract liquidation of modern society, its (unproductive, were
it not so productive for some) fundamental intensification and consummation. This thought
can perhaps only appear comprehensible if we take the following words at heart. For
Martnez Marzoa,
In Marx, in effect, the difference between the point of view of modern society (natural
consciousness in Hegelian terms) and the point of view of the revolution resides in the fact
that, according to the former, the calculability of being (the physico-mathematical mode of
knowledge [that articulates modern society according to the principle of general equivalence,
or law of value]) expresses, purely and simply, the nature of things, and the equality of
rights is a requirement of human nature (or pure Reason), that is: in both cases we have
a truth in itself that has no dependency on the phenomenon called modern society,
whereas, from the point of view of revolution, things are different: the revolution must be
wholly radical in its self-exigency that those postulates [that is, the calculability of being as
general equivalence, and the equality of rights] must be fulfilled, precisely because it does not

consider them as realities simply in themselves, comfortably installed in a given nature,
21
rather as the criteria for a task to be accomplished. (190)

If revolution is the means through which the postulates of universal general
equivalence and equality of rights come to be fulfilled, then revolution is internal to the
system of modernity, and it can only accomplish modernity. In fact, revolution is to be
understood as the very essence of modern society, and not as a departure from it. From that
realization, it becomes clear, according to ones preference, either that there would have to
be a fundamental change in the very notion of revolution or that revolution is as exhausted
as any of the other primary concepts in the architectonics of political modernity. Why,
indeed, would we have to assume that revolution could survive the entropic catastrophe
that has befallen its other systemic terms, from representation to the people, from the
subject to the nation, from legitimacy to hegemony? Unless, of course, the project of
a finished modernity is still good enough to capture democratic hearts and minds.
Otherwise, it is time either to abandon the term revolution to the dustbin of the history of
modernity or to start imagining what revolution could perhaps be once unmoored from its
current and at this point rather endemic systemic haven.10 The latter is not an easy task
certainly not at the level of imagining it, let alone at the level of making it present. Politically,
the challenge is to reach the possibility, in thought first, of an equality, that is, of an end to
hierarchies of power, not based on the general equivalence of beings, not based on the
leveling down of all substance to its exchange value: a reinvention of the thing, which is
always a political invention.
I wanted to frame this discussion as a reflection on allegorywhich, for my
purposes, we can redefine as an extended metaphorand denarrativization not because I
believe that every metaphor denarrativizes; rather, because I believe that denarrativizing
metaphors, as metaphors that point to their own end, to their own destruction, are singularly
powerful and could convey something of the sense of an ending. But we must not take
ending in the mechanical sense of terminationthe ending I am referring to might be with
us for a very long time, as indeed the responses to scar del Barcos letter make clear. My
contention is that Del Barcos position (not an argument, he says somewhere, but not in
that letter) splits modern political history in two, or begins to split it. That he offers, in other
words, in specific reference to Argentinian, and Latin American, political history, the

beginning of a fundamental refusal of modern politics, and of modern revolutionary politics,
22
which is first expressed as an arrest of political subjectivation. And that from such a
beginning we can begin to unravel the hairball of militant ontotheological politics with a
view to its radical destruction, and for the sake of a new figuration. I can only evoke this
trans-figured politicity, which includes what I have been calling infrapolitics (and also
posthegemony).
Del Barcos letter has to do with the so-called armed struggle that developed in the
1960s in many countries partially as a consequence of theoretical developments within
Marxism (itself consequent for the most part with a long history of subjectivity, with a deep
ideological production of triumphant subjectivityit is not Marx we are considering here
necessarily, but the history of Marxism). Del Barco merely opposes them, in retrospect,
through claiming that there is no ideal that could justify the killing of a human being, be it
General Aramburu, or a militant or a police officer (115). The armed struggle is not
justified, Del Barco claims, and his opposition to it is a consequence of his opposition to the
taking of human life. The letter says little else, really. It does say that its author can
understand that the injunction thou shalt not kill will not be fulfilled, since, even as a
principle, he says, it is an impossible one: I know that the principle that thou shalt not kill,
like that of loving ones neighbor, is an impossible one. I know that history is in great part
the history of pain and death. But I also know that upholding this impossible principle is the
only possible thing to do. Without it, human society could not exist. To hold the impossible
as possible is to uphold what is absolute in every human being, from the first to the last
(116). It is not necessary to belabor it, because it is clear enough, and in fact the simplicity of
what is said, the lack of elaboration and argumentation, proves to have been the most
anxiety-producing factor of this letter, and what earned Del Barco the most insults.
What counts is the very restraint, the very simplicity of the position that affirms,
resolutely, the validity of the statement, impossible as it may be, thou shalt not kill. And
not only because it establishes, or perhaps re-establishes, for the Argentinian left, a
prohibition its members are then forced to deal with, but primarily because the prohibition
(it is a negative injunction, it concerns, therefore, a prohibition, and the prohibition is the
taking of human life, for whatever purpose, in whatever circumstance) has a fundamental
consequence: from it, the revolutionary narrative of the left, the actually existing narrative of

the Argentinian left, for instance, stumbles and falls and cannot be sustained in the daylight.
23
There is something absolute about the human being, Del Barco says, and this absoluteness
forbids killing and being killed. If it were said by someone else, a priest, a newspaper
columnist, it would be a matter of opinion merely, itself a matter of political combat. But it is
said by scar del Barco, himself associated with the Argentinian left, himself an old
Communist militant (Perhaps you forget that I was a Stalinist?, Del Barco will ask some of
his critics [Del Barco, Comments, 162]), and then a supporter of armed struggle. The
combat had moved inside, it was no longer a matter of nuances or mere position-taking
within a general agreement, and this was and is seen as intolerable by many.
The prohibition, the negative injunction, functions as a deallegorical tool, as a
powerful instrument of denarrativization. There is an allegoryevery story, every narrative
of political effort, of political militancy as militancy, is an allegory, militancy is always
allegorical of the promised triumph, of the end of timesand it is the story of the killing,
under Masettis orders, of the two quebrado (broken) militants of the Ejrcito
Revolucionario del Pueblo. The retrospective injunction, we should not kill, we should not
have killed, destroys the allegorical aura by reducing the narrative to its sordid literalness, by
ruining the validity of the figural plane, by indicting the ground of sacrificial militancy on
which revolutionary practice has been based: there will be no triumph on killing, and that is
that, and it kills the narrative and its figure. The loss of allegorical value is extreme political
violence. I do not think we should harbor any illusions that Del Barcos gesture has nothing
to do with violence: it is an extreme violence, the violence of a fundamental
denarrativization, which is to say, the violence of a fundamental desubjectivation. The heroic
subject of sacrificial revolutionary militancy is debunkedthrough its simple negation.
I insist on Del Barcos own violence because it seems to me important to retain the
thought that Del Barcos action is not an abandonment of politicsfar from it. It is not a
renunciation of politics in favor of some ethics, whether Levinasian or Kantian or properly
DelBarquian.11 The injunction is political because it has political intent. It is aimed at the
heart of revolutionary-left practices for most of the twentieth century, and it is aimed at it,
with devastating effects, in my opinion, not as one would oppose ethics to politics, but
rather as an internal fold of politics, as an alternative politics, as a wholly other politics. This
is confirmed by Del Barco when, in his response to articles by Jorge Jinkis, Juan Ritvo, and

Eduardo Grner, he tells them: the letter is not strung on high but laid out on the
24
ground, in politics, contradicting what you say about my supposed abandonment of

politics, which in reality is an abandonment of what you understand by politics
(Comments, 155). In the same counter-response Del Barco refers to what he is trying to
do as in-politics, or . . . non-political politics (158), in order to mark what is announced as
a break, a differend that cannot and should not be reconciled. Later on he says:
You refuse to understand that in fact I am rejecting your idea of politics, which in my
judgement (and I must repeat myself) is that politics that respects the limits fixed by the
System for thinking politics and acting politically. . . . I must tell you that not only have I
not abandoned politics, but I am up to the neck in politics, in what I consider politics:
painting, poetry, music, ecstasy, meekness, philosophical thought, mercy, justice,
responsibility, joint action, solidarity. (162)
One of the most prominent antagonists to Del Barcos position was, of course, Len
Rozitchner, who, in addition to his punctual polemical intervention, decided to write a full
book on it, posthumously published as Levinas o la filosofa de la consolacin. His general
indictment of Del Barcos position comes down to a disagreement on the prevalence of the
prohibition, that he considers patriarchal, and that he would want to substitute with the
positing of what he calls a maternal value: Primero hay que saber vivir [First you must
know how to live]. For Rozitchner, the positive vivirs [you will live] trumps del Barcos
injunction, and changes everything, that is, it restitutes, not necessarily the convenience of
killing (Rozitchner is also opposed to political crime), but definitely the casuistry of human
actions, that should now be evaluated on the basis of their relative support of the
fundamental value of living, and living on. Rozitchner, therefore, not del Barco, is the one
who bases his political reasoning on an ethics of life in avoidance of the absolute injunction
not to take life. Life can be taken for the sake of some other life, Rozitchner ultimately says,
on properly ethical, value-laden grounds. SRozitchners counter-violence is an ethical
counter-violence before it is political, the counter-violence of an oppressed subject, of the
slave against the master, ultimately consistent with the division of the world between the
powerful and the poor, or the master and the slave in the Hegelian account (And dont
forget that Hegels philosophy is a (the) system (and not only of philosophical thought),
says Del Barco [Comments, 172]). Rozitchner calls for counterhegemonic violence over

against Del Barcos posthegemonic, and properly political, violencewhich thus emerges as
25
true counter-systemic counter-violence. I believe that one of the consequences of Del

Barcos position, not the least hard of them, is a radical abandonment of ethical calculation,
that is, of ethics in the conventional, onto-theological sense. Thou Shalt Not Kill,
politically speaking, is the injunction that marks the beginning of a wholly other politics not
from an ethical stance, rather from a sort of reckless or savage moralism for which I prefer
to use the term infrapolitics (which would be a friendly correction to Del Barcos nonpolitical politics or in-politicscontra Rozitchner the real position of the not-all as maternal
injunction, as impossible possibility.)12
I am saying that the end does not justify the means. I am saying that every human
being is sacred, amongst other things because his meaning cannot be referred on to anything
or anyone (Comments 167). Sacredness, as the positive side of the negative injunction, is
not a valueit is the very radicality of the absence of valorization in the absence of every
principle of legitimacy, in the absence of principial thought as such. Sacredness always and in
every case demetaphorizes, deallegorizes, to the extent that sacredness is the
uncompromising holding-fast to the literalness of a nonequivalent singularity. From
infrapolitical sacredness, it is simply not possible to move on to the always figural, always
metaphoric calculations (the weighing of the relative in the face of the cause, in the face of
the absolute goal, which is Rozitchners politics, for instance) that have turned modern
politics into a game for hegemonic power without reprieve. Del Barco tells his critics:
For you to desacralize is to laicize, that is, in the last instance . . . to submit man to the
growing alienation and reification of the System, making him revolve in metaphysics and its
depredations . . . What I call the sacredness of man or the attempt at passive totality of socalled self-consciouness as excess-of-self is the opposite of consciousness augmented to
omni-potence as superman (in reality the superman is the oppposite of the beyond-man: he
should be seen as man invested onto-theologico-rationally, that is as Being, God or Reason,
and, I would add, Will to Power. (Comments 177)
In his fine 2008 essay, Memory between Politics and Ethics, Patrick Dove
unearths the comments Ciro Bustos, a former guerrilla member, made to Jon Lee Anderson
about the situation Jouv himself narrates, and that prompts Del Barcos letter. In Bustoss
recollection, the decision to kill comes in the wake of the following: [Groswald] had flat

feet, was frightened of going down slopes, and he began animalizing. It was truly repellant,
26
and as the days went by, he began physically to look more like an animal. To go down a hill,
he went down on his ass, walked on all fours; a pathetic image for a guerrilla . . . He was
dirty, unclean, and finally he was punished, given the hardest jobs, that kind of thing
(Anderson, quoted in Dove, 286). Dove presents this as an allegory of militant reason and
its crisis: the psychological collapse . . . indicates . . . the disgusting . . . possibility of a
reversal of developmental history (286). The decision to kill is a consequence of so-called
animalizing: the man who animalizes is no longer a man. Technically, the injunction Thou
Shalt Not Kill still holds. The revolutionaries do not kill a man, they kill less than a man, a
degenerate man, a man that does not correspond to the militants idea of manhood. It is
because manhood can only obtain in its equivalence. For the sacrificial revolutionary left
and there has hardly been any other so farmanhood is nothing but a metaphor of the final
goal, which consumes singular sacredness for the sake of the sacredness of a cause turned
totality. Which is why Del Barco says:
If you believe that everything is politics, then any discussion becomes useless. For my part, I
repeat, I do not believe in this politics, because I consider it a closed space that disempowers
essentially autonomous practices, which when subsumed into a unity can be dominatedassimilated by the System. I would rather define politics (or in-politics) as a multitude of
erratic or perverse actions without a centre, or a polyphony that no theoretical unity or
political practice by parties can suppress. I would prefer to be treated as a theologian or a
mystic or a man of religion . . . than as just a politician. (Comments 158)
The refusal of the politics of the politician is an affirmation, inaugural, I believe, in the Latin
American context, in favor of an infrapolitical alternative, perhaps leading to a wholly other
politics whose effective possibility we lose nothing for exploring.
III. Unearthing Posthegemony
In the Conclusions to her Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicols
Ailo and the Chilean State, 1906-2001, Florencia Mallon indulges in a bit of confession. She
says: "At first it was especially difficult for me to recognize, and to put aside, one of my most
enduring and lovingly held prejudices: that oppressed or subaltern groups are in reality
morally superior, that in some ways their lives have not been touched by the power struggles
that mark the rest of society" (233). Her remark has the virtue of making the rest of us

question ourselves: is that a belief we share and endure? Do we happen to think that there is
27
a moral or ethical superiority to subalternity, and does our interest in subaltern life perhaps
then ensue from such charming self-deception? I call it self-deception following Mallon, who
in the course of her research, as she tells us, came to recognize her prejudice as a prejudice,
but also because I do not believe that there are any groups untouched by power struggles,
somehow beyond society.
The belief that any number of disenfranchised, or disadvantaged, or oppressed
groups are morally superior to the rest of us in virtue of their historically produced misery
can be called self-deception, which immediately raises a number of issues. Is self-deception,
that is, lying to oneself, first of all possible, and under what conditions? What regulates it?
Can one lie unintentionally? Or does it come, the self-deception, that particular one, perhaps
others as well, as part and parcel of some larger ideology that we embrace in the course of
our work, and that would founder the moment we sober up and see a particular thread of
the real for what it is, and pull from it? Was the realization that the people of the Mapuche
community of Nicols Ailo were not after all morally superior good or bad? Was it
something of a traumatic awakening for Mallon? She does not say, and it does not matter.
But we might benefit from the sort of traumatic awakening Mallon hints at, while she may or
may not have undergone it.
My interest in the question has to do with the possibility of construction of
posthegemonic democracy, and not just in Latin America but anywhere. Of course, the word
"democracy" already has something to do with superiority, through that kratos that makes
the notion of democratic force different from "monarchies" and "oligarchies" and
comparable only to "aristocracy." According to Nicole Loraux, in a fascinating essay entitled
"Notes on the One, the Two, and the Multiple," which is a commentary on Pierre Clastress
work and an attempt to measure the difference at the level of political ontology between, say,
the Guaran and the Greeks, the difference between arkhe and kratos has to do with the fact
that "kratos says less about power than about superiority" (162). "Democracy" is to be
understood, in the Greek way, as the clear affirmation of the superiority of the demos over
everyone else, in the same way that an aristocracy would contend that the upper classes of
society are better endowed for rule; but this, in Ancient Greece, not because the demos was
conceived as somehow immune to the power struggles of the social, uncontaminated by

them. The superiority of the demos was, for Greek democrats, always already a political fact;
28
hence, conceivably, it had nothing to do with morality in Mallons sense. But the general
kratos of the people was, in Lorauxs understanding, in every case tempered by arkhe, the
rotatory function of command that made democracy what it wasa place of indistinction
between the governed and the governors, which was the specifically equalitarian, demotic
function of Greek politics.
Pierre Clastres, in his classic 1974 book Society against the State, refers to the frequent
accusation launched by all manner of European preachers and imperial servants against
many groups of Indians, particularly in sixteenth-century Brazil, who were under no illusions
concerning the superiority of the indigenous. The Indians were deemed to be "faithless,
lawless, kingless" (205). The Europeans looked at them from the perspective of what they
were lacking, and what they were lacking was invariably a State. It was the lack of a State that
deprived them of faith, law, and king, in other words, of a logic of filiation and submission
to despotic authority meant to produce or to sanction inequality. Indian groups, essentially
equalitarian in Clastress ethnology, were characterized by the fundamental prohibition of
inequality (199), which was a prohibition of the State, that is, a prohibition regarding the
State. Clastress question then becomes:
Primitive societies are societies without a State because for them the State is impossible. And
yet all civilized peoples were first primitives: what made it so that the State ceased to be
impossible? Why did some people cease to be primitives? What tremendous event, what
revolution, allowed the figure of the Despot, of he who gives orders to those who obey, to
emerge? Where does political power come from? Such is the mystery . . . of the origin.
(205)
The question of posthegemonic democracy must come to terms with the question of
the origin of power. The question of liberation, which, in order to be such, cannot be
conceptualized as merely a liberation from empire, but should be liberation from hegemonic
power, cannot be answered without recourse to the question of the nature and origin of
political power, which postcolonial studies has been singularly remiss to ask, if it has ever
asked it, by essentially taking it for granted that the postcolonial task was the construction of
a postcolonial State, today understood as a multinational state in countries such as Bolivia or
Ecuador. It is in the very last pages of his book that Clastres intimates a hypothetical

response to his own question. For him, the history of the Tup-Guaran, who in the few
29
decades before the Conquest were agents of a massive messianic movement that led many of
them "to forsake everything and launch out in search of the Land Without Evil, the earthly
paradise" (215), provides the possibility of an answer.
The hypothesis is the following: the Tup-Guaran, in virtue of demographic growth,
were coming close to the creation of a system of chieftainship that devolved political power
on the chief, which until then had been kept away from him. It is at that point that the
shamans, the kara, began to engage in "a prophetic speech, a virulent speech, highly
subversive in its appeal to the Indians to undertake what must be acknowledged as the
destruction of society. The prophets call to abandon the evil land (that is, society as it
existed) in order to inherit the Land Without Evil, the society of divine happiness, implied
the death of societys structure and system of norms" (215). For Clastres, what obtained then
was tragic: "the insurrectional act of the prophets against the chiefs conferred on the former,
through a strange reversal of things, infinitely more power than was held by the latter . . .
Prophetic speech, the power of that speech: might this be the place where power tout court
originated, the beginning of the State in the Word?" (218). The State came to the preConquest Tup-Guarani through the very attempt to ward off the State.
We are now stuck with the State. Mallon says that much. For her, regarding the
Mapuches, "the Chilean state seems to set the rules of the game, in the sense that it
establishes the structures, institutions, and political discourses within which people must
struggle and exist" (237). It is, for the time being, either too late or too early to return to
Tup-Guaran original ground. But, learning from the past, in order to establish
posthegemonic democracy, or, more modestly, to pursue the path of posthegemonic
democratization, the path must then be radically non-prophetic. Whatever equivalence could
be traced between the Tup-Guaran move towards the destruction of society and
contemporary resistance to capitalist coloniality, it is prophetic speech that, then or now,
manages to gather the people under the power and the spell of the One, and constructs
hegemony. But what if the originary ground were not to be conceptualized as a ground of
filiation but as a ground of alliances? What if we could learn from contemporary
anthropology that the structure of filiation that regulates all our mostly Western notions
about the ground and about the originary is precisely a notion always already rejected by the

so-called nonhistorical peoples that still populate the Amazon basin? What if we could set
30
our political expectations not on a return to a pristine Tawantinsuyo, which was already a
State society, based on tribute and forced labor, but on the possibility of a savage democracy,
based on the potential virtue of a posthegemonic theoretical practice? What if the demotic
principle of non-interference were to be based on the ontology of warwar between
equalsthat Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has explicated as proper to the Tup-Guaran, that
is, on an ontology of exchange not identity, on an ontology that always already looks for
interference, beyond the One, as the only possibility for the manifestation of Being?13
We can explore a transversal line of flight against violence and empire and beyond
postcolonial studies that I will indifferently call geophilosophy, following Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, or cosmopolitical thought, following Jacques Derrida.14 For many parts of
Latin America, such line of flight must be thoroughly invested in the anthropology of
indigenous life that Tim Ingold used to call "philosophy with people in it." Cosmopolitical
thought has a demotic agenda, but it is a minoritarian agenda that wants to look both beyond
the ruses of colonization and the rhetoric of liberationist decoloniality for the sake of a
return to a ground of thought that should think of itself against every configuration of
filiational thought. Cosmopolitical thought might make Deleuze and Guattaris words about
Captain Ahab its motto: "I have no personal history with Moby Dick, no revenge to take,
any more than I have a myth to play out; but I do have a becoming" (245). Becoming, which
as they say is always of a different order than filiation, it concerns alliances (238), is
something for which only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium (291). And
becoming is the very possibility of history, or at least of a new history. It would involve
both Indians and non-Indians, that is, everyone, and precisely everyone.
Clastres refers to Heraclitus in his explanation of the politico-intellectual becoming
of the Tup-Guaran kara. He says: "the mind of the savage prophets and that of the ancient
Greeks conceive of the same thing, Oneness; but the Guarani Indian says that the One is
Evil, whereas Heraclitus says that it is the Good. What conditions must obtain in order to
conceive of the One as the Good?" (217). Heraclitus, also a believer, like most Amazon
Indians, on war as foundation of the universe, was, for Clastres, a shaman who had already
fallen into his own prophecy, who had already invented political power through the very
desire to oppose it. Western metaphysics would eventually lead into the theorization of the

State as ethical substance (in Hegelian metaphysics, which only explicated a state of affairs),
31
but the exemplarity of the Tup-Guaran consists of the refusal to countenance the goodness
of the One. This is posthegemony ground zero.
Clastres tells us that the Tup-Guaran did not oppose the One to the Multiple, but
rather to duality or complementarity. From the karas statement that "things in their totality
are One; and for us who did not desire it to be so, they are evil" (170), he glosses: "to name
the oneness in things, to name things according to their oneness, is tantamount to assigning
them limits, finitude, incompleteness" (173). The extent to which this sentence is both a
philosophical and a political sentence, or rather an antipolitical sentence if politics is precisely
originated with the rise of the despotic principle, the extent to which a refusal of the One
within a universe of general war is an opening to the mystery of complementarity, would
guarantee the need for a practice of alliance on grounds of radical equality as cosmopolitical,
and even infrapolitical, geophilosophy.
Let me return to Florencia Mallon. Her book concludes in a series of questions
concerning historical understandings of community among the Mapuche from which I
would like to retain the question that is not there. She says:
Is the community a kinship network built around the family of the original cacique
(definition created by the resettlement and the land-grant titles)? Is the community
constructed through struggle and solidarity among all the poor and oppressed (definition of
the left and the agrarian reform)? Is it simply a place of residence like any other (definition of
the military dictatorship)? Or is it a trade-union or syndicalist organization under legally
defined statutes and bylaws (the Indigenous Law of 1993 and the postauthoritarian
governments of the 1990s)? (241)
For Mallon all of those versions of the community are active today in Mapuche selfunderstanding, all of them a result of the impact of their own history on Mapuche life. The
key issue is that there are no other versions. We are far here from, for instance, Alvaro
Garca Lineras notion, in Forma valor y forma comunidad, that the overcoming of capitalism as
labor form, and therefore the substance of all systemic, that is, antisystemic struggle, must
appear as the restoration of archaic community and a return to the originary unity of
nature. 15 The contemporary emphasis on substantial community, the need to return to
originary ground in radical, prophetic decoloniality: well, perhaps it runs the risk that,

through it, the State of the One will come, and return, and keep returning, through its very
32
attempt to ward it off. It is, after all, old history. And what one says of prophetic
decoloniality can also be said of so many other pronouncements in the contemporary left
that keep telling us any refusal of the One is always at the same time an embrace of
insidious, many-faced Capitalism.

Works Cited
33
Alemn, Jorge. Apuntes sobre la emancipacin. Eldiario.es 28 March, 2015. Web.

Alvarez Yagez, Jorge. Lmites y potencial crtico de dos categoras polticas: Infrapoltica e
impoltica. Poltica comn 6 (2014). Web.
Belzagui, Pablo Ren, ed. No matar. Sobre la responsabilidad. Crdoba, Argentina: Ediciones
del Cclope, 2007. Print.
Del Barco, scar. Comments on the Articles by Jorge Jinkis, Juan Ritvo, and Eduardo
Grner in Conjetural. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 16.2 (2007): 155-82. Print.
---. No matars: Thou Shalt Not Kill. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 16:2 (2007)
115-17. Print.
Cacciari, Massimo. Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976. Print.
Clastres, Pierre. Society against the State. Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein New York: Zone,
1989. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burnell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. The Death Penalty. Volume 1. Ed. Geoffrey Bennington, Marc Crpon and
Thomas Dutoit. Trans. Peggy Kamuf Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014. Print.
---. Le retrait de la mtaphore. Posie 7 (1978) 103-26. Print.
---. Letter to a Japanese Friend. Derrida and Diffrance. Ed. David Wood and Robert
Bernasconi. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998. 1-5. Print.
---. The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitical Point of View. (The Example of an
International Institution). Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy. Ed. Peter
Pericles Trifonas. Lanham, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Print.
Dove, Patrick. Memory between Politics and Ethics: Del Barcos Letter. Journal of Latin
American Cultural Studies 17.3 (2008): 279-97. Print.
Garca, Luis Ignacio. No matar: Una botella arrojada al mar. Typescript, forthcoming in
Papel mquina [2015].
---, ed. No matar. Sobre la responsabilidad. Segunda compilacin de intervenciones. Crdoba:
Universidad Nacional de Crdoba, 2010. Print.
Garca Linera, Alvaro. Forma valor y forma comunidad. Aproximacin terico-abstracta a los
fundamentos civilizatorios que preceden al Ayllu universal. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2010.
Print.
Graff Zivin, Erin. The Ethical Turn. (Unpublished typescript.)
Heidegger, Martin. A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer. On the
Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971. 1-54.
Print.
---. Contributions to Philosophy. (Of the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela VallegaNeu Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. Print.
---. Overcoming Metaphysics. The End of Philosophy. Trans. Joan Stambaugh Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 2003. 84-110. Print.
Kelley, Robin. Race Rebels. Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press,
1994. Print.
Malabou, Catherine. The Heidegger Change. On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Trans. Peter Skafish
Albany: State University of New York P, 2011. Print.
Mallon, Florencia. Courage Tastes of Blood. The Mapuche Community of Nicols Ailo and the
34
Chilean State, 1906-2001. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.

Mandarini, Matteo. Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in
Italian Philosophy of the 1970s. Cosmos and History. The Journal of Natural and Social
Philosophy 5.1 (2009): 1-16. Print.
Martnez Marzoa, Felipe. La filosofa de El Capital de Marx. Madrid: Taurus, 1983. Print.
Rozitchner, Len. Levinas o la filosofa de la consolacin. Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional,
2013. Print.
Loraux, Nicole. Notes sur lun, le deux et le multiple. LEsprit des lois sauvages. Pierre Clastres
ou une nouvelle anthropologie politique. Ed. Miguel Abensour. Paris: Seuil, 1987. 155-70.
Print.
Schrmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting. From Principles to Anarchy. Trans. ChristineMarie Gross and Reiner Schrmann Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Print.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale UP,
1990. Print.
---. Two Cheers for Anarchism. Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.
Sztulwark, Diego. Poema y poltica en Len Rozitchner. Typescript.
Villalobos, Sergio. Notas al Seminario sobre Infrapoltica. [Feb 19, 2015] [typescript].
---. Oscar del Barco. La crtica del marxismo como tcnica liberacionista. Forthcoming in
Papel mquina [2015].
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul. The Encounter of Catholics and
Cannibals in 16th Century Brazil. Trans.Gregory Duff Morton Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press, 2011. Print.

Notes

35
See Scott, Two Cheers, xx, for a quick definition. Scott started using the term in Domination (1990). See also
Robin Kelley, Race Rebels, for a use that follows and develops Scotts.
2
See Alvarez Yagez, Lmites, for a revised version of the contribution to the University of Madrid
Workshop on Posthegemony, Literature, Infrapolitics organized by Jos Luis Villacaas (June 2014).
3 Another qualifier needs to be the mention of the fact that I am not speaking for the Collective.
Nobody
speaks for the Collective, as wethat is, as all members, because we are quite uncertain about the status of that
weseek to speak in the singular, not representationally. In spite of that, I will make some claims that would
seem to come from more than one speaking subject. They will be controversial, debatable, even rejectable
every time. As a compensation, I would like to dedicate this essay to the Infrapolitical Deconstruction
Collective, in celebration of our conversations over the last twelve months, which have been indeed memorable
for me, and for many of us.
4 I am referring to an important thread in Heideggers Dialogue. See for instance 49-52.
5 Probably needless to say that my interest in posthegemony does not refer to the vulgar rendering of it Jorge
Alemn naturalizes: The posthegemonic moment cannot not be a fantasy imagining an acephalic world
exclusively given over to the cultivation of its drives. See Apuntes 2.
6 Although Emmanuel Levinass Totality and Infinity must be first credited, Schrmanns proposal regarding aprincipial thought in Heidegger on Being and Acting made it thematic for post-Heideggerian philosophy: It is
through a historical deduction of the categories of the other beginning that action deprived of a unifying pros
hen will become thinkable (9). This is explicitly associated by Schrmann to an an-archic political project
connected to a cessation of principles, a deposing of the very principle of epochal principles, and the
beginning of an economy of passage, that is, of anarchy (9).
7 Malabou thematized the fantastic in her book on Heidegger: The fantastic, far from designating a simple
logic of the phantasm or an intrusion of the phantasm into the real, characterizes precisely the real of the
phantasm. Ontological difference, the convertibility between the two (ex)changes [this is Malabous way of
referring to the Heideggerian beginnings], the new ontological gift, and the new exchangeability are not pure
abstractions. They constitute our real, the way the real registers the impact of its deconstruction and change
(182).
8 See on this the devastating reading of Cacciaris 1976 book in Mandarini, Beyond Nihilism, 1-7.
9
See the two volumes of No matar (Belzagui ed., and Garca ed.) for a compilation of some of the most
significant contributions to the polemic.
10
See however the fascinating essay by Luis Garca, No matar, where he associates Del Barcos
revolutionary practice to Walter Benjamins notion of divine violence. I intend to engage further with this
essay in an expanded version of this section of the essay, as it is too important a reading to limit its discussion
to a single footnote. See also Villalobos forthcoming essay on Del Barcos critique of Marxism as liberationist
discourse.
11 See Graff Zivin 14-17 on the ethics/politics discussion in the wake of Del Barcos letter, which she places
within a phantom intellectual history of their mutual substitution and finally the suspension of any possible
substitutional paradigm.
12 See, on Rozitchner, Sztulwarks essay, Poema y poltica, which is an attempt at interpreting Rozitchners
work in a manner quite different from the one I have just summarized.
13 See Viveiross short essay, probably the best account of Amazon-basin metaphysics ever produced.
14 See Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? and Derrida, The Right to Philosophy.
15
See in particular chapters 5 and 6, 229-365.
1
Nihilism and the Deconstruction of Time: Notes toward Infrapolitics
______________________________________
JAIME RODRGUEZ MATOS
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
1
How do we stand with respect to nihilism? Perhaps Oliver Marcharts book PostFoundational Political Thought (2007) is not a bad place to start when considering this question,
even if in a preliminary fashion. His book is, among other things, an attempt to separate
Leftist-Heideggerian theorists (including Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Claude Lefort and
Ernesto Laclau) from the charge of nihilism that is usually leveled at approaches that posit
the absence of a final or foundational ground, whether it is in terms of politics or
philosophy. He cites Laclaus words to this effect:
there are no necessarily pessimistic or nihilistic conclusions to be drawn from
the dissolution of the foundationalist horizon . . . As Laclau underlines, the
abandonment of the myth of foundations does not lead to nihilism . . .
since the dissolution of the myth of foundations . . . further radicalizes the
emancipatory possibilities offered by the Enlightenment and Marxism. (156)
What is odd about this particular defense against the accusation of nihilism is that the theory
of post-foundationalism is predicated first and foremost on what Heidegger called the
ontological difference. And in Heideggers own thought, we find that taking the ontological
difference seriously would make it impossible to treat the problem of nihilism as a mere
pitfall that can be avoided or as an obstacle that can be simply surpassedfor nihilism must
instead be thought in its essence and thought must first learn how to gather itself in the
nothing that it is (see On the Question of Being Heidegger 291-322). Marchart, on the
contrary, states that nihilism, which for him is another name for anti-foundationalism, is the
assumption of the absence of foundations, even if one thinks of foundations as a contingent
and partial. And according to him, this would result in complete meaninglessness (14).
Marcharts project is geared toward avoiding such an abyss.
My aim here is not to delve into the intricacies of the theory of post-foundationalism
as Marcharts elaborates it, but his insistence on sidestepping the problem of nihilism does
serve to illustrate one of the recurrent symptoms of the incursion into politics of the

37 | Rodrguez Matos, J. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

question of being. In Marcharts case, the basic problem remains: how to accept the
deconstruction of metaphysics while remaining politically relevant. All answers to this
problem that leave the very idea of politics and its temporalities untouched (even while
declaring that the political is contingent, finite and ultimately without ground) risk
reproducing the very metaphysical matrix that they explicitly critique. In the limited space
that I have, I do not pretend to offer an image of what a different conception of politics
would be; I simply want to elaborate on certain problems that are essential in approaching
that question.
2
One way of illustrating the underlying problematic behind the question of
foundations for politics is by turning to the work of Carl Schmitt. It is well known that
Schmitt defines the sovereign as he who decides on the exception (Schmitt 5). In turn, the
exception, he states, is principally characterized by unlimited authority, and this means
the suspension of the entire existing order; he adds: In such a situation it is clear that the
state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and
chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind (12). The
state is above the law, and this superiority has nothing to do with its anarchic or chaotic
character. For the exception to be intelligible in the first place, there must be a normal
situation. Thus, another definition of the sovereign is in order: he who decides whether this
normal situation actually exists (13). Since there exists no norm that is applicable to
chaos, the entire apparatus of sovereignty according to the political theological model is to
begin by legislating the anarchic and the chaotic, the formless and the ab-normal, out of
existence (13). This stratum becomes a nothingness that stands in opposition to the all that is
nevertheless divided into two: the situation and the exception. The an-archic is vanished, but
only because it is taken over and domesticated by the act of decision, which is the only
absolute principlebut a principle that, precisely because it is a decision, cannot be an arch.
This displacement is at the heart of the contradictory dynamic that Schmitts sovereign
enacts: he constructs by destroying, determines by in-determining, forms by deconstructing
(Galli Genealogia 338). Authority, Schmitt writes, to produce law . . . need not be based on
law (Schmitt 13).
Carlo Galli has pointed out the extent to which we are dealing here with an abyss
that is proper to the crisis of modern political thought, and which leaves the order that the


sovereign is able to produce haunted by its diametrical opposite: Through this creation of
form and of order the sovereign draws energy from disorder itself, from the exception;
neither is this abyssal act given once and for all, rather disorder and exception remain, within
the order, as an always present potential (Galli, Genealogia 339). It is tempting to imagine
that this problem emerges only with the demise of the Christian social mediation. However,
this would obscure the fact that the Christian mediation, and before that the Imperial
Roman mediation (with its law and its humanitas), and before that . . . we could keep tracking
this crisis all the way back to the most fragmentary of pre-Socratic remains we have at our
disposalall of these steps back are iterations of the same attempt at domesticating the
nothingness from which order emerges. Galli puts it thus:
The modern rationalist project (Lockian, Enlightened, Positivist) of making
politics turn upon the individual, of turning the political mandate into an
impersonal and legal function, and of rendering politics transparent and in
continuity with the rationality of the subject, according to Schmitts text, is
shipwrecked: in order for a rational and impersonal order to have normative
validity there must be a personal, prelegal and prerational mandate, founded
on that normative Void that is the decision. (Galli, La mirada 65)
Galli immediately adds that Schmitt is not a nihilist on this score, but he must come to terms
with Modern nihilism: with the absence of foundation (Galli, La mirada 65). In Schmitt,
there is the recognition that the only possibility of something concrete in the modern age
lies in the awareness of nihilism and the opposition to its formal concealment, that is, the
merely formal . . . determination of the political order (Galli, La mirada 65). Modern
political existence, for Schmitt, is defined by this founding absence, this Void-of-Order. This
lack is the decision, and assuming it as the unfounded foundation of the law is the only way
to be scientific regarding the Modern situation. In this Schmitt assumes, on the one hand,
that order is necessary, but impossible to realize it perfectly; and, on the other, that this is a
historically specific situation. The only way to face this moment is by remembering and
activating the remembrance that the public order emerges from the contingent. This
understanding of the lack of foundations, and not a Heideggerian approach based on the
problem of the ontological difference, seems to be more attuned to the elaboration that
Marchart makes of post-foundationalism. For the Heideggerian approach to the ontological
difference, as Emmanuel Biset has shown in his own reading of Marcharts book, cannot be


reduced to the dualism of an ontic politics and an ontological realm of the political without
welcoming back the classical metaphysical matrix and its foundationalist thought (on this
point see Biset).
Even a cursory description of Marcharts approach to foundations reveals closer
affinities with Schmitt than with Heidegger. He explains that, since it is not an easy task to
get rid of foundations altogether, post-foundational thought pays closer attention to what is
excluded by the erection of foundations; these contingent foundations are an ontological
weakening of foundations that does not go all the way to doing away with themand adds:
What distinguishes [anti-foundationalism from post-foundational thought is that the latter]
does not assume the absence of any ground; what it assumes is the absence of an ultimate
ground, since it is only on the basis of such absence that grounds, in the plural, are possible. .
. . Hence, post-foundationalism does not stop after having assumed the absence of a final
ground . . . for what is still accepted by post-foundationalism is the necessity of some
grounds. What becomes problematic as a result is not the existence of foundations (in the
plural) but their ontological statuswhich is seen now as necessarily contingent. (14)
There is a shift involved that turns the attention away from the object and toward its
conditions of possibility. This operation has been called transcendental by Laclau, but I want
to ask whether it is, properly speaking, a metaphysical operation as well. The fate of any
possible Left-Heideggerianism is at issue in this question. For it is by taking the
ontological difference (between being and beings) that this operation is said to be possible in
the first place. As Marchart puts it, at stake in post-foundationalist thought is the status
attributed to foundations, whereby the primordial (or ontological) absence of an ultimate
ground is itself the condition of possibility of grounds as presentthat is, in their objectivity
or empirical existence as ontic beings (15). Against thinkers that dismiss the relevance of
the ontological difference (like Rancire, Rorty, or Oakeshott), this understanding of
ontological difference qua difference is essential for post-foundationalism. A plurality of
contingent and temporary foundations ground the social field empirically, but it remains
impossible to find a final ground for that plurality. To hold these two ideas together at once
is to admit that the impossibility of the final ground cannot be of the same order as
empirical foundations themselves (15). The absence of arch ends up being the very
legitimating mechanism for the multiplication of finite foundations, which will take on the
form of a decisionas was the case also in Schmitt. The empirical order must then be able


to posit its own finite principle. It is not universal, and it is openly accepted as contingent,
but it remains a principle. And what makes it possible is the transcendental absence of an
ultimate principle.
We can think this description not as post-foundationalism, but as a thoroughly
secularized version of the transcendence and rescendence that obtains when the location of
value(s) is no longer above but here on Earth. As such, it can be used as a description of
what modernity or enlightenment actually were supposed to be even as it is with
modernity and the enlightenment that this operation becomes the basic ideological matrix
for a disembodied and unlocalized universalism that we know today to have been in crisis
since its very inception. Would this not then mean that post-foundationalism is simply a
rehabilitated form of modern thought as a whole? If this is so, then post-foundationalism
attends to the ontological difference the better to forget about being, in Heideggers sense
of the term. But more generally, what is at issue in this forgetting has a very specific political
consequence: this flattening out of the ontological difference prepares the way for the
accusation of nihilism to be leveled at whoever does not forget what is essentially at issue in
thinking the difference between being and beings as difference and not as a stratification of
ontic and ontological levels.
3
The accusation of nihilism is not made today primarily as the condemnation of a lack
of faith in a concept of politics that is easily traced back to its metaphysical legacy, even if it
is couched in post-foundational gestures such as we have explored in the case of Marchart.
Take the following as a starting point: In Being and Event, Badiou diagnoses . . . active
nihilism as speculative leftism, the belief in the absolute event that all too easily folds over
into accepting the unalterable reign of power (Noys 160). This folding over turns belief in
an absolute event into the disbelief that will obtain in the case of all real events, as there is
no such thing as an absolute event to begin with. Badiou writes of speculative leftism as the
belief that it is possible to commence from nothing, and he cites Nietzsche and the belief
that it is possible to break in two the history of the world (Badiou, Being and Event 210).
But again, this is imagined by this doctrine as the preparation for disbelief in all events that
do take place, events that take on a more dialectical and less pure form. Thus the accusation
of nihilism is bounced back to those forms of thinking that have attempted to think through
the problem of nihilism, but now with the added caveat that nihilism is what these theories


themselves produce and not anything that describes the state of humanity in whatever sense
we wish to give to that expression. The result is striking as the fight against nihilism
continues, but it is now a fight against those who think the problem. The banality of nihilism
must be dismissed or critiqued.
Justin Clemens, in his Badiou-inflected The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory, has
shown to what extent, within Badious doctrine, this means to identify nihilism with antiPlatonist trends from Nietzsche and the Romantics down to the various deconstructions of
metaphysics that are loosely collected under the heading of theory:
Romanticism is obsessed with the problem of nihilism, which it often codes
as Platonism. The abiding force of the problem is such that its effects can
be discerned across an immense range of contemporary theoryand even in
writers who may seem hostile or indifferent to nihilisms appeal.
Furthermore, the problem of nihilism is irreducibly bound up with the
problem of aesthetics. For Romantics, art is the non-place in which the
historical distress of the world is best discerned and analyzed, although by no
means resolved. (194-95)
The problem of nihilism, Clemens concludes, can be circumscribed to a series of
philosophical or theoretical theses: concerning irreducible multiplicity and subjective
finitude, the necessity to delineate the end of metaphysics, the rejection of technoscience,
and so on (195). In The Caesura of Nihilism, Badiou sheds light as to what is the bottom
line in this sort of proposition in terms of a materialist concept of politics. So long as
philosophy is critique, fixated on exposing the finitude that haunts every Idea, we are active
nihilists; for philosophy has no other legitimate aim except to help find the new names that
will bring into existence the unknown world that is only waiting for us because we are
waiting for it (Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy 65). The new world has to be named
by philosophy, this is its political task. Anything else would be to call for the nihilistic
disenchantment of all hitherto existing values and a call to inaction.
Commenting on this identification of nihilism with the inactive and impolitical,
Bruno Bosteels has asserted that any effort to link this to a progressive or leftist agenda
would have to contend with Geoff Waites indictment of Left-Nietzscheanism (Bosteels
Actuality, 123-24). Though it is not a matter of proving ones progressive or leftists
credentials, it is worthwhile to take Bosteels up on this suggestionnot because in the end a


true theory of the Left will emerge, but because it will shed light on the way that politics, as
such, has taken up the place of the highest value and has thus been theologically inflected in
order to defend it from the corrosive effects of so-called nihilist thought. Bosteels does not
point to any specific place when citing Waite, but one could do worse than this passage:
Historical arguments linking Nietzsche positively to the Left can be compromised by
demanding that the historians who make them define what they mean by the Lefta term
that too often means a cowardly liberalism that has been more part of the problem of the
relationship between liberalism and not only the welfare statebourgeois democracy at its
maximumthan any solution to it. A powerful, even fascistoid-liberal tendency has long
been more in league with Nietzsches corps/e than in effective combat against it. (Waite 145)
Basically the issue is with any theory that by its radical critique will fall into a tacit or
unwitting defense of the status quo. Nietzsche is a revolutionary thinker for Waite, but a
revolutionary in what sense? He finds his answer in what he considers the most significant
moment in all Nietzsche criticism, that is, Stanley Rosens Nietzsches Revolution. In
Nietzsche, Rosen writes: An appeal to the highest, most gifted human individuals to create
a radically new society of artist-warriors was expressed with rhetorical power and a unique
mixture of frankness and ambiguity in such a way as to allow the mediocre, the foolish, and the
mad to regard themselves as the divine prototypes of the highest men of the future. And, as
Rosen concludes this part of this argument, Nietzsche intends to accelerate the process of
self-destruction intrinsic to modern progress, not to encourage a return to some kind of
idyllic past. The more persons who can be convinced that they are modern progressives (or
postmoderns), the quicker the explosion. In short, Nietzsche is a revolutionary of the right
in his radical aristocratism and antiegalitarianism, but he needs the willing cooperation of a
workforce in this bizarre, even murderous and suicidal project. Furthermore, Nietzsche
seems to have succeeded, for Rosen, at least in part and negatively: namely, in enlisting
countless thousands in the ironical task of self-destruction. (Waite 166)
Waite leaves the apocalyptic Christianization of Nietzsche that this reading implies
unremarked. It is telling that to arrive at this long citation, which settles his argument for the
moment, the author has to spend so much energy touting the need for a proper philological
reading of Nietzsches text. He faults people like Richard Rorty for not having read deeply
enough in the work of Northrop Frye. Likewise, Heidegger, Lukcs and Freud, among an
overwhelming number of others (since for Waite Nietzsche is the philosopher of the


contemporary world, the most influential on a global scale, the dominant ideologue in the
context of the pax americana), all of them, according to Waite, simply ignore the philological
question of method when appropriating the texts of the German philosopher. Philology,
then, is opposed to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, we are told (via Sorel as cited in Rosen and
reported by Waite), entails an expression of middle-class fear of the violent and repressive
nature of truth . . . a cowardice which consists in always surrendering before the threat of
violence; and for the author this indicates that hermeneutics is condemned to death and
that its disappearance is only a matter of time (163). Philology, on the contrary, has a more
Gramscian connotation for Waite: not only as a practice of communist scholarship, but also
a practice of communist action beyond the academy. Gramscis living philology is, for
Waite, the highest possible standard against which to judge any text (79, cf. 145-66). The
current appropriation of this argument, goes under the guise of an attack on the melancholy
leanings of a putative self-defeatist Left that prevents the revolution by its fixation on failure
and its unwillingness to produce the new world that is waiting for us.
Perhaps the most important recent incarnation of this philological imperative is the
claim that theory or postmetaphysical thought is today a major hurdle against the
promise of a better world, even serving as the philosophical equivalent of savage capitalism
and its democratic processes (see Bosteels, Badiou and Politics 262). Yet, if finitude has
today become a dogma that risks keeping the empirical form being internally transformed
(Bosteels, Translator's Introduction xxvii), perhaps it is not of a dogma that we are
talking about in the first place. On the one hand, this position assumes that the revolution,
or the new world, is prevented from coming into being by the perhaps unwitting
speculative efforts of certain theoriststhat is, it seems to throw the political field onto the
desk of the philosopher/theorist up to a point. On the other, it wants to offer a dialectical
recasting of the very opposition between theory and praxis in which theory is no longer the
work of leaders separated from the masses, or philosophers in a position external to actual
emancipatory political sequences. Thus, the work of the masses themselves, the work, that is,
that goes on in those actually existing political sequences, has to be displaced from a purely
practical consideration and reimagined as dialectically engaged in the production of both
theory and of a torsion or change within the historical situation as such. This shift is not a
merely theoretical move, for it has been achieved as an effort of the intellect of the masses
themselves:


Political movements, in other words, are also and at the same time theoretical
acts; conversely, all theoretical or philosophical configurations are likewise to
be read as political interventionssay, as diagnostics or as prognosis,
whether overt or esoteric. But the crucial point not to be missed is that these
insights are but two sides of the same coin. Otherwise we risk smuggling in
through the back door the straw mans argument that we thought we kicked
out of the front door, namely, the dichotomy of theory and practice.
(Bosteels, The Efficacy 661)
And further:
To protest is to know; to know is to transform; and to learn is to be
controversial. If the theorists are the masses themselves, instead of the
vanguard leadership detached from them, then this is what theorists are for
in times of riots and distress. (The Efficay 662)
It is impossible, given the aim of this paper, to retrace all of the subtle and complex
theoretical footwork that has to take place for this dialectic to make sense. Nevertheless,
several remarks are in order to understand what is at stake both in Bosteels and in what I am
proposing in these pages. We could start with the idea that for Bosteels, following Badiou,
the main interlocutor here is Left-Heideggerianism, a loose label that is some times applied
to Badiou himself. For our purposes here what is important to underscore is that LeftHedeggerianism is meant to designate those thinkers for whom the work of Heidegger is a
fundamental point of departure, but who ultimately assume that in Heidegger there is no
answer to the question What is to be done?, and thus no useful link between theory and
praxis. What results is a theorization of the social that sees in it the appearance of an
unstable or un-founded totality, always precarious and always contingent. The attempt to
close this gap, so the argument goes, would result in terror. For Bosteels, this radicalization
of the Heideggerian principle of anarchy, the unpresentable void at the heart of all ontic
phenomena, remains unable to give a satisfactory answer to the problem of theory and
praxis. It leaves the theorists in a very traditional position; according to Bosteels, the
philosophy of radical democracy rarely exceeds the frame of traditional political philosophy,
in as much as it is still a question of deliberating the uses and disadvantages of different
modes of organizing society. In other words, it judges politics from outside . . . starting
from a necessary comparison of various types of symbolic ordering (Badiou and Politics, 270).


This externality is no less unacceptable than the relative externality of theory when compared
to the isolated and autonomous praxis of the militant, according to which theory only
happens in the streets. The dialectical relation between theory and praxis, if it is to avoid the
adventurism of ultra and speculative leftistism, involves two tasks that go to the heart of
Bosteelss proposal. The first is to provide an ontology of actuality, or of the present, which
Bosteels associates with Foucault, but ultimately defines as the theoretical task of mapping
the events whose configuration marks our present; the second is to cover over the void
that so-called anarchic poststructuralist thought makes so much of, in order to define the
subject of truth capable of transforming that empty space itself (269). Or, in other words,
the task is to define the present and to find the subject of truth that will be able to transform
it according to a universal prescriptionas opposed to a contingent hegemonic articulation
without ultimate grounds.
The reference to Foucault is more than a little odd here, particularly as it is set aside
right away in the name of a more Badiouian formulation regarding events. In Foucault, the
ontologies of the present had more to do with exposing the contingency at the heart of any
present circumstance, precisely because it is one of the traditional metaphysical moves to
assign the status of necessity to what is presenta status that goes straight to the heart of
the principle of reason. In Bosteels as well, the contingent is meant to emphasize the fact
that what is present is not necessary and can therefore be transformed in a radical way
consistent with emancipatory politics. But the principle of reason creeps back in with the
suggestion that it is possible for theory to offer a univocal representation of what the present
is. And this brings us back to the issue of an answer to the question what is to be done?
The possibility of an answer to this question is tied necessarily to the possibility of knowing
what the present is. As soon as a clear picture of what the present is appears, there also
appears a set of consequences as to what needs to be done. However, the problem is how
this picture emerges in the first place, and whether it is possible for it to emerge without
returning to the most traditional philosophical grounds. But even beyond the more
philosophical questions, it would be an issue that affects the most trivial organizational
principals in constructing our critical arguments. For instance, is what defines our present
the fact of a deep unity between post-metaphysical thought and the structure of the
market? (262). However subtle the qualifications one adduces in making this reduction, the
fact that it can be seen as an instance of reductionism, at the very least, exposes the


impossibility of defining and representing the present except as a subjective wager regarding
what is and is not actual, or is actual only from a certain perspective. This is the subject that
displaces the void, the subject of truth, the subject of revolution. To be in disagreement with
that subject about what the present is, means to be a reactionary subject; a subject unwilling
or unable to believe in the truth professed by the militant subject. It would be tempting to
invoke here the current commonplaces about how disagreement as such is what lies at the
heart of politics, and to say, for instance, that the present is neither one side nor the other
but the tension that the disagreement sustains, and thus that the present is the multiplicity of
presents that are therefore configured. But this would be simply to multiply and complicate
the requirements necessary to fully delineate what the present actually is. What I submit is
that the real issue lies in the impossibility of giving form to the present and that this
impossibility can only be overcome by sheer voluntarism and reductionism. This means that,
up to a point, I am in agreement with Bosteelss critique of Left-Heideggerianism, in so far
as what he says can also be read as a diagnosis that the necessary absence of foundations of
the social often, as was explained in the pages above with regard to Marcharts proposal,
substitutes for or acts as yet another foundation with which to cover over the an-archic at
the heart of the political. But if the Left-Heideggerians do this unwittingly, Bosteels does it
fully conscious that it is ultimately a question of displacing and forgetting the void. That is,
the issue of the forgetting of being, in the twenty first century is no longer a question of
what has gone unthought, but of a willing forgetfulness that is justified in the name of
making the work of politics easier. And its first task is to dismiss all that the theorist knows
about the difficult and treacherous traditional philosophical baggage regarding the presence
of the present for thought. But the here and now, particularly after Hegel, does not let itself
be pried open in this form.
However dialectically mediated, the theory/praxis dyad remains completely folded
into an epistemological search for ultimate foundations, the final ground, from which
knowledge is obtained. That is, the dialectic of theory and praxis remains wholly within
epistemology itself. But it also posits that nihilism is the measure of the distance staked out
from the non-melancholic proper Left that defines what the here and now are, which is to
say, the distance that separates critique from true politics as the highest value. Furthermore,
by pointing out the obstacle that the melancholic poses to this highest value, the true
progressive does nothing other than unwittingly underscore the finitude of what he or she


assumes to be the correct political path. For, one cannot kill god as if it were a choice; not
even Nietzsche made such an extravagant claim. The void at the heart of the political has
little to do with a proverbial theoretical pudding2 that is offered and can therefore be
accepted or rejected as if it were a matter of choice. This void is not an aesthetic or imagined
supplement, it is the first evidence of modern political experience, particularly after the great
political revolutions of the era. That is, it is not a conservative gap installed in order to
dismiss or discredit the emancipatory energy of the militant, it is what the militant, unaware
of all its consequences, first exposed in saying that the King was not a necessary feature of
the social landscape. And that his beheading, far from being a catastrophe, was the only way
of making life more bearable. But the void does not pick sides; the day after the revolution
that void is also there already gnawing at whatever new institutions are put in place. The
paradox of historical materialism is that it is unable to come to terms with the materiality of
this emptiness. And this is the central paradox of nihilism today. From the point of view of
our contemporary radical thinkers, to confront the void that revolutions made fully manifest
in the political field immediately turns you into a nihilist, as our contemporary revolutionary
theorists seem to see in anyone willing to look into the abyss only the black sheep that run
away from the Good Sheppard.
But it would be a mistake to think that this is only a question of/for the Left. In fact,
it would be possible to show the extent to which an approach labeled Left-Nietzschean, or
Left-Heideggerian, or even Left-anti-Platonist, which is to say the thought of the
displacement of politics as a category of metaphysics, appears today as the enemy and nihilist
adversary across a wide ideological spectrum. This is not because it is always the same
concept of the political that is at issue, but because politics is placed in the same structural
place: as the highest value against which nihilism is measured. For the moment, I will call the
dislocation of that site the task of infrapolitical deconstruction. But my aim here is to show
the extent to which its disavowal operates under the guise of a defense against nihilist
thought.
The same fundamental gesture reappears in the neo-communism of contemporary
theory. Bosteels, quoting Badiou, states: contemporary nihilism . . . consists . . . in defining
the Good only negatively by way of the need to avoid Evil. Evil is that from which the
Good is derived, not the other way round, as Badiou writes in his diagnosis of the ethical
turn. Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather


than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which
is like a counterpart of blind necessity (Marx and Freud 68). A proper leftist politics will
only emerge upon the eradication of all that, fixated on willing nothingness, prevents the real
transformation of the present alienation. This is a program that he outlines in the closing
section of The Actuality of Communism (2011), where he emphasizes the need for the proper
progressive left to recognize an eternal or ahistorical kernel that would open up the
possibility of changing the very terrain upon which history plays itself out (The Actuality
278). The dualism of an ontological and an ontic stratification of different levels that need
somehow to be linked is already at work here, though not under the banner of postfoundationalism. Yet it is from the same premises that the tasks for theory in the current
situation should be decided according to Bosteels. For him, the first would be writing a
history of communist eternity, that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist
hypothesis in a strict immanent determination; the second, communism must also be
actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things
(The Actuality 278). On the first count, Bosteels argues against a linear logic of necessary
stages, and in effect paraphrases the basic premise of the theory of the event in Badiou: that
an event emerges in a situation and not out of nothingness (to think so is the mistake of
speculative lefism, and thus of nihilism, according to this theory); on the second, while
assuming that the left as a whole would want to adopt the name communism as its own, he
admits that all the fights and disagreements of the left would concern what one understands
by that particular embodiment and organization of communist politics (the party, or the
statethe negation of bothor the multitude, and so forth), and it is in this latter
acrimonious zone that subjectivity emerges. Elsewhere, Bosteels has commented on the
difficulties of producing the new man, with reference to the case of Cuba in particular, and
of how it cannot be by way of eliminating the old in view of the new, whether it is a
bourgeois subject that needs to become revolutionary or a religious one that needs to be
secularized. In fact, these two kinds of subjectivity appear as two dimensions of the same
problem, as a true emancipatory politics would entail traveling down the road to the
religious alienation that lies at the root of political and economic alienation (Marx and Freud
122). The time of such a subject would have to be a new subjective present (Badiou, Logics of
Worlds. Being and Event II 51); but then the world this subject occupies and transforms would
have to be somewhere in between, in transition, both in order to maintain the requirement


of immanence and to avoid the Christian carryover of a subject that simply destroys an old
self.
The image that best captures the crossroads of time that this assumes is that of the
horizon, which is derived from the rhetoric of Bolivian vice-president lvaro Garca Linera.3
The actual body that incarnates the idea-in-history will have to declare that the horizon is not
actual (this is patently clear from Garca Lineras statement), whereas the theorists that
appropriate this horizon need to re-mark it as the actuality of the present:
This and nothing else is what the invocation of the communist horizon is
meant to produce or render actual once again: a complete shift in
perspective, or a radical ideological turnabout, as a result of which capitalism
no longer appears as the only game in town and we no longer have to be
ashamed to set our expecting and desiring eyes here and now on a different
organization of social relationships. (Bosteels, Actuality 228)
So far, this is the horizon of the present of a subject faithful to the communist hypothesis.
Since that subject is here-and-now the hypothesis of communism is also here-and-now: it is
an actual body that is present. But this means, at the same time, that the non-communist
situation, the world that has to be transformed, in which this subject emerges, and the now
of the subjective wager coexist. Furthermore, that situation is then touched by a temporality
that is beginning to blur the line between history and eternity more and more. Bosteels,
citing Jodie Dean, states: Horizon: . . . tags not a lost future but a dimension of experience
we can never lose, even if, lost in a fog or focused on our feet, we fail to see it. The horizon
is Real not just in the sense of impossiblewe can never reach itbut also in the sense of
the actual format, condition, and shape of our setting (and I take both these senses of Real
to be Lacanian); Jodi Dean explains in her own riff on the notion of the communist
horizon that she also borrows from Garca Linera. We can lose our bearings, but the
horizon is a necessary condition or shaping of our actuality. Whether the effect of a
singularity or the meeting of earth and sky, the horizon is the fundamental division
establishing where we are. (The Actuality 228)
If this dimension of experience we can never lose is not an impossible illusion, that
impossible to reach line where earth and sky meet, but the condition for shaping our
actuality, why then resort to the image of the horizon? Of course, one pays homage to
Garca Linera by doing so, but in his own formulation the image had rather different


connotations:
The general horizon of the era is communist. . . . But at this moment it is

clear that this is not an immediate horizon, which centers on the conquest of
equality, the redistribution of wealth, the broadening of rights . . . that is . . .
as far as social forces allow us to go . . . We enter the movement with our
expecting and desiring eyes set upon the communist horizon. But we were
serious and objective, in the social sense of the term, by signaling the limits
of the movement. (Cited in Bosteels, The Actuality, 226-27)
Horizon here entails a movement toward something that is to come, which will have to be
constructed. If this is a stage-ist reading of the passage, which Bosteels dismisses as
inappropriate, then what emerges when it is read by the new Communism begins to sound
and look more like the not-so-new and only questionably communist temporal image of
classical or orthodox vulgar Marxism-Leninism. For what the passage states is that the
movement has to be properly formedgiven its limitationsby a very serious we that
knows better.
Perhaps it is time to reconsider the problem of foundations from the perspective of
the ex nihilo without any further qualifications, that is, from the perspective a thoroughly aprincipial thought. That the non-foundation of change is always the void would then mean
that no political praxis/thought would be able to avail itself of necessary reason, even if this
reason returns in the form of a stable, though contingent, image of the present. The
precariousness of this praxis/thought would constitute the edge or the border between what
forms and unforms it at every turn. This proposal does not require that we delimit the
proper space of literature, politics, science and so on with every putative autonomous region
as separate conditions for thought. But we would need to frame the problem some ways
beyond the columns that cordon off the romantic legacy that has most often been associated
with the formless, the sublime, and the tragic, as so many instances of the void that
structures the whole even in its vanishing. Derridas work on Hegel can be of help on this
front. I want to conclude by turning to Glas, in the hopes of showing that the impossibility
of giving a strong answer to the question what is to be done? is not the result of a weak or
melancholic subject in love with defeat, but the upshot of a more general impossibility to
give form and define what the present is. In the end, what makes revolution, change,
transformation, possible is the very thing that wrests the possibility of the new from the


realm of a subjective choice, and also from the field defined by the relation between theory
and praxis.
4
Derrida recounts: in absolute religion, such as Hegel understands it, separation or
division is not overcome by reconciliation. The opposition remains as a representation that
anticipates the ultimate truth, and hence the essential content of this representation remains
external. The object in question is present, but remains outside and ahead. The subject for
whom this representation appears cannot be one with its object in the now, and the
reconciliation has to wait (Derrida Glas 219, I always cite from the column on Hegel). If this
is what obtains prior to the Hegelian synthesis (the sublation of religion into speculative
philosophy), it would serve to mark the limit of a pre-Hegelian modernity. So long as this
exteriority remains, we are somewhere prior to absolute knowledge. By the same token, we
would be in a zone where time, which would be defined as the representative exteriority
itself, would be caught in the realm of objective necessity, nothing to be done to it, almost
impossible to even notice it. Derrida sums this up in a single sentence: Religion is
representative because it needs time (220). Let us mark, in passing, that any political praxis
of subjectivity that has not yet produced its anticipated end result (e.g., communism) would
come to occupy the place religion does here: it would have to be representative because it
would need time. But occupying the same place that religion occupies before and after the
formalization of Absolute Knowledge has its consequences. Namely, that the time of
separation must be turned around, it must be actualized and organized as the real
movement that abolishes the present state of things . . . [and] find inscription in a concrete
body (Bosteels, The Actuality 239). Separation would then be: that which is being destroyed
by the actuality of that which is not yet here but as horizon. The age that places itself under
the sign of the Aufhebung, modernity since Hegel, is forced to produce the historicization of
eternity by pitting its horizon-al actuality against a present it needs to destroy, a present it
sets out to transform, even as this present is only available as its own theoretical projection,
it own theoretical fiction. We are talking about the crossroads of religion and revolution, but
also about the formalization of a stable present that can be handled so as to transform it, as
if time were at hand, given in the form of an object here and now.
Moreover, the mere surpassing of this exteriority would only yield a further
complication. If, as Hegel points out in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Absolute Knowledge is at


once a deletion and a relief of time, what obtains is a barely existing limit, exceeded as soon
as it is posited, which is already no more what it is yet and does not even give time to
think its time. This limit is what barely presents itself between absolute religion and Sa
[Absolute Knowledge] (Derrida 220). Everything hinges on the strategic interpretation one
makes of this deletion and relief of time, and any possible idea regarding a post-Hegelian
modernity depends on it.
Absolute Knowledge, then, as the passage from representation to presence, produces
the being by itself of the logos, its unveiled essence. Derrida calls this the final
accomplishment of the phantasm: The absolute phantasm: Sa (225). And he asks: what
can there be outside an absolute phantasm? What can one yet add to it? Why and how does
one desire to get out of it? He follows these questions thus: It is necessary to give oneself
time; but what kind of time, when the concept itself seems to be what makes it so difficult
to imagine any thought of an outside in the first place? Derrida adds: not the time that
remains, but Times remains(s) (225, 226). The difficulty lies in:
Trying to think . . . a remain(s) of time . . . that would not come under a
present, under a mode of being or presence, and that consequently would fall
outside the circle of Sa, [but] would not fall from it as its negative, as a
negative sound . . . The remain(s), it must be added, would not fall from it at
all. Everything that falls (to the tomb) in effect yet comes under [releve du]
Sa. (226)
Derrida opened Glas by observing that the words here and now are for us citations
and that we will have learned this from Hegel (1). Considered as citation, the question of
here-now can nevertheless be staged, the better to go in the direction of that element of
the scene which exceeds representation (Derrida Points 11). What is at issue here then is a
question concerning the possibility of time beyond any synthetic representation of it, yes, but
the crucial point is not the aesthetic proposition of the theorist struggling with Hegel, but
that the only way of avoiding the mere substitution of one foundation or absolute ground by
another depends on the possibility of assuming the here and now only as citation, as a
theoretical fiction which envelops us almost to the point of blindness, but which can
nevertheless be staged so as to confront its fictionality, however obliquely. It makes no
difference if this substitution of the foundation takes on the mask of the void or the form of
the willful forgetting of the emptiness that haunts all institutions. What is at issue is therefore


not merely to posit the vanguard notion of a post-metaphysical time, again as if it were
simple a question of inventing a new idea. What is at stake is, rather, that the possibility of
confronting the truth of what is given, to be a materialist in the most righteous sense of that
useless word, is to find a way to think the fact of this thing which is time beyond form,
the nothing from which history is made.4
The infrapolitical perspective is always pointing to this fact. And it does not say to
the militant or the radical thinker you have to accept the categorical imperative that
everything comes to an end. The infrapolitical perspective only points out: you want your
present defined and delimited so as to know what needs to be done; and you only find a formless mess which
escapes your reach. If the present does not yield to the phantasmatic projection of the militant
subject, this is not a theoretical dispute, but the confrontation between that projection and
the real that escapes it.
The remain(s) of time, or that time that is not without being nothing, point to a
time, or time, that is no longer the time of metaphysics, but as such is only time if we
understand this word catachrestically, as the only word that we have available even though it
is not up to the task, for this time is a formless time, the absence of time as a formalized
structure of any sort, a time that lies beyond the columns (for instance the two columns of
Glas). This is an uncertain time. And yet there is the need for infrapolitical deconstruction to
make it appear, not as an aesthetic program, but as a confrontation with the formlessness of
history. Forces resistant to the Aufhebung, to the process of truth, to speculative negativity,
must be made to appear, while at the same time maintaining that these forces of resistance
do not constitute in their turn relievable or relieving negativities. In sum, a remain(s) that
may not be without being nothingness: a remains that may (not) be (Glas 43).
Only then will the question of nihilism become something other than the accusation
of disbelief, in order to open itself up to the gathering of thought in the nothingness that
nihilism is: only then will nihilism become thinkable as something other than a nostalgic
desire for values, for, the void is not a site from which a sequence departs, after which there
is loyalty to the consequences that displace it. The void is not a structural constant that needs
to be supplemented with the vocabulary of contingency or fidelity. It is what makes of
politics that field from which only structured and formed absolute phantasies can be expected,
such as the absolute knowledge of what the presence of the present is, from which the
certitude of what is to be done would be deduced. What this says is something that we all


know intimately: there is always the need for further change; and to say this does not make
choosing between evil and a lesser evil anything other than a forced choice for evil. The
accusation of nihilism, which comes down as a sledgehammer or serves as a putative
crowbar for liberation from a phantasized worldwide domination of post-metaphysical
thought, is also a strange condemnation of the formless nothingness from which history is
made. Conservative thought is the thought that seeks to restrain this dark matter, history
itself, being, by believing that its own praxis is immune from the ineluctable effects of
degradation, and this by the sheer force of a willed forgetting.
It is important to keep in mind what the point of reference is here. For Bosteels,
following Badiou, not to will the forgetting of the forgetting is to keep to a perverse
radicalism that cancels the possibility that an unprecedented regime of consequences can be
initiated in the here and now by a rare temporal act of subjectivation (Badiou and Politics,
172). According to this orientation, in the denegation of all present temporality, the
obscure subjective figure becomes fundamentally a figure of death (172). The question is
immediately asked by Bosteels, should we not consider the acknowledgement of the death
drive, the void, difference, the Real at the heart of social antagonism, the impossibility of all
present temporality except as citations of a here and nowshould not all of this be
considered a mystical intuition that immediately renders impossible the consequent
belaboring of a new and unheard-of truth (172)? But if you opt for the forgetting of the
forgetting, that is, if you opt for the rejection of what has already been acknowledged, you
have to accept what this implies within the history of thought that is at the heart of these
daunting and complicated questions: that this is not truly an option except as the unwitting
choice for the tomb where everything that yet comes under Absolute Knowledge falls.
Beyond what can be decided by the subject of truth, it is his or her phantasm that is
consequently belabored when here and now are taken to be something other than citations.
What lies beyond that phantasy is not the tragic sublime of the political, and much less the
philosophical idea of time or times, but the simple datum that the time that lies beyond
the columns, beyond the philosophical projection of its form, whether it is declined
politically or otherwise, is not the figurative imposition of anyones here and now. The
rest of time: an unwieldy time that cannot be managed or imposed on anyone.

Works Cited
Badiou, Alain. The Adventure of French Philosophy. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. London, New York:
Verso, 2012. Print.
____. Being and Event. 1988. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York, London: Continuum, 2005.
Print.
____. Logics of Worlds. Being and Event II. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London, New York:
Continuum, 2009. Print.
Biset, Emmanuel. "Contra la diferencia poltica." Pensamiento Plural 7 (July/Dec. 2010): 173202. Print.
Bosteels, Bruno. The Actuality of Communism. New York, London: Verso, 2010. Print.
____. Badiou and Politics. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.
____. Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror. New
York, London: Verso, 2012. Print.
____. "Translator's Introduction." The Adventure of French Philosophy. London, New York:
Verso, 2012. vii-l. Print.
_____. "The Efficacy of Theory, or, What Are Theorists for in Times of Riots and
Distress?" The South Atlantic Quarterly 113.4 (2014): 659-70. Print.
Clemens, Justin. The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institution, Aesthetics, Nihilism.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Print.
Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Glas. 1974. Trans. Jr. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand. Lincoln; London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Print.
____. Margins of Philosophy. 1972. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982. Print.
____. Points... Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Print.
____. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Print.
Draper, Susana. "Within the Horizon of an Actuality: The State and the Commons in the
Eternal Return of Communism." The South Atlantic Quarterly 114.4 (2014): 807-20.
Print.
Galli, Carlo. Genealogia della politica. Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno. 1996. 2 ed.
Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010. Print.
____. La mirada de Jano. Ensayos sobre Carl Schmitt. 2008. Trans. Mara Julia de Ruschi. Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 2011. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill et al. Ed. William McNeill.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.
Marchart, Oliver. Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou
and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Print.
Noys, Benjamin. The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Philosophy.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Print.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters in the Theory of Sovereignty. 1922. Trans. George
Schwab. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print.
Steinberg, Sam. History and Survival in lvaro Garca Linera. Unpublished manuscript.
Waite, Geoff. Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophesy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of
Everyday Life. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1996. Print.

Wood, David C. The Deconstruction of Time. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humianities Press
International, Inc., 1989. Print.

Notes

1 Among
others, Bosteels is a representative of this charge (Actuality... 280; Marx and Freud 159-193). Rebeca
Comay, writing also of the terror of the tabula rasa, sums it up by asserting that for a certain species of
speculative leftist belle me misery provides its own pacifications (Comay 150).
2 Bosteels: In fact, when it does not opt for the traditional format of philosophy, one of the only ways in
which the defeatist stance of postmetaphysical thought can still garner for itself the appeal of radicalism is via
some convoluted argument or other about the resistance to theory. The proof, then, is not in the pudding so
much as in the fact that so many people refuse to eat it (The Efficacy 663).
3 Though here I cannot engage in a dialogue with recent work that has been appearing in relation to the
important notion of horizon, I would like to at least mark the that this dialogue is and should be taking place
elsewhere (see Steinberg and Draper).
4 Only when this is taken into account does it become possible to understand the proper place of Derridas
diffrance. The point is important enough to require the clarification of a possible misunderstanding, which lies
at the heart of David C. Woods otherwise illuminating The Deconstruction of Time. Wood attempts to expose a
fault in Derridas thinking on time. On the one hand, Wood argues, Derrida is known for his claim that an
other concept of time cannot be opposed or offered as a good alternative to the bad time of the
metaphysics of presence: time in general belongs to metaphysical conceptuality (269, Wood is citing from
Ousia and Gramme). Time is always a fundamental concept when it is a question of metaphysics, which is to
say that time is a fundamental concept whenever diffrance is denied. For diffrance, as Derrida writes, is the
constitution of the present, as an originary and irreducibly non-simple (and therefore strictu sensu nonoriginary)
synthesis of marks, or traces of retentions, and protentions [terms only used provisionally] which (is)
(simultaneously) spacing (and) temporization (273; Wood is citing from Diffrance [Derrida Margins of
Philosophy 13]). The implication is that for Derrida there cannot be a two-tier temporality: Diffrance cannot be
used as a corrective (273). For Wood this implies that diffrance is used in a quasi-transcendental manner that is
illegitimate. On the other hand, it is possible to find places in which Derrida surprises the reader by referring
to a delinearized temporality which appears when what is strategically at issue is, for example, showing the
nonlinearity of signification that linguistics or structuralism denies. More recently, it is possible to find Derrida
alluding to an alternative to the transcendental phenomenology of time while speaking of a welcoming to the
temporality of the other: the present or proper time of the other, which I must no doubt forego, giving up
radically, but whose very possibility is also at the same time the chance of the encounter of the event
(Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan 133). Woods point is that by denying the quasi-transcendental
status of diffrance as the constitution of the present the possibility of an alternative nonmetaphysical
temporality would then open up, eliminating the apparent contradiction at the heart of the very concept of
multiple or alternate temporalities (Wood 277). However, this proposal would amount to annulling the whole
of Derridas contribution to the deconstruction of western metaphysics.
Sovereignty: An Infrapolitical Question
______________________________________
RONALD MENDOZA DE JESS
EMORY UNIVERSITY
Tu autem, . . . in cuius oculis mihi quaestio factus sum, et ipse est languaor meus.
(And you, . . . in whose eyes I am made a question, and this itself is my languor)
Augustine
Predicated on indivisibility,1 erected upon the spatiality of the nomological earth,2 lodged
within the punctuality that separates the time of an exceptional decision,3 grounded on the principle
that decrees that being itself is one and the one is being as such,4 elevated in monotheism to the
keystone of the politico-theological5Sovereignty will have always been inviolable.
Is it possible to write another history of sovereignty? A history of the political that would not
merely reaffirm the unconditional character of sovereigntys inviolability? A history of sovereignty
that would not boil down to a narration of sovereigntys hegemony across the political realm? A
critical history of sovereign power that would configure politics otherwise, leading to an experience of
what is perhaps otherwise than political? Perhaps an infrapolitical history of sovereignty?
Before these questions could be raisedlet alone answeredit would be necessary to
interrogate the concept of the question that informs these phrases and programs their reading to
elicit the answer that is already implanted in their grammar. And yet, if interrogating the question is
an exigency, this task certainly lags behind the expedient urgency that ordains that the question of
the question ought to be neutralized, that the ground upon which our thinking stands must be
prevented from slipping away under our very feet.
Examples of the resistance to this per-verse coiling of the question upon itself abound in
contemporary thought, but perhaps nowhere as much as in the political terrain. This is an obvious
fact, and justifiably so. After all, political thought is supposed to be the place where theoretical
inquiry confronts the experience of interpellation. Political reflection thus requires bringing to a halt
the aleatory ambivalence that keeps questions open to further questioning. Politics orders that a
stand be made and sides be chosen. The neutralization of what remains a question in every question
becomes even more palpable in the case of intensely political questions like the ones I raised
above concerning the possibility of another history of sovereigntya history that would not reassert
the primacy of sovereign power as the inviolable arkh of the political. Indeed, to insist on inquiring
53 | Mendoza de Jess, R. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)
into the presuppositions of a political question is likely to be taken as a sign of the inquirers
depoliticization. And yet, if we assume for a moment that tarrying with these questions and treating
them as questions does perform a certain kind of work that is not simply apolitical, we would then
have to ask why it is so difficult to acknowledge the labor of radical questioning within hegemonic
configurations of political thought and action. If it is the case that putting political questions in
question remains at best a political eccentricity, if not a blind spot of politics, then what does this
situation tell us about the limits of the political and the status of radical questioning?
My wager in this essay is that politics blindness to the force of radical interrogation tells us
something about the closure of politics, namely, that the political as such constitutes itself as a field by
eradicating any traces of the an-archy of the question. Conversely, this political blindness also
suggests that the radicality of the question cannot be given its due in the terrain of politics. The
experience of questioning the questions that constitute the horizons of the political is instead to be
seen as a crucial dimension of what Alberto Moreiras calls infrapolitics.6 Moreiras himself has
recently suggested that if infrapolitics were to have a proper place, it would be the non-place from
which the place of politics is radically interrogated (Castillo et al. 126). Taking a cue from Moreiras,
this essay contributes to the ongoing theoretical elaboration of infrapolitics by outlining the
structure of the kinds of questions that what we might call infrapolitical. The first section of this
paper thematizes the relation between infrapolitics and the question through a reading of a recent
interview of Moreiraswhich is included in this dossierand the opening pages of Jacques
Derridas Violence et mtaphysique: Essai sur la pense dEmmanuel Levinas (Violence and
Metaphysics: Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas). Working through Derridas thinking
on the question allows me to further explicate the radicality of infrapolitical questions. At the same
time, reading Derridas essay with Moreirass notion of infrapolitics in mind casts a different light on
this text. Derridas reflections on the status of the question in fact move towards a thinking of the
an-archic, a-principial interrogation that is presupposed by any commandment and any law. Derrida
gives at least three names to this an-archism of the law (a genitive that must be read in a strictly
objective sense): the question of the question, the freedom of the question, and the possibility of the
question. My claim is that something like infrapolitics is already at work in Derridas thinking of the
improper freedom and the weak possibility of a question that is free from any determination. This
other liberation coincides for Derrida with the radical questioning of the legitimacy of any law
including the law of the questionand thus with the powerlessness of the question in the face of
the dispersion of its own questioning.
The second contribution that I hope to make to the theorization of infrapolitics takes us into
a more explicitly political terrain. How does infrapolitics stand with regards to the ongoing
theoretical efforts to draw a limit around sovereignty? Contemporary political thought abounds in
affirmative responses to the question of whether a critique of sovereignty is possible. Recall Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negris notion of the constituent power of the multitude, Jon BeasleyMurrays theory of post-hegemony, Roberto Espositos call for an affirmative biopolitics, or
Giorgio Agambens politics of destituent power; these theories criticize sovereignty in the name of
a politics that would not be structured by the phantasm of the indivisible one and its biopolitical
ensnaring of lifes potencies.7 Still, the affirmative relation that these theorists entertain with the
lexicon of powerwhether constituent or destituent, Spinozist or Nietzscheanbetrays the fact
that their critiques of sovereignty continue to be structured by a political demand, which also ordains
that the possibility of the critique of sovereignty should not be questioned.
The second half of this essay proposes an infrapolitical approach to the possibility of
sovereigntys critique by interrogating the political charge that has already determined in advance the
sense of the concept of possibility and which these political theorists take for granted. To formulate
infrapolitics way of approaching this question, in the second part I analyze briefly three texts that
interrogate sovereignty from without the political: Emmanuel Levinass lecture Au-del du possible
(Beyond the Possible), Maurice Blanchots Lcriture du dsastre (The Writing of Disaster), and
Derridas LUniversit sans condition (The University without Condition). Each in their own singular way,
these thinkers suggest that any critical history of sovereignty must interrogate the link that binds
sovereignty and possibility and thus confront the problem of its own possibility. But whereas
Levinass other and Blanchots neutral are still attempts to name the limits of sovereignty,
Derrida ups the ante by insisting that the question of sovereignty ought to remain an open question.
For any answer to this question presupposes the dissociation of sovereignty from unconditionality, a
distinction that is paradoxically impossible.
The third and last section of this paper explores Derridas claim concerning the paradoxical
impossibility that keeps the question of sovereignty open. To do so, I turn to Voyous: Deux essais sur
la raison (Rogues: Two Essays on Reason), where Derrida comments on Aristotles arguments for the
existence of the Prime Mover in Book XII of the Metaphysics. My reading of this passage suggests
that Derridas turn to Aristotle should be read as an attempt to clarify the aporia that any
deconstruction of sovereignty must confront. This aporia could be stated in the following terms: if
sovereignty at its core is nothing other than sheer exceptionality, then any attempt to delimit the
proper space of sovereignty is bound to fail. The deconstruction of sovereignty cannot coincide with
the effort to draw the proper boundaries of sovereignty, since such a project misrecognizes the
essentially ecstatic character of sovereign power. Aristotles way of understanding the relation
between the Prime Mover and the first heaven provides an allegory of the closure of the political in
the identification of sovereignty and unconditionality. If sovereignty has already shaped its supposed
other in its own self-image, then it would seem as if the deconstruction of sovereignty is impossible.
However, this impossibility is not the terminus ad quem, but rather the terminus a quo from which the
deconstruction of sovereignty may perhaps begin. The experience of the im-possible names the
exigency that traverses the chance of another history of sovereign power that would question
sovereigntys claim to inviolability from the non-site of infra-political solicitation.
I. An Infrapolitical Question?
In an interview published in this dossier,8 Moreiras gives several preliminary definitions of
infrapolitics. Perhaps the most crucial to my argument occurs in the middle of a discussion about
the relation between infrapolitics and posthegemony. For Moreiras, these two notions have to be
approached as implying a radical questioning of the political:
Neither infrapolitics nor posthegemony are goals to be achieved, but conditions of
life, or of practice, and of thought, and one must reach them, perhaps, or if at all
possible, through a certain labor of destruction. They require, to enter into
themselves, a certain destruction whose end result is never assured. In my previous
answer I said that real politics is not usually found where it seems to be but in a
different place. Wherever it is, whoever finds it, neither infrapolitics nor
posthegemony claim to occupy that place, rather they occupy the place that allows
for making the place of politics a question in each case. (Castillo et al. 130)
Moreirass engagement with the notions of infrapolitics and posthegemony constitutes one of
the most sustained theoretical efforts in contemporary political thought to submit politics to a
radical interrogation. Infrapolitics exceeds even the reputed radicalism of postfoundationalist
approaches to politics insofar as the questioning of politics that the infrapolitical enables prevents
reading this genitive as a subjective genitive.9 In other words, infrapolitical questions are not strictu
sensu political questions; they are neither questions that could be answered from within the political
realm nor are they questions that interrogate politics exclusively for the sake of establishing another
politics. We could get a better sense of how the questions that infrapolitics pursues are not reducible
to political questions by developing further Moreirass claim concerning the critical destruction
that the notions of infrapolitics and posthegemony must undergo in order to enter into
themselves. What kind of critique and what kind of destruction would enable these names to
thematize the radical force of interrogation that has a claim over them?
For these terms to be understood infrapolitically and posthegemonically we would have to
displace the settled semantic values and the stabilized referential forces that turn infrapolitics and
posthegemony into words that relate to self-evident concepts and realities. To do so, we would have
to suspend the normative lexicology that immediately determines infrapolitics and posthegemony as
specific spatio-temporal modifications of politics and hegemony. If we reread the infra and the
post against the grain of their spatialization and temporalization, we begin to see that infrapolitics
does not designate what would be merely below or beneath the political, just as posthegemony is not a
name for the mode of politics that emerges after hegemonys exhaustion. Rather than taking the topoi
of politics and hegemony as the reference points that enable us to determine the time-space of the
infrapolitical and the posthegemonical, we would have to rethink the infra and the post in terms
of the time-space that would belong to a radical interrogation of politics. This would be neither an
epochal time nor a neatly-defined space; instead, something like the instance of a dia-chronic instant
in which an epokh irrupts that turns off the politics of hegemony, which is grounded upon the
principle of sovereignty. Furthermore, the weak, minimal form of ideality that would correspond to
infrapolitics and posthegemony requires not only rethinking the time-space of the infra and the
post, but also reverting the relation of semantic and syntactic dependence that normally subjugates
bound morphemes like infra- and post- to their independent roots. Although the latter are
supposed to constitute a semantic whole unto themselves, to think infrapolitics infrapolitically
requires reading the -politics of infrapolitics as being in fact subjugated to its prefix: the infra-
and the post- are the sites of an excess that is free from its determination by the politics of
hegemony and the hegemony of politics. It is only through the destruction of the transcendental
lexicologyindeed, the transcendental grammar of politicsthat already determined the infra- as
relative to political that infrapolitics may come to its own as a mode of interrogating the political that
calls politics infinitely into question.
Finally, Moreirass claim about the need for a critical destruction to think infrapolitics and
posthegemony suggests that no dialectic obtains between these four names. In other words, neither
the infra- nor the post- are to be read as indexing two modalities of what would amount to an
essentially negative relation to the political. Rather than having the status of negativity vis--vis the
positivity of politics and hegemony, infrapolitics and posthegemony in each case configure unique
a-topologies that are only determinable by the irreducible singularity that marks each moment in
which the politics of hegemony and the hegemony of politics is put into question.
Earlier in the interview, Moreiras gives another preliminary definition of infrapolitics that
establishes a strong connection between this notion and deconstruction: But we can make an
attempt: let us say that infrapolitics refers to deconstruction in politics, or that it is deconstruction of
politics or politics in deconstruction (Castillo et al. 125). If we read this tentative definition
alongside the characterization of infrapolitics as the interrogation of politics, we begin to get a better
sense of the kind of interrogation of the political that animates Moreirass efforts to theorize otherwise
the notions of infrapolitics and posthegemony. Indeed, we might even say that these two definitions
say the same thing: as the interrogation of politics, infrapolitics is also the deconstruction of politics.
We could therefore gain some clarity on what infrapolitical questions entail if we turn to
deconstructions radicalization of the experience of the question. Such a radicalization is at work
from the opening of Derridas Violence et mtaphysique. Derrida is concerned in these pages with
the question of philosophys finitude. Is philosophy now dead or was it already essentially defunct? Will
it continue to die again in the future (Derrida 117)? Derrida is not interested in this question because
philosophy could one day solve it; for him, the very unanswerability of this question teases out an
aspect of the experience of interrogation that is necessarily elided whenever a question is posed.
What is reduced through the form of interrogative statements is the very unanswerability of the
question. In the case of the question of philosophys death, this neutralization has crucial
consequences, insofar as, according to Derrida, only this question could give a sense both to
philosophy as such as well as to the community of philosophers dispersed throughout the world. It
is only from philosophys finitudefrom what philosophy cannot ask while hoping to find a final
answerthat the philosophical as such could be constituted. To inquire after philosophys death
therefore amounts to an infra-philosophical interrogation. The totality that determines the sense of
the philosophical and the identity of the philosophers can only be achieved through an impossible
inquiry into the impossibility of ever achieving this totality (Derrida 118). And yet, it is precisely
because the question of philosophys death cannot be answered within philosophy that both the
philosophical as such and the community of philosophers remain constituted as it were through
their destitution, through their incapacity to master impossibility by answering the question
concerning their own limits. The community of philosophers and philosophy as such are thus
marked by an essential precariousness: their coming together only takes place in the time-space of a
fragile and infinitely open self-questioning:
Communaut de la question, donc, en cette fragile instance o la question nest pas

encore assez dtermine pour que lhypocrisie dune rponse se soit dj invite sous
le masque de la question, pour que sa voix se soit dj laiss articuler en fraude dans
le syntaxe mme de la question. Communaut de la dcision, de linitiative, de
linitialit absolue mais menace, o la question na pas encore trouv le langage
quelle a dcid de chercher, ne sest pas encore en lui rassure sur sa propre
possibilit. Communaut de la question sur la possibilit de la question. (Derrida
118)10
The question of philosophys finitude is fragile due to its radical indetermination, which
eludes even the minimal determination of the question by the syntactic form of an interrogative
statement. Derrida calls these kinds of statements hypocritical because they introduce the response
into the question surreptitiously; they already answer the question as soon as the question itself is
raised. Interrogative propositions thus neutralize the questions questionability. Later on in the essay,
Derrida links this suspension of the syntactic form of the question to the preservation of the
question as a question: la question doit tre garde. Comme question (Derrida 119).11 Rather than
reaffirming the question in its fixed essence, this preservation of the question as question releases the
question into its freedom: La libert de la question (double gnitif) doit tre dite et abrite (Derrida
119).12 A question that would be preserved as a question would have been liberated from the necessity
of its inscription as an interrogative statement; as such, it would also be a question that is free from
the answer that its inscription has already prescribed to it. At the same time, at stake in the freedom
of the question is also the question of freedom. But can this two-fold inter-rogative freedom be
attained? And, if so, who could achieve it? How could the liberation of the question from its
syntactic pro-gram also preserve the freedom of the question and the question of freedom?
To begin to approach this issue we would have to take stock of the fact that Derridas
statements regarding the freedom of the question are marked by a doit or a must; they have the
character of an injunction. Indeed, the opening pages of Derridas essay thematize the duty that falls
upon those who claim to belong to the community of philosophers by virtue of the sole fact that
they partake in the history of the question, a history inaugurated by the subtraction of the question
as such from the entire field of factual interrogative statements. As we saw above, this duty
commands questioners to preserve the question as such, demanding the extraction of all questions
from their emplotment within the homogeneous linearity of syntax, itself informed by a linguistic
morph that determines the very sense of any question in relation to the telos of answerability.
Unfreethat is, answerablequestions must be destroyed in order to be safeguarded as questions,

in order to be restored to their freedom. Thus understood, the law of the question appears to
command the entire field of philosophy, determining the conditions that enable any philosopher to
be admitted to the philosophical community. The law of the question would amount to the very
arkh of philosophy and the principium of the philosophical subject. As such, the law of the question
would found the historical topos in which the question abides as such and is transmitted in its abiding:
Demeure fonde, tradition ralise de la question demeure question (Derrida 119).13
And yet, the law of the question functions otherwise than it appears to do. For this duty does
not confirm the archontic and principial supremacy of the law of the question. Nor does it
determine the very subjectivity of the philosopher or the questioner in view to the constitution of an
an actual community of questioners ruled by the pure relation between the law and the subject:
Si ce commandement a une signification thique, ce nest pas dappartenir au domaine de lthique,
mais dautoriserultrieurementtout loi thique en gnral. Il nest pas de commandement qui ne
sadresse une libert de parole. Il nest donc ni loi ni commandement qui ne confirme et nenferme
cest--dire qui ne dissimule en la prsupposantla possibilit de la question. (Derrida 119)14
Derridas implicit reference to Levinass thinking of ethics in this passage can help us to
understand the extent to which the law of the question does not enable the constitution of any subject
or ipseity of the question. According to Derrida, the order of the question is not essentially ethical
because every instantiation of the questions command ultimately addresses both itself (the question)
and the questioner as possibilities. What kind of notion of possibility is at stake in the possibility of
the question? If the law of the question prescribes the questioner to preserve the question as such
and if the latter coincides with the questions freedom, and furthermore if these two are to be
understood as possibilities, then the law of the question itself incites and welcomes its own
transgressive deposition. For every law and every commandment dissimulate the possibility of
coming into question, the chance of being interrogated as to their legitimacy. It is here, in what
Derrida calls freedom of speech (libert de parole) that we ought to locate the site from which the
possibility of the questioner and of the question themselves can be experienced as free. This is the
reason why the disclosure of the possibility of the question requires something more than the mere
destruction of its dissimulation as an interrogative statement. All appearances to the contrary, the
question as such is not to be seen as the expression of the phenomenological essence of the question,
just as much as the freedom of the question and of the questioner are not to be immediately
understood in terms of the freedom of an ego-logical consciousness that constitutes the world as a
totality of essences. Rather the essence of the question as well as its freedom lies in its an-archic
questioning of every and any arkhai, including the very commandment that would have presumably
produced this anarchic excess, namely, the order to free the question as such into its own possibility.
Therefore, the freedom of the question and of the questioner irrupts uniquely and most intensely
whenever the very law of the questions preservation comes into question, whenever one may
approach the aporia of the question of the possibility of the question or whenever the question
itself, as such, comes to the question. It is only from this aporia that the possibility of both the
question and the questioner can be measured as free: freedom would lie in the infinitely singular
experience of the inter-rogation of the question itself. It is only in this questioning that the question
loses its own possibilities and its proper freedom, destroying every propositional iteration of
itself and becoming free from the very notion of freedom as ground and subject, experiencing
freedom only in the interrogation of its own freedom. The questioning of the question therefore
opens unto an infinity that calls into question any lawincluding the law of the questionas well as
any questionincluding the question of the law and even the question of the question. Since such a
free, possible question is itself a response to a law, the question cannot claim to be an arkh or a
principium, rather it is an infinitely finite prosthesis. And yet, the law that supposedly brings about the
question is, in turn, questionable and to such an extent that it cannot master its own being-questioned,
and thus its own dispossession.
II. Infra-Ipseity? Other, Neutral, Im-possible
If something like infrapolitics is already at work in Derridas outlining of the
infraphilosophical question of philosophys death, this is because infrapolitics is an attempt to affirm
and thematize the destabilizing movement of inter-rogation that deposes the auto-positionality of
the law, interrupts the self-referentiality of ego-logy, and suspends the constitution of any intersubjective community. At the same time, it is worth noting once more that the expropriating effects
of infrapolitical questions are not due to their hyper-primacytheir status as the first and/or last
instance of judgment and critical authority. Instead, infrapolitical questions live and die as questioned
questions that are incapable of mastering their own questioning. Hetero-auto-affected; there is no
ipseity of the question. The possibility of the question coincides with its impossibility. Not unlike the
question of philosophys finitude, infrapolitical questions have to be raised otherwise than as an
interrogative statements, which secure the question in its possibility and thus in its answerability.
In the introduction, I argued that the same political demand that informs the efforts of
theorists like Negri, Beasley-Murray, Esposito, and Agamben to draw a limit to sovereign power
forces these theorists to neutralize the questionability of this demand.15 After an excursus through
Moreirass interview and Derridas essay we are now in a better position to see why this is so. The
demand that a mode of non-sovereign power be thought and enacted turns the question of sovereignty
into the site for the self-affirmation of a political ipseity: a self that is assured about the possiblepossibility of the questions that it raises and about its own power to pose and answer these questions. We
can see here the workings of the ruse of sovereignty, a ruse analogous to Hegels ruse of reason:
the same demand that structures the efforts of these thinkers to theorize another, post-sovereign
politics ends up reinscribing sovereignty as the arkh of the political field through the reaffirmation
of the power of possibility and the possibility of power as the structuring principle of an inquisitorial
politics.
What would it mean to raise the question concerning the possibility of writing a critical
history of sovereignty as an infrapolitical question? To read this question with an ear for what
remains recalcitrant to its pre-determination as a pro-positional statement and thus as an answerable
question? Approaching the question of sovereignty obliquely, infrapolitics does not adjudicate
whether such an endeavour is possible or impossible. Instead, infrapolitics thematizes how sovereign
power has already brought the political to a close by determining the identity of ipseity, possibility,
and politicity as the structuring principle of the politics of hegemony. From the non-place of
infra-politics, rethinking politics without interrogating the power of the possible amounts to nothing
but another effort to relaunch the political gigantomachia, another attempt to substitute one
sovereignone possible, one powerfor another.
In order to think through what is at stake in the suspension of the movement of
possibilitization that turns the question of sovereignty into the site for the reaffirmation of the
sovereignty of possibility, I want to turn quickly to two texts of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice
Blanchot. Au-del du possible (Beyond the Possible) is a lecture that Levinas gave at the
Collge Philosophique in Paris in 1960 and which remained unpublished until 2009. This text
contains a brief account of the origin of sovereigntys inviolability in the power of the will:
La volont, principe des pouvoirs, unit donc une contradiction: immunit contre
toute atteinte extrieure au point de se poser incre et immortelle, doue dune
force au-dessus de toute force quantifiable (rien de moins nest attest par la
conscience de soi o ltre se rfugie inviolable : je ne chancellerai pas pour
lternit {psaume 30}) et dune permanente faillibilit de cette inviolable souverainet
devant la suprme violence au point que ltre volontaire se prte des techniques de
la sduction, de la propagande et de la torture. (Levinas 306-07, emphases mine)16
Levinass characterization of the will (la volont) thematizes the contradiction that tears this concept
asunder. On the one hand, the will is a sovereign principle: it is the arkh
and the principium of any
mode of power. As such, the will has the power above all to pose itself as itselfas the will to will
that is also the will to powerconstituting itself as an absolute and ungenerated interiority that is
impervious to exteriority. The parenthetical remark in this passage introduces the motif of
sovereigntys inviolability through a citation from Psalm 30 that betrays the structural bond that
Levinas sees between the politico-theological and ontology understood as the philosophy of the
sovereign will. Composed by King David, Psalm 30 addresses YHWH directly, singing his praise for
sparing David from death. Levinas quotation of verse 7 could be read as pointing to the structural
analogy that characterizes the relation between the will and self-consciousness and the human and
the divine: When I was untroubled, I thought, I shall never be shaken (Psalms 30, 7 1444). Selfconsciousness is the refuge of all being; it is the form that enacts and preserves the absolute
immunity of the will. Its originary transformation as self-consciousness extricates the will from the
entire fabric of sensibility and appetite, of action and passion, endowing the ego-logical will with the
dignity that corresponds to it as the origin of the world.
On the other hand, in spite of its claims to eternity and ungenerability, the will is finite.
Indeed, Levinas understands death as an impossible experience in which impossibility itself becomes
impossible:
Etre temporel cest tre la fois pour la mort et avoir encore du temps, tre contre la
mort, avoir des possibilits. Dans la faon dont la menace maffecte, dans
limminence, rside ma mise en cause par la menace et lessence de la peur. Cest une
relation avec un instant dont le caractre exceptionnel ne tient pas au fait quil se
trouve au seuil du nant ou dune renaissance, mais au fait que dans la vie il est
limpossibilit de toute possibilit (et non pas la possibilit de limpossibilit de toute
possibilit {comme le veut Heidegger)} [sic.]. Dans cette relation se rvle la passivit
{totale ct de laquelle la passivit} de la sensibilit qui se mue en activit nest
quune ple imitation de la passivit. (Levinas 306)17
Levinas departs from Martin Heideggers interpretation of death in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time),
where Heidegger argues that deathon the condition of being experienced in the mode of running
ahead (Vorlaufen), is the non-phenomenon that grants Dasein access to die Mglichkeit der malosen
Unmglichkeit der Existenz (Heidegger 262).18 But for Levinas, death as the impossibility of the
possibility of impossibility reveals something beyond the mere impossibility of the self. The
experience of the imminent fear of death discloses what Levinas calls total passivity, which
exceeds the traditional opposition between passivity and activity and the category of sensibility
(Levinas 306). This passivity not only constitutes the true sense of finitude, but also enables Levinas
to turn the wills submission to the supreme violence (suprme violence) of death into the very
opening through which the will is disclosed not only as impossible but as always already in relation
to the other (Levinas 307).
This explains why, in spite of recognizing that death reveals the impossibility of the
possibility of impossibility and thus marks the limit of the sovereignty of the will, Levinas insists in
the need to go beyond the impossible: Rclamer limpossible cest dailleurs encore saccrocher au
pouvoir en esprant transformer limpossible en possible (Levinas 303).19 For Levinas, the only exit
from the determination of subjectivity as sovereignty is to be found in the experience of the anoriginary relation to the radical alterity of the other. This relation necessitates the emergence of the
self in the purity of its subjectivity: a self that no longer coincides with the principial will; a
subjectivity that no longer has its refuge in the ego-logy of auto-thetic consciousness and is thus
deprived of the power to transform every experienceincluding the nothing of death as
impossibilityinto a correlate of its potency of possibility.
Towards the end of Lcriture du dsastre, Blanchot issues a warning regarding sovereigntys
power that echoes Levinass precaution concerning sovereigntys capacity to transform even the
impossible into its own possibility:
La souverainet nest RIEN. Ainsi prononc le mot rien nimplique pas seulement la
souverainet dans sa ruine, car la ruine souveraine pourrait tre encore une manire
pour la Souverainet de saffirmer en rehaussant le rien majuscule. La souverainet,
selon le schma de la ngativit toujours lafft, se dploierait alors absolument en ce qui tendrait
la nier absolument. Mais il se pourrait que le rien ne soit pas ici au travail et, sous sa
forme outrancire et tranche, drobe seulement ce qui se drobe en ce qui ne peut
tre nomm, le neutre, le neutre toujours se neutralisant et auquel il nest rien de
souverain qui, par avance, ne se soit dj rendu : soit en la ngligence de lUN, soit
par la scansion ngative de lautre, ngation qui ne nie ni naffirme, et, de par
lrosion infinie de la rptition, laisse lAutre se marquer et se dmarquer et se
remarquer comme ce qui na pas rapport avec ce qui vient en prsence, ni non plus
avec ce qui sen absente. (Blanchot 200, emphases mine)20
Citing Georges Batailles famous dictum, La souverainet nest RIEN (Bataille 300),21 Blanchot
warns us that Batailles insistent gesture throughout La Souverainet (On Sovereignty) and elsewhere to
capitalize the word rien and write it as RIEN, runs the risk of reintroducing the principle of
negativity into the thinking of the NOTHING of sovereignty. The result of this transmutation
would be that the RIEN, the NOTHING that sovereignty is, would become the medium of
sovereigntys self-enactment, transforming this nothing into the principle of sovereigntys ergontology. 22 Drawing from Batailles thinking of dsuvrement (inoperativity), Blanchot then
proposes that sovereigntys nothing be read instead as inoperative. But it is precisely at this point
that Blanchot deviates from Levinas: an inoperative nothing leads to a thinking of the neutral that
understands the alterity of the other as a movement of neutralization. The neutral deprives the self
of its ipseity and subjectivity and pluralizes the other in such a way that the other cannot anymore be
construed as the an-archic basis for any ethical relation. Any such attempt would amount to a
reduction of the others neutrality and thus a restoration of the other and the self in the position of
sovereign bodies, even if their sovereignty takes the form of a god without essence, a self without ego,
or of volitionless subjectivities. For Blanchot, it is only by releasing the other into the infinite
multiplicity of neutralization that other becomes the sole instance in front of which all sovereignty
even the possibility of the sovereignty of the other and of the self held hostage by the othermust
have already surrendered itself (Blanchot 200). The infinity of sovereignty for Blanchot could only
be measured by the immensurable in-finities of the neutrals neutralization.
Is another history of sovereigntya history in which not even the other could sustain itself
in its transcendental positionnow possible? Is this question finally settled? If so, would not the
neutral become another surreptitious sovereign, in spite of or perhaps because of its neutralization?
The last tribune to which even the sovereignty of alterity must pay tribute?
Rather than
radicalizing/neutralizing alterity in order to locate sovereigntys outside, Derridas efforts to

deconstruct sovereignty in his later work constitute an attempt to shift the terms in which the
question of sovereignty is posed even by Levinas and Blanchot. For Derrida, the deconstruction of
sovereignty remains an unfinished task and the reasons why this is so demand an infinite
elaboration.
In Derridas later writings since at least LUniversit sans condition, Derrida undertakes an
analysis of the aporia that keeps the question of sovereignty open by reinscribing the notions of
sovereignty and unconditionality in order to preliminarily designate the sovereignty of the

theologico-political and something that would be subtracted from this determination:
Et sil se dcline selon le mode verbal du conditionnel, cest aussi pour annoncer
linconditionnel, lventuel ou le possible vnement de linconditionnel impossible,
le tout autreque nous devrions dsormais (cela non plus je ne lai pas encore dit ni
fait aujourdhui) dissocier de lide thologique de souverainet. Au fond, ce serait
peut-tre cela mon hypothse (elle est extrmement difficile et presque im-probable,
inaccessible une preuve): une certaine indpendance inconditionnelle de la pense, de
la dconstruction, de la justice, des Humanits, de lUniversit, etc., devrait tre
dissocie de tout fantasme de souverainet indivisible et de matrise souveraine. (Derrida
76)23
The peculiarity of Derridas double gesture in this passage is worth noting: on the one hand, he
opposes what he calls the impossible unconditional and the unconditional independence of
thought, . . . etc. to the theological idea of sovereignty and to all phantasm of indivisible
sovereignty and of sovereign mastery. Derrida thus mobilizes the terms sovereignty and
unconditionality as an opposition. On the other hand, Derrida himself makes clear that this
gesture is illegitimate since the dissociation between sovereignty and unconditionality remains to be
accomplished. Indeed, Derrida not only emphasizes the fact that his own use of this opposition has
the character of a hypothesis, but also insists that task of justifying this opposition is extremely
difficult and almost improbable. Derridas double gesture begs the following question: if
unconditionality is already available as the name for a mode of independence, autonomy or
even freedom without sovereignty, if unconditionality is the horizon for any deconstruction of
sovereignty worthy of its name, then why does he insist so much on remarking that the task of
distinguishing sovereignty from unconditionality is potentially impossible?
III. Another History of Sovereignty: Ipseity in Aristotles Prime Mover
My task for the remainder of this essay is to attain some clarity on the reasons for Derridas
reticence concerning the possibility of separating sovereignty from unconditionality. However, my
goal is not so much to clarify an important aspect of Derridas later work, but to show that Derridas
insistence on keeping the question of sovereignty open betrays a proto-infrapolitical commitment to
submitting the sovereignty of politics and the politics of sovereignty to a radical interrogation. To
get a sense of why this interrogation must in a way begin and end by putting itself to question and
remaining uncertain as to its answerability, I want to turn to La roue libre (The Free Wheel), the
first chapter of La Raison du plus fort (The Reason of the Strongest), published as the first
essay of Voyous (Rogues). It is here that Derrida engages with Aristotles derivation of the Prime
Mover that is found in Book XII of the Metaphysics. In my reading, Derridas turn to Aristotle in
Voyous provides an allegory of the aporia that the deconstruction of sovereignty must face. This
aporia becomes manifested through the double-bind of a mutually-exclusive imperatives: 1.
Sovereignty must be deconstructed (or its translation: Unconditionality without sovereignty must be
thought.) 2. A felicitous, actualized deconstruction of sovereignty would reaffirm what it has
deconstructed by positioning the name in which this deconstruction is enactedi.e.,
unconditionalityin the position of the sovereign.
To begin to unravel the two sides of this double-bind, let us turn now to Derridas
engagement with Aristotle in Voyous. Derrida paraphrases Aristotles arguments about the Prime
Mover in the Metaphysics in the context of a discussion of the relation between the movement of
turning and re-turning and the structure of ipseity:
Sans se mouvoir ni tre m, lacte de cette nergie pure met tout en mouvement, un
mouvement de retour soi, un mouvement circulaire, prcise Aristote, car le premier
mouvement est toujours cyclique. Et ce qui laspire ou linspire, cest un dsir. Dieu,
lacte pur du Premier Moteur, il est la fois rogne et pensable. Il est dsirable
(ermenon), le premier dsirable (to proton orekton) en tant que premier intelligible (to
proton noeton) qui se pense lui-mme, pense de la pense (e noesis noeses noesis).
(Derrida 35)24
The political allegory that is the Prime Mover can be read off from this passage of Derridas
commentary, if we pay attention to the difference between the Prime Mover and what Derrida calls
the first movement (premier mouvement), a reference to the first heaven in Aristotles cosmology.
Briefly stated, the political significance of this allegory consists in its isolation of two distinct modes
of sovereignty, which are analogous to two different exceptional modes of movement: whereas the
first heaven moves in a circle and thus is capable of remaining itself and returning itself to itself in its
own movement, the Primer Mover does not move at the same time as it moves everything else that is
movable. As I will try to show in this section, what is at stake in this distinction is nothing other than
the opposition between a notion of sovereignty determined by the movement of specularity and the
economic return of the self to itself, and a prior determination of sovereignty as an unconditional,
hyperbolic, incalculable excess from the entire ontic-ontological realm.
But in order to make this case, we have to consider how Aristotle articulates the difference
between the Prime Mover and the first heaven in Book XII of the Metaphysics:
But since it is possible for it to be this way, and if it is not this way things will come
from night and from all things together and from not-being, these questions could
be resolved; and there is a certain ceaseless motion that is always moving, and it is in
a circle . . . so that the first heaven would be everlasting. Accordingly, there is also
something that moves it. And since what is in motion and causes motion is
something intermediate, there is also something that causes motion without being in
motion, which is everlasting, an independent thing, and a being-at-work. . . . Now if
something is moved, it admits of being otherwise than it is; and so, even if the
primary kind of change of place is a being-at-work, insofar as something is moved, it
is in that respect at least capable of being otherwise, with respect to place even if not
with respect to thinghood. But since there is something that causes motion while
being itself motionless, this does not admit of being otherwise than it is in any
respect at all. For among changes, the primary one is change of place, and of this the
primary kind is in a circle, but this is what this mover causes. Therefore it is
something that has being necessarily, and inasmuch as it is by necessity it is beautiful
and in that way a source. For the necessary has this many senses: what is by force
because it is contrary to a things impulse, that without which something will not be
in a good condition, and that which does not admit of being any other way other
than in a simple condition. (Aristotle 1072b 10, 241-42)
The Prime Mover moves everythingbut itself. Its activity constitutes the source of the sphere of
physis, where everything is determined by mutability in the form of displacement, alteration, coming
to be and passing away. And yet the Prime Mover remains absolutely excepted from the natural
realm that it nonetheless inaugurated by setting the first heaven forth into its proper cyclical
movement. The mode of being of the Prime Mover is thus pure energeia, pure actuality, pure beingat-work. The Prime Mover is the name for the transcendental activity responsible for the first
heavens circular motion, which, in turn, can only be described as the mode of movement that
admits displacement while being absolutely foreign to any other mutation.
To understand what is at stake in the distinction between the Prime Mover and the first
heaven I want to take a step back and dwell for a moment on Aristotles more detailed analysis of
motion and change in the Physics. From the outset, we must note that the Prime Movers excess with
regard to the first heaven marks the formers mode of being as absolute in-transitivity. This intransitivity is opposed to Aristotles analysis of the essential transitivity of metabol, of change, which
usually takes the form of the following formulation: every change is from something to something
(Aristotle 225a, 135). In different moments in the Physics, Aristotle defines motion and change in
terms that are often contradictory. Nonetheless, it is possible to grasp the internal logic of these
contradictions. Early on in the Physics, Aristotle uses motion and change interchangeably to talk
about any modification in a beings ontic or factic structure.25 But in Book V, he introduces a crucial
distinction between kinesis and genesis that allows him to grasp the ontological significance of these
different kinds of change by recourse to the logical distinction between contrariety and
contradiction. Motion, in the sense of displacement, quantitative change, and qualitative alteration, is
a movement between contraries. For instance, something hot will become something cold if it
ceases to be exposed to a source of heat; likewise topological motion can be grasped in terms of
above or below. What is important for Aristotle here is the fact that changes between contraries
which defines kinesis properly speakingdo not exclude the middle terms that lie in between these
contraries. There is thus a relative continuity between these changes, since, as Aristotle puts it, grey
is white in relation to black and black in relation to white (Aristotle 224b 30, 135). Aristotle thus
concludes Chapter 1, Book V of the Physics by delimiting motion to quality, quantity, and place, since
these are the only categories that admit contrariety.26
The specific kind of change that Aristotle calls genesis is a kind of movement that can only be
gasped in terms of contradiction, that is, in terms of a logical relationship between extremes that
excludes the possibility of any middle term between the opposition and, for this reason, excludes any
mediation. Genesis is therefore understood to be a radically discontinuous form of metabol. Although
genesis is still structured in terms of a fundamental transitivityit is, after all, still a change from
something to somethingit is different from kinesis inasmuch as the latter allows for a continuity
that the former excludes. This explains why Aristotle begins Chapter 2 of the Physics declaring that
motion does not belong to ousia, or, for that matter, to the categories of relation, action, and
affection: There is no motion with respect to thinghood since there is not among beings a contrary
to an independent thing. Nor indeed is there a motion of relation . . . Nor is there one of acting and
being acted upon, or of moving and being moved, because there is not a motion of a motion, or a
coming into being of coming into being, or in general a change of a change (Aristotle 225b 10,
136). There is no motion with respect to thinghood, Aristotle says, inasmuch as the category of
existenceousia, thinghooddoes not admit any contrary. The only logical possibility to talk
meaningfully about the opposite of being is to invoke its radical contradiction, its privation or its
absence: not-being. There are no intermediate degrees between existence and non-existence, no
motion between not-being and being, no mediation that might ensure the possibility of a continuous
passage from one term to the other. Aristotles distinction of kinesis from genesis identifies in a beings
simple emergence out of not-being a discontinuous mode of change that exceeds the categorical
declinations of being in terms of quantity, quality and place. In fact, the latter presuppose the
former, since only a being that is can be said to have the capacity to change location, or to undergo
quantitative and qualitative alterations. The immobile movement of existence punctures the
continuity of motion, inscribing singularity and asymmetry into the very fabric of physis.
The distinction between metabol as kinesis and genesis becomes even sharper by Book VIII of
the Physics, where Aristotle circumscribes continuous motion only to circular movement. This
decision corresponds to two necessities of his philosophy: On the one hand, the first heavens
circular motion must be determined as the only mode of absolutely continuous movement, since
only the first heaven could be the moved source of motion of every other motion, providing the
measure for the entire realm of physis as kinesis. On the other hand, Aristotle must account for the
first heavens everlastingness by safeguarding its ungenerability, which we should understand in
ontological terms as the incapacity for the first heavens being to undergo genesis and, by extension,
the steresis of genesis, coming to beings privation: passing away. Thus Aristotles task is to identify a
mode of motion that would constitute the mode of being of an everlasting, natural being. This
modality of motion is isolated in Book VIII of the Physics over the course of a long refutation of
Zenos paradox, where Aristotle shows that the geometrical figure of the circle provides the identity
of beginning and end that is necessary in order to account for the mode of being of the first heaven
as immutable, continuous mobility without running into contradictions, without positing a
movement that generates discontinuity, or without falling into an infinite regress: Therefore neither
in a semicircle nor in any other circumference is it possible to be moved continuously, since these
would need to be moved over and over and to change in contrary changes, since the end does not
join up with the beginning. But those of the circle do join up, and only it is complete (Aristotle
264b20; 221). Only in a circle would motion from point A to point C be at the same time motion
from point C to point A without any interruption of the movement, since only in a circle would the
beginning point and the end point of said movement be identical. The identity of beginning and end
in a circle grounds the mode of being of the first heaven and constitutes another exception within the
very realm of physis as kinesis. The first heaven can thus move without compromising not only its
identity and its self-presence, but most importantly its capacity to sustain itself in its being
throughout eternity.
I have taken this detour through some of Aristotles arguments in the Physics because I think
they can help us to understand what is at stake in Derrida decision to turn to Aristotles Prime
Mover as providing an exemplary instance of pure energeia. The necessity of something like the Prime
Mover follows from the split at the heart of metabol itself, its twofoldness as kinesis and genesis. This
division is addressed in terms of the category of ousia at the very beginning of Book XII of the
Metaphysics, where Aristotle distinguishes between three different modalities of ousia. The category of
presence is different for beings that are perceptible and imperishable, perceptible and perishable, and
simply imperceptible (Aristotle 1069a30, 231). It is clear that the first mode of ousia refers primarily
to the absolute kinesis of the first heaven, whereas the second is the mode of being of all beings that
are generated and can also be destructedthat is, those beings that have the capacity to undergo
genesis and steresis. The third categorical declination of ousia as a mode of imperceptible tode ti, an
imperceptible independent or separable being, would correspond to one of the questions that
determine the specificity of Aristotles inquiry in the Metaphysics, namely, what is the being of eidos,
the being of form as a mode of ousia. The distinction at the heart of ousia begs the question
concerning the possibility of securing the unity of the knowledge of metabolas kinesis and genesis
and of eidos, whose imperceptibility and priority marks it as the proper matter of prima philosophia,
of first philosophy.
The Prime Mover is Aristotles response to this problem, which touches on the very
possibility of Aristotelian philosophy as the articulation of first and second philosophy into a
system of knowledge. The Prime Mover solves this problem by providing an unconditional
instance of activity and power that accounts for the unity of metabol as kinesis and genesis while at the
same time safeguarding the manifold ways of ousia as perishable, imperishable, and imperceptible
from any essential contamination with not-being.27 The Prime Mover is the unity of continuity and
discontinuity, the keystone that closes the edifice of philosophy, the activity that gathers absolute
motion and absolute emergence into their formal unity and secures the possibility of physical knowledge as
the intelligibility of metabol. But the Prime Mover can only function as such within Aristotles
framework due to its absolute intransitivity. This is what distinguishes it from the first heaven: the
Prime Mover does not even come out of itself in the way in which the first heaven exposes itself to a
mutation that is immediately negated by the circularity of its motion. If the first heavens motion
could be described in terms of the sublation of alteration itselfthe circular movement that marks
the self-overcoming of finitude itselfthe Prime Movers activity could only be described as the
non-circle within the circle of the first heavens that, in turn, accounts for the endless movement of
all beings.
Derridas engagement with Aristotle allows us to locate in the doctrine of the Prime Mover a
foundational moment in the history of political theology. An understanding of sovereignty in terms
of unicity and autocracy would have already been articulated at least since Aristotles thinking of the
first heaven as a perfectly spherical movement. But more radically still, I want to argue that
Derridas paraphrasing of Aristotle suggests that the latter implicitly determines the essence of
sovereignty as hyperbolic, incalculable excess. This determination comes to the fore in the
Metaphysics, where Aristotle singles out what Derrida calls a pure mode of actuality, pure energeia, as
the very mode of being of the Prime Mover. The return to itself that characterizes the most minimal
instance of the first heavens movement provides the schema for all conceptions of sovereignty as
an economy of self-possession. The Prime Mover does not comport to this schema insofar as it is
radically excepted from the first heavens circle, which it nonetheless established. Thus we can argue
that the Prime Mover is an absolutely an-economical principle, a mode of activity, energy, actuality
and power in which unconditionality and the excess of hyper-sovereignty coincide. For this reason,
the Prime Mover has no identity and no existence. It is not a subject or an essence, just as much as it
is not a hypokeimenon. Since it is not a subject, since its proper mode of being lies in its radical excess
with regard to the circle of beings, the Prime Mover is outside the circle in which the first heaven
secures its immutable mobility and causal potency. The Prime Mover is incalculability itself in the
form of an unconditional nothing. To be more precise, the Prime Mover is the almost nothing of a
pure activity that can only secure its proper unconditionality through its radical subtraction from the
realm of being as physis. Absolutely withdrawn from the world that it nonetheless sets in motion
leaving in its wake the celestial trace of a heaven whose perfect, continuous, cyclical movement
nonetheless pales in comparison with its absolute simplicity: the Prime Mover is Aristotles name for
the absolute effacement of the simple origin.
Before concluding with some remarks on the implications of my reading of the Prime Mover
as hyper-sovereign figure for Derridas task of separating unconditionality and sovereignty, I want to
highlight another important aspect of Derridas engagement with Aristotles Primer Mover. As
Derrida reminds us, Aristotle thinks the Prime Mover within the horizon of the concept of life. In
fact, the Prime Mover is for Aristotle a form of life; as such, it should not be regarded as
exempted from the realm of the living:
Ce premier principe, Aristote le dfinit aussi, et cela comptera pour nous, comme
une vie, une genre de vie, une conduite de la vie, comparable ce que nous pouvons
vivre de meilleur pendant tel bref moment de notre vie. Cest donc une vie qui
dborde la vie des hommes, une vie que vit le Premier Moteur de faon constant,
toujours, continment, ce qui pour nous est impossible. (Derrida 35-36)28
Derrida himself does not develop the profound implications of this remark, although he refers to
this moment later on in Voyous as crucial for an understanding of democracys autoimmunity,
democracys constitutive suicidal tendencies: La dmocratie a toujours t suicidaire et sil y a un venir pour elle, cest la condition de penser autrement la vie, et la force de la vie. Cest pourquoi jai
insist tout lheure sur le fait que lActe pur est dtermine par Aristote comme une vie (Derrida
57).29 I read Derrida here as suggesting that any serious engagement with the political history of the
concept of life should take into account this moment in Aristotle where the unconditional instance
of activity that accounts for genesis, for the emergence of finite being, is paradoxically defined as an
imperishable, supra-natural, form of life. Although I do not have enough space to really develop this
argument, I think this moment in Aristotle is important for Derrida because it challenges the very
foundations of contemporary approaches to bio-politics. Insofar as the Prime Movers force, this
nothing that secretly acts the very world itself, is determined as a mode of life, then at the very least
the distinction between pure or bare life and form of life, as well as the opposition between life and
death, living and dying, and furthering life and killing and sacrificing, must be reconsidered.
The inscription of the life of the Prime Mover within the text of metaphysics forces us to
contend with the thought that life and living are not simply names for the persistence of beings that
are essentially limited by their originary mortality. The history and the structure of the concept of life
would have to be thought of as including a mode of activity that is not simply delimited as it were
from the outside by its possible finitude. As Derrida suggests by invoking the life of the Prime
Mover in his discussion of democracys suicidal tendencies, the mode of life that belongs to the
force of pure energeia should be thought on the basis of the logic of autoimmunity. We could even
argue that the Prime Mover provides an instance of a more radical logic of autoimmunity than the
one at work in the suspension of the Algerian electionsa more nuanced, more originary, and
incalculable autoimmunity, which Derrida describes in chapter four of Voyous. If in the case of the
Algerian elections autoimmunity designates the aporetic situation in which democracy itself was
targeted by self-avowed democrats in order to precisely defend democracy from its enemies, then
the life of the Prime Mover perhaps goes one step further. As Derrida puts it, lauto-immunit est
plus ou moins suicidaire, mais cest encore plus grave: lauto-immunit menace toujours de priver le suicide
lui-mme de son sens et de son intgrit suppose (Derrida 73, emphases mine).30 The Prime Movers life
perhaps marks a break with the auto-referential logic, with the principle of calculation that would be
still at work in all sui-cides. For the kind of life that this pure energy leads can only be described as
immediate transcendence, as a living force that cannot even own its own life and therefore cannot
calculate its own death. The Prime Mover would be thus the name for the most heightened instance
of both auto-immunity and survival. A life that does away with the circle of economical calculation,
where death is another occasion for the reaffirmation of subjectivity. A life that lives above, below,
and beyond life and death. A life that begins and ends in sur-vival.
To conclude, I want to return to my initial question concerning the separation of
unconditionality and sovereignty. If the story about the Prime Mover and the first heaven were to
end here, then one could say that Derridas engagement with Aristotle has given us the tools to
begin to dissociate unconditionality from sovereignty. The Prime Mover would allow us to isolate a
concept of unconditionality that is on the side of incalculability, excess, absolute transcendence,
whereas the first heaven provides the mode for all conceptions of sovereignty that index the circular
movement of in which the self returns to itself. As Aristotles epikeina tes ousias, the Primer Mover in
its withdrawal determines the entire realm of ousia as the economy of a self in self-possession of its
self. And yet, things are more complicated. For we must take into account the fact that the Prime
Movers excess with regard to being as physis is nonetheless, in a certain way, giventhat is, inscribed
in Aristotles text precisely as the supra-natural, non-phenomenological principle that accounts for
the manifold being of metabol. In its subtraction from every determination of perceptible ousia, the
Prime Mover erects itself as the condition of possibility of any knowledge of physis as the unity of
metabol and kinesis. But how is this mode of unconditional, incalculable, pure life given? How is this
figure of transcendence, of sheer exteriority inscribed in the world as the condition, as the very
intelligibility of movement, alteration, coming to be and passing away?
The Prime Mover constitutes an illegible mark in Aristotles texta name for that which can
only be read off from the text of ousia as physis, whose movement is determined by the perfect
movement of the first heaven. The subtraction of this unconditional life determines its inscription in
Aristotles text as a concept for a mode of transcendence that must be even if in principle it remains
imperceptible. But the meaning of this concept lies in event of physis itself: its withdrawal from the
realm of metabol is meant to account for the existence of the reign of the first heaven and the
sovereignty of ousia as the principle of all becoming. Therefore, the Primer Movers unconditional
life is only given through its deferral and its passage through its other. It is only by giving place to
the circle of the celestial bodies, to the sovereignty of an eternally movingand thus, in a certain
way, unmovedpower, that the Prime Movers necessary hyper-being comes to light. At the level of
the ordo exponendi, the first heaven is in fact prior to the force and pure energy that is supposed to
have caused it. This ontic priority is not merely ontic, but touches upon the very ontological
structure of the concept of the Prime Mover. Therefore, the chance of the Prime Movers necessary
unconditionality requires the presence of the first heaven and the economy of its sovereignty over
the cosmos. The Prime Mover can only be on the condition that it gives rise to the sovereign heaven
that conditions the movements of the cosmos. Unconditionality is sovereign.
By the same token, the originary relation of non-relation between unconditionality and
sovereignty forces us to rethink the latters supposed finitude, its existence as an economical
principle. For as we saw there is an exceptionality to the first heaven, which is due to the fact that
that its movement marks the frontier that delimits the proper realm of physis, constituting a source of
movement that is moved without ever passing away. The quasi-transcendentality of the first heaven
suggests that the Prime Movers unconditionality also in a certain way belongs to the first heaven,
whose sovereignty does not simply lie in its movement of self-appropriation, but also in the exception
that constitutes any such movement in the first placeallegorized in this case by the first heavens
immortality. Sovereignty would therefore be set to its proper movement of self-appropriation by its
own unconditional, hyperbolic, subtraction. Sovereignty is unconditional.
However, the essential contamination between sovereignty and unconditionality appears to
confront a limit as soon as we see the Prime Mover as a mode of life. We saw that Derridas take on
of this life characterizes it as a radical form of auto-immunity. The life of the Prime Mover is such
that its living does not take the form of a strategic suicidea suicide that has already calculated its
own killing in order to better preserve and own its own self. Instead, this pure energy lives precisely
by suiciding the self or suiciding its self. It follows that this way of life is deprived of any proper
relation to itself. Having begun to live by killing its self, this mode of life cannot be said to be able to
even own its own suicide, that is, to be capable of internalizing the suspension of its life as a moment
of sui-cide, as a decision that would belong to the self. This incalculable life of unconditionality is
therefore radically improper. And yet, the impropriety of this unconditional life is precisely what
cannot but be economized, transformed into the proper property of the Prime Mover. Aristotle
himself enacts this re-economization as soon as he takes the Prime Mover as the an-economical
principle of physis, stabilizing its excess by turning it into the telos of every mode of intra-cosmic life.
The Prime Mover is ultimately the eidos of the ergon itself, the pure energeia that provides the ultimate
measure for the very goodness of the life of any entelechy. This re-economization is the structuring
principle of the ethical and the political in their ergontological constitution.
To return to my original concern, this impropriety is also economized as soon as
unconditionality is construed as the foundation for a critique of sovereignty. By insisting that
unconditionality is unconditional, the impropriety that pluralizes ad infinitum unconditionality is
reduced to the sheer transcendence and the hyper-sovereignty of the one. The very attempt to
secure the unconditionality of unconditionality yields the opposite, auto-immune effect:
unconditionality becomes sovereignty. Aristotles Prime Mover proves that Western philosophy has
never ceased to understand the undecidable space that relates life and death, as well as the
withdrawal that essentially relates presence and absence, as an instance of power. Indeed, Aristotle
could even be read as already anticipating Agambens notion of a form-of-life (forma-di-vita) that
would be structured by un potere puramente destituente (Agamben 2014).31 Not only is there no ergon
without energeia, but also the very attempt to think of a power that would be purely destituent is to
endow this instance of power with the power over its acts of destitution. From Aristotle to
Agamben, the place of what Derrida calls unconditionality has already been saturated by the
excessiveness of a wholly transcendental form of life that constitutes the first and last arkh
precisely because of its own destitution. Since at least Aristotles Prime Mover sovereignty and
unconditionalityconstituent and destituent powerare ultimately indistinguishable. The identity
of sovereignty and unconditionality suggests that the task of the deconstruction of sovereignty
remains incommensurable. Another history of sovereignty would have to begin and end by destroying
each and every name that have been and continue to be used in order to draw the limits within
which sovereignty exercises its power. For these names not only dissimulate their own status as
metaphors of sovereignty. Their dissimulation is so complete that they render illegible each time
their own claims to be the unconditional sovereign of any other sovereign metaphor.
We are now in a better position to understand why Derrida regarded the task of dissociating
unconditionality from sovereignty as presque im-probable, as almost im-probable (Derrida 76).
Unconditionalitys Shibboleth not only turns unconditionality into sovereignty but also covers up
their irreducible co-belonging, preventing us from being exposed to the aporia that marks the
essence of sovereignty as sheer excess, what Derrida in La Bte et le souverain II designates with the
name hyper-souverainet or hyper-sovereignty (Derrida 397). Seeking to make transparent the
movement of self-dissimulation of sovereign metaphors, another history of sovereignty would also
have to interrogate the hyper-, that excess which names the coincidence of sovereignty and
unconditionality.
Infrapolitics is a name for such an interrogation. Questioning the heliopolitical
determination of excess as hyper-sovereignty (Moreiras), infrapolitics seeks to thematize the
impossible experience of a non-self that insists and persists in the non-space of the freedom to
question every name and every form of power, including the power that belongs to the question as
soon as the question becomes secure in itself as a possibility. The hyper-politicity of the infrapolitical
unfolds in the renunciation of the power of possibility and the possibility of power: in its loss of the
very form of its own, i.e., in the loss of its ipseity. Just as there is no ipseity of the question, there
is no infra-political ipseity. Each time anew, the infrapolitical task requires to be taken upor not,
for such is the freedom of this renunciation, always on the verge of self-betrayal precisely through the
appropriation of a self for itself. This task is an exigency modulated through the Nietzschean
dangerous perhaps, which Derrida, among others, has taken up as a emblem for the experience of
the unconditionality of thinking, which is never present as such but rather belongs to the Zu-kunft,
the German word for the future, but which is rendered best in English as to come. Infrapolitics
is an attempt to submit politics to a radical interrogation in order to contest the certainty of
sovereignty and the sovereignty of certainty, which has already structured in advance the closure of
political thought. Hardly a politics, some may say. But hardly anything less political, either.
Works Cited
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---. Per una teoria del potere destituente. Sinistrainrete: Archivio di documenti e articoli per la discussione
politica nella sinistra. 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 21 Apr. 2015.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. Joe Sachs. Santa Fe: Green Lion Press, 2002. Print.
---. Physics. Trans. Joe Sachs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Print.
Ascherl, Andrew. Infrapolitics and the (Non)Subject: On Ethics, Politics, and Radical Alterity. CR:
The New Centennial Review 13.2 (2013): 179-202. Print.
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Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2002. Print.
Bataille, Georges. uvres Compltes VIII. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Print.
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Esposito and Alberto Moreiras CR: The New Centennial Review 10.2 (2010): 205-238. Print.
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Derrida, Jacques. Le monolingualisme de lautre ou la prothse dorigine. Paris: Galil, 1996. Print.
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---. Politiques de lamiti. Paris: Galile, 1994. Print.
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---. Voyous. Paris: Galile, 2003. Print.
de Vries, Hent. Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political. Political
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New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. 1-88. Print.
Esposito, Roberto. Bos: Biopolitica e filosofia. Torino: Einaudi, 2004. Print.
Hamacher, Werner. Arbeiten, Durcharbeiten. Archologie der Arbeit. Ed. Dirk Baecker. Berlin:
Kadmos, 2002. 155-200. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tbingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006. Print.
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Print.
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Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Print.
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Notes

See Bodin (1992), in particular his discussion about the absoluteness of sovereignty in page 49.
See Schmitt (1974) 13-20.
3 For the classic exposition of sovereigntys relation to the exceptional decision, see the first chapter in Schmitt (1979).
On the relation between the time of the instant and the decision, see Derrida (1994) 97. For Derridas most sustained
engagement with Schmitts thinking of the sovereign decision, see chapter three in Derrida (1994). For a lucid
exploration of Derridas longstanding engagement with the time of the decision as madness, see Bennington (2011) 10327.
4 For the locus classicus of the identity of being and the one, see fragments III and VIII in Parmenides (1998). For an
interpretation of Parmenidess poem relevant to the concerns at the core of this essay, see the first part of Schrmann
(1996). For an early instance of the politicization of the series being-one-thinking (einai-hen-noein) see the last lines of
Book XII in Aristotle (2002). For the passage that Aristotle cites in his conclusion to Book XII of the Metaphysics, see
Homer (1961) II 203-6.
5 For a history of the concept of political theology, see de Vries (2006) 25-47.
6 The word infrapolitics has been a constant of Moreirass work on political thought and Latin American studies since
at least the publication in 2002 of his essay, The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges. For a recent attempt to
account for Moreirass thinking of the infrapolitical in relation to Roberto Espositos notion of the impolitical, see
Yagez (2014). For an earlier attempt to link Moreiras with Esposito, see Bosteels (2010) 225-29. For a recent
engagement with Moreirass thinking of infrapolitics that accuses infrapolitics of political passivity, see Ascherl (2013)
179-201.
7 See Hardt and Negri (2011) and Beasley-Murray (2011). For Espositos affirmative biopolitics, see Esposito (2004)
xvi. On the notion of destituent power, see Agamben (2014).
8 See Castillo et al. (2015).
9 For an influential attempt to establish a post-foundational, left-Heideggerian political ontology, see chapter seven in
Marchart (2007).
10 Community of the question, thus, in this fragile instance in which the question is not yet determined enough for the
hypocrisy of a response to have already invited itself under the mask of the question, for its voice to have already
allowed itself to be articulated fraudulently in the very syntax of the question. Community of the decision, of the
initiative, of the absolute initiality but threatened, in which the question has not yet found the language that it has
decided to seek, it has not yet been reassured in itself about its own possibility. Community of the question on the
possibility of the question.
11 The question must be preserved. As question.
12 The freedom of the question (double genitive) must be said and sheltered.
13 Well-found abode, the realized tradition of the question remained a question.
14 If this commandment has an ethical signification, it is not that of belonging to the domain of the ethical, but of
authorizingulteriorlyevery ethical law in general. There is no commandment that is not addressed to a freedom of
speech. There is thus neither law nor commandment that does not confirm and confinethat is to say, that does not
dissimulate by presupposingthe possibility of the question.
15 For the exception that proves the rule, see Agamben (1995) 55. The fact that Agambens genealogy of sovereignty
ends by proposing the concepts of form of life and destituent power as ways of undoing sovereignty shows how far
away Agamben has moved from his own acute intuitions concerning aporia of sovereignty and the bond that unites
sovereignty to potency and ipseity. My question is whether the categories of form and of power can be extricated
from their inscription in the ergontology that is established through the sovereign ban.
16 The will, principle of powers, thus unites a contradiction: immunity against all external breaches to the point of
positing itself uncreated and immortal, endowed with a force above any quantifiable force (nothing less is attested by
self-consciousness where inviolable being finds its refuge: I shall never be shaken {Psalm 30}) and a permanent
fallibility of this inviolable sovereignty in front of the supreme violence, to the extent that voluntary being lends itself to
the techniques of seduction, propaganda and torture.
17 Being temporal is at the same time being towards death and still having time, being against death, having possibilities.
In the way in which the threat affects me, in imminence, resides my accusation by the menace and the essence of fear. It
is a relation to an instant whose exceptional character is not due to the fact that it finds itself at the threshold of
nothingness or of a rebirth, but to the fact that, within life, it is the impossibility of all possibility (and not the possibility
of the impossibility of all possibility {as Heidegger wants)}. [sic] In this relation, {total} passivity reveals itself, {with
respect to which the passivity} of sensibility, which changes itself into activity is but a pale imitation of passivity.
1
2

the possibility of the immeasurable impossibility of existence.
To reclaim the impossible is indeed to cling still to the possibility in waiting to transform the impossible into
possible.
20 Sovereignty is NOTHING. Thus pronounced, the word nothing does not only implicate sovereignty in its ruin, for
the sovereign ruin could be still a way for sovereignty to affirm itself by lifting the majuscule nothing. Sovereignty,
according to the schema of negativityalways on the lookoutwould thus deploy itself absolutely in that which would
tend to negate it absolutely. But it could be the case that the nothing here may not be at work and, under its outrageous
and cutting form, it subtracts only what subtracts itself in that which cannot be named, the neutral, the neutral always
neutralizing itself and to which there is nothing sovereign that in advance has not already surrendered itself.
21 Sovereignty is NOTHING.
22 On the notion of ergontology, see Hamacher (2002) 155-200.
23 And if it declines itself according to the verbal mode of the conditional, it is also to announce the unconditional, the
eventual or the possible event of the unconditional impossible, the wholly otherwhich we should from now on (that
neither I have not said or done today) dissociate from the theological idea of sovereignty. At the bottom, that would be
perhaps my hypothesis (it is extremely difficult and almost im-probable, inaccessible to proof): a certain unconditional
independence of thought, of deconstruction, of the humanities, of the university, etc., must be dissociated from all
phantasm of indivisible sovereignty and sovereign mastery.
24 Without moving or being moved, the act of this pure energy puts everything in motion, a movement of return to
itself, a circular movement, Aristotle clarifies, for the first movement is always cyclical. And that which aspires or
inspires it, is a desire. God, the pure act of the first mover, is at the same time erogenous and thinkable. It is desirable
(ermenon), the first desirable (to proton orekton) inasmuch as it is the first intelligible (to proton noeton) that thinks itself, the
thought of thought (e noesis noeses noesis).
25 For Aristotles notion of metabol as kinesis and genesis, see Book III, Chapter 1 in Aristotle (2011).
26 See Aristotle (2011) 225b; 136.
27 However, it would be incorrect to conclude that Aristotle radically separates being and not-being. Genesis as the name
for the movement of pure, simple existence incorporates not-being into its very essence. As Aristotle himself puts it,
what passes into being is what is not . . . not being belongs to what comes into being simply (Aristotle 225b 20;136,
emphasis mine). Still, not-being does not threaten the unicity of ousia, since is no possibility for the not-being and the
being of a being to obtain at the same time.
28 Aristotle also defines this first principle, and this will matter for us, as a life, as a kind of life, a conduct of life,
comparable to the best that we can live for a brief moment of our lives. It is thus a life that overflows the lives of men, a
life that the First Mover lives constantly, always, continuously, which for us is impossible.
29 Democracy has always been suicidal and if there is a to-come for it, is on the condition of thinking life, and the force
of life, otherwise. That is why I insisted just now on the fact that Aristotle determines the pure act as a life.
30 auto-immunity is more or less suicidal, but it is even more serious: auto-immunity threatens always to deprive suicide
itself of its supposed sense and integrity.
31 a purely destituent power.
18
19
Infrapolitics1 and Shibumi. Infrapolitical Practice between and beyond

Metaphysical Closure and End of History
______________________________________
MADDALENA CERRATO
TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
For Nicola
That philosophy died yesterday, since Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche, or

Heideggerand philosophy should still wander toward the meaning of its
deathor that it has always lived knowing itself to be dying . . . that
philosophy died one day, within history, or that it has always fed on its
agony, on the violent way it opens history by opposing itself to non
philosophy, which is its past and its concern, its death and wellspring;
that beyond death, or dying nature, or even, as is said today, is still
entirely to come because of what philosophy has held in store; or, more
strangely still, that the future itself has a future, all these are
unanswerable questions. By right of birth, and for one time at least, these
are problems put to philosophy as problems philosophy cannot resolve.
(Derrida Violence and Metaphysics 97-98)
1- R.I.P.
Do we still speak of G, Teacher?

Yes. And of its shadow: life.
(Trevanian, Shibumi 110)
In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida highlights how, since the 1950s, a certain apocalyptic
2
tone has been marking philosophy. He, indeed, pointed out that deconstruction developed
throughout the engagement with those classics of the end [that] formed the canon of the modern
apocalypse (end of History, end of Man, end of Philosophy, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
with their Kojvian codicil and the codicils of Kojve himself) (16, emphasis in original). Another
half-century has gone by now since the moment Derrida is referring to and since Maurice Blanchot's
text The End of Philosophy (1959). In his lecture, Derrida quotes and discusses a long passage of
the text where Blanchot wrote: This death of philosophy would belong, therefore, to our philosophical
time. The death does not date from 1917, not even from 1857, the year in which Marx, as if
performing a carnival test of strength, would have overturned the system. For the last century and a half,
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| Cerrato, M. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)
with his name as with that of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, it is philosophy itself that has been
affirming or realizing its own end (Specters 44, emphasis in original). Therefore, now we should say
that for the last two centuries it is philosophy itself that has been affirming or realizing its own end,
because beyond a doubt the death of philosophy belong[s] to our philosophical time (Specters 44). The
question rather ought to be whether it belongs to our philosophical time too or still. Whether our
philosophical time may be still the same Blanchot is referring to or whether we are actually inhabiting
another, new philosophical time that is marked by the death of philosophy, too. Whether we could claim
for ourselves a specificity that positions us differently with respect to the mourning of ontotheological thought.
In order not yet to answer, but to be able to dwell in such an interrogation, we should take a
step back with respect to the collection of the classics of the end and focus on the different ways
philosophy has announced and accomplished its own death. If it is trueas Heidegger saidthat the
ending lasts longer than the previous history of metaphysics (End 85), the way thinking conducts
itself at the sunset, or, as Blanchot would say, the way every thinker is leading its slow funeral
procession gets to constitute the real event of thought and to determine any possible, although
spectral, future at stake. Since infrapolitical thought, which is both the frame of references and the
theoretical aim of this work, is strictly related to a certain heterogeneous tradition fundamentally
marked by Heidegger's thinking of the ontico-ontological difference and of the end of metaphysics,
I shall take as point of departure the Heideggerian account on this matter. One can distinguish, in a
Heideggerian manner, between the completion of metaphysics and its overcoming, intended as the
delivering over of metaphysics to its truth (Heidegger, End 92). And, in this sense, the Hegelian
sublation of philosophy (and theology) into absolute knowledge, that takes History to its end, begins
the completion of metaphysics that is achieved by the Nietzschean Will to Power:
With Nietzsches metaphysics, philosophy is completed. That means: it has gone
through the sphere of prefigured possibilities. Completed metaphysics, which is the
ground for the planetary manner of thinking, gives the scaffolding for an order of the
earth which will supposedly last for a long time. The order no longer needs
philosophy because philosophy is already its foundation. But with the end of philosophy,
thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning. (Heidegger, End 95-96,
my emphasis)
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With Nietzsche, Plato's myth of the cavern, which is the allegory that reveals the
understanding of truth that founds metaphysics, finds itself overturned, metaphysical values
transvalued, reversed, but in this way kept together. Nietzsche leads philosophy to its end, earns the
final closure of philosophy as metaphysical thinking, but does not achieve the transition to another
beginning. The conquest of the transition, the displacement of thinking into the passage to another
beginning, is the privilege of a deconstructive an-archic thought that dwells in the metaphysical
closure. This means a thought that addresses the history of philosophical thinking through an
interpretative analysis that is both phenomenological and deconstructive at once, which is the kind
of analysis that the first Heidegger tries to name with the term hermeneutics (which comes from the
Christian theological tradition) with the intent of transforming thinking itself. There is a positive,
constructive perspective leading the work of mourning for the end of philosophy: what follows the
passing of metaphysics is a passage, or rather a transformation of thinking that occurs as a passage
(Heidegger On the way 42). I believe it is extremely important to recognize the positive implication of
the Heideggerian retracing of the history of Being, to recognize the hopeful expectation that
oversees this slow mourning work for the end of ontotheology, whichwe can say keeping ourselves
within the Freudian frame of referencehas been mistaken quite often, instead, for a pathological,
constitutionally ambivalent, melancholia.3 I would probably not sayas does Blanchot in the
passage quoted by Derridathat philosophy celebrates its funeral in a joyful exaltation because it
expects, in one way or another, to obtain its resurrection (Derrida Specters 44, emphasis in original).
But the condemnation of Heidegger's thought as bearer of a sterile ambivalent melancholic
negativityeven if is indisputable that there are many aspects of it that have to be thoroughly
questioned and disavowedrisks (and actually it has already happened) producing also a radical
misunderstanding of the Derridian deconstructive project of thought, as well as of the various
attempts to bring the Heideggerian thought of ontico-ontological difference to bear on a reflection
on radical democratization, referred to as Left-Heideggerianism. Such a misunderstanding would
compromise the possibility of grasping what is actually at stake in infrapolitical discourse.
Both the work of Reiner Schrmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: from Principles to Anarchy
(1982), and the more recent work of Catherine Malabou, The Heidegger Change (2004), have drawn
attention to the more fruitful aspects of Heideggerian thought, not only giving extremely original
and fecund interpretations, but also opening it up toward new possibilities of affirmative
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deconstructive anarchic thinking that goes beyond it. According to Schrmann, Heidegger's
deconstruction (Abbau) of metaphysics inaugurates the possibility of breaking the succession of
principial phantasms, that is, breaking with the ultimate hegemonic principles (archai in Greek) that
organize the normative horizon in the diverse epochs of the history of Being. Moving from the
hypothesis of the closure of metaphysics, the Heideggerian deconstructionist enterprise can be
adequately summarized by Schrmann's felicitous paradoxical expression principle of anarchy:
This paradox is dazzling because in two words it points within and beyond the
closure of metaphysics, thus exhibiting the boundary line of that closure itself. The
paradox that the expression principle of anarchy articulates locates the
deconstructionist enterprise, it indicates the place where it is situated: still implanted
in the problematic of ti to on (What is being?), but already uprooting it from the
schema of the pros hen that was connate to that problematic; retaining presence, but
dislocating it from the attributive schema; still a principle, but a principle of anarchy.
It is necessary to think this contradiction. . . . The deconstruction is a discourse of
transition. By putting the two words principle and anarchy side by side, what is
intended is to prepare oneself for this epochal transition. (What must 9)
The affirmation of the end of the hegemony of epochal principles, insofar as it is an-archical, also
marks the end of epochality itself, but it is, at the same time, the beginning of a passage, of the time
of the transition from the passing of ontotheology to a new historicity. It is in this passage, in this
transition, which is a transformation and a displacement of thinking itself, that deconstructive
discourse takes place; and it is the very place to which our philosophical time belongs. Malabou
refers to the hermeneutic triad of change (change, transformation and metamorphosis) in order to
describe it as the place that the Heidegger Change inaugurates, through the introduction of the
fantastic in philosophy:
Constructing the Heidegger change therefore involves elaborating the schematizing
instance that will alone permit us to perceive, with Heidegger and beyond him, this
conceptually depatriated placethe very enigma of our philosophical momentthis point of
rupture and suture between metaphysics and its other that imposes upon philosophy, whether
it admits it or not, its limit; a limit that is also its reality. This point is the phantasm of our
philosophical reality. Lodged at the heart of the triad, it is what gets displaced with it; unlocatable,
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undatable, and unthinkable, it is nonetheless the motor of thought. (13, emphasis in original)
Moving from the metaphysical closure, one finds oneself lacking in any normative principle upon
which to determine whether one is on the right path: there are no right paths, there are no routes
since there is no destination, neither teleological nor eschatological, and not even any criteria by
which to chose pathmarks on the way, just paths lost in the woods, Holzwege, or Off the Beaten Track
(the English translation of the title Holzwege that is one of Heidegger's collection of essays). Trying to
be on the trail of the very enigma of our philosophical time is rather a matter of trying to follow
sporadic traces, of trying to find your anarchic, and so rootless, way toward the unlocatable,
nameless, place of your displacement that you can inhabit and experience, where you can be-there,
Dasein, but never either go back or project to be, because it occurs as a passage (Heidegger, On the
way 42). This is why, on a hunch, I started gathering quasi-random traces going on the way that I
shall present in the next pages, that is, the way through this conceptually depatriated place that is the
very enigma of our philosophical moment, and is a way toward infrapolitics as an attempt to think
through the phantasm of our philosophical reality (Malabou 13). Perhaps one could say that infrapolitics
is the way to deal with the proliferation of the haunting that inhabits existence in our philosophical
time, since the closure of metaphysics and since the consequent loss of ultimate universal principles
arranging the historical normative order that once arranged the frame of action.
The quasi-random traces I gathered to build my own pathway to infrapolitics are those left
by certain attempts to dwell in the twilight of Western philosophy looking at it as prefiguration of a
coming dawn, more than a mere announcement of a coming dusk, that have sought the possibility
of displacement, the transition to a new beginning of thought, the chance of a change of thinking,
when such attemptsthese events of thinkinghave taken place somehow looking to the Orient,
particularly and significantly to Japan, hoping to see the rising daylight that could enlighten toward
the conceptually and historically depatriated place of the point of convertibility between metaphysics
and its other (Malabou 68). In particular, to open my way I chose to follow the track left by
Heidegger's 1953 text A dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer, and by the
famous note that Kojve addedafter a voyage to Japan in 1959to the second edition of his book
on Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit in order to unravel the ambiguity of the preceding note stating the
disappearance of the Man at the end of History. Both textswhich are also especially compelling
because of the, more or less explicit, intertextual relationships to them that can be found
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disseminated throughout our philosophical timegive important indications as to how to think

about and in the point of rupture and suture between metaphysics and its other. Their tracks lead me to
introduce infrapolitics as a particular way of inhabiting the passage and relating to the enigma of our
philosophical time; and finally, to engage with an infrapolitical form of life through Trevanian's
novel Shibumi.
Before getting into the analysis of what kind of tracks these texts have left, it has to be
clarified that neither one of them should be read as an attempt to represent Japan as a reality, nor by
any means (as an attempt) to contribute to the European system of knowledge about the Orient, an
accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness to which Edward Said
referred as Orientalism (6). I would suggest that we could understand the kind of approach they take
toward Japan in a way not too far removed from the one evoked by Faraway, the first of the notes
comprising Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs (1970), so long as we highlight that neither of them takes
Japan as a direct object of thinking, whereas Barthes seems to remain trapped into the objectifying
discourse of metaphysics when he is relating to Japan, trying to isolate certain features and treating
them as a system, even though it occurs on a fictive level without the pretense of representation or
knowledge. Barthes's text in question begins with these words:
If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it
declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no
real country in my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the
signs of literature). I can alsothough in no way claiming to represent or to analyze
reality itself (these being the major gesture of Western discourse)isolate somewhere
in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed in linguistics),
and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is this system which I shall
call: Japan. (3)
Barthes is very clear in stating that it is the possibility of a difference, the possibility of a different
symbolic and linguisticsymbolic because linguistic, and linguistic because symbolicorder what is at
stake in turning the gaze toward the Orient (and not the objectified Orient of Orientalism), and
toward Japan:
Hence Orient and Occident cannot be taken here as realities to be compared and
contrasted historically, philosophically, culturally, politically. I am not lovingly gazing
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toward an Oriental essenceto me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely

providing a reserve of features whose manipulationwhose invented interplayallows
me to entertain the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether
detached from our own. What can be addressed, in the consideration of the Orient,
are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another wisdom (though the latter might
appear thoroughly desirable); it is the possibility of a difference, of mutation, of a
revolution in the property of symbolic systems. (3-4)
What is at stake is not at all a hunt for the proverbial oriental wisdom as a more or less cheap
wholesale trade, in the context of some New Age philosophy, but a slender thread of light [that]
search[es] out not other symbols but the very fissure of the symbolic (4).
2. Metaphysical closure and Japan
Heidegger's A Dialogue on Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer, written in
1953-1954, on the occasion of the visit of Prof. Tomio Tezuka from the Imperial University of
Tokyo, is particularly remarkable, not to say unique in the Heideggerian production and in general in
contemporary philosophy, because of the choice of the dialogue, the oldest form of philosophical
discourse, whose significance becomes completely explicit at the end of the text. It is a dialogue on
language, and it could not be anything but on language (and not about because I: Speaking about
language turns language almost inevitably into an object (50, emphasis in original) since it is a
dialogue that thematizes its own impossibility from the very beginning: The danger of our
dialoguethe interlocutor-Heidegger says referring to his encounter with another Japanese
professorwas hidden in the language itself, not in what we discussed, nor in the way in which we
try to do so (4, emphasis in original). And then, referring to The Letter on Humanism, he
clarifies: Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of
his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an
entirely different house than Eastasian man . . . And so, a dialogue from house to house remains
nearly impossible (5, emphasis in original). Here nearly is the key. The possibility that is left is the
possibility of a step back with respect to language, a step back from the language of metaphysics,
namely backtracking from the metaphysics that sticks to the language, adheres to its skin.
The backtracking (der Schritt zurk) names Heidegger's dialogue with the history of
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philosophy, and his way to dwell in the metaphysical closure. This backtracking goes in the opposite
direction of the Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung), and does not imply taking an isolated step in one's
thinking, but a kind of thought movement, and a rather long way (Essays in 43). Backtracking,
Heidegger goes toward what metaphysical tradition left unthought, that is, the ontological
difference, the difference between Being and beings which still has to be named in the language of
metaphysics. In order to overcome metaphysics, that is, to bring[s] back metaphysics within its
own limits (On the way 20), it is not enough to think the difference as such, to correspond to the call
of the Two-fold (Zwiefalt) of Being itself and beings. In order to open the possibility of a radical
transformation of thinking, what has to be thought is the nature of language insofar as it defines the
hermeneutic relation: What prevails in and bears up the relation of human nature to the the two-fold
is language (On the way 30). The reciprocal belonging of hermeneutics and language in turn bears
on one of the pivotal moments of the dialogue:
J: . . . I believe that now I see more clearly the full import of the fact that
hermeneutics and language belong together.
I: The full import in what direction?
J: Toward a transformation of thinkinga transformation which, however, cannot
be established as readily as a ship can alter its course, and even less can be established
as the consequence of an accumulation of the result of philosophical research.
I: The transformation occurs as a passage...
J: in which one site is left behind in favor of another...
I: and that require the sites to be placed in discussion.
J: One site is metaphysics.
I: And the other? We leave it without a name. (42)
Earlier in the dialogue, when the Japanese asked why Heidegger did not give his own name to the
aim of his research rather than surrendering to metaphysics calling it the sense of Being, he said:
How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for? To assign the naming word is, after all,
what constitutes finding (20). So, it is a matter of a passage that puts into question both the site
from which it comes, that is metaphysics, and the nameless site of the new beginning of thought.
Here, a topology and a tropology are at stake at the same time. Saying this, I am picking up
another quasi-random trace found, not too accidentally, on my way. This is Faxitexture, the
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lecture Derrida gave in 1991 at a conference with architects and urbanists regarding the city of the
new millennium. The conference was titled Anywhere, and it was held in Japan, on the island of
Yu Fuin. The binomial topology-tropology, which opens Derrida's remarks, and that constitutes an
important key for the rest of the lecture, is pivotal to understanding the subject matter of the
dialogue, and also what kind of role Japan is coming to play at the end of philosophy. Tropes are
tours, changes of places, from somewhere to somewhere else: displacement, voyage, transfer or
transposition, metonymy or metaphor, translation or transhumance (20). Heidegger's destruction of
the history of Being takes into question the topology of metaphysics, that is, the dualism between
the sensuous and supra-sensuous world, which is also the arch of its tropology (first of all allegorical
and metaphorical); but since it calls for an an-archic thought, it cannot simply move on toward a
new topology. An-archic thought loses its mooring, it is displaced, dislocated into tropologies without
return. This is the condition of the passage. In the passage, thinking can just expose itself to singular
tropes, singular displacements without any expectations of stability neither as return to an originary
birthplace nor as relocation elsewhere. The passage itself is, indeed, as we have seen, what Malabou
called the conceptually and historically depatriated place of the point of convertibility between
metaphysics and its other (68, my emphasis). It is a matter of dwelling within the passage that
places in discussion the site left behind as well as its nameless landing place: Place itself and, among
all places, the place of habitat or possible residence, the end of a transhumance, is defined after the
fact (20), but since it can never get stabilized in a principle, be represented, grasped in a concept, it
will remain nameless, and so fated to be constantly re-placed and provisionally re-named.
The hermeneutic relation to the Two-fold, to the ontological differencebut we could also say
diffrance with Derridatakes place as an event of language that strives to name it, to grasp it, and
fails. Each attempt is an adventure and is a trope, a turn of thinking against the limit of language
to go beyond the presence of what is present. Each attempt and failure lets the difference be as what
cannot be mastered by language, as what leaves always a trace, hides a mystery, a secret. The
Dialogue on Language, with its silences, its suspensions, its being nearly impossible, tries to
respond to this paradoxicality. And the silence, the suspension, the hesitations, are not renunciation,
rather they are traces of the mystery of originary Saying (die Sage), to account for the paradox of
the attempt of speaking from the Language, that is, trying to correspond to such a Saying that
cannot be said. Only a dialogue could be such a saying correspondence, Heidegger says: Above
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all, silence about silence (52).

Each trope is haunted by the specter of its failure. So, the figural aspect of such tropes has
to be understood as an emerging of a spectrality, of phantasms, insofar as an improper metaphor
that is not resting upon any proper sense, and whose catachrestic function is always already
known as impossible.4 Each attempt, since it cannot be justified by a principle (an arch), bears
already with itself the possibility and the need for its replacement (more precisely, replaceability) as
repetition (or rather as iterability) gives place to place (24).
In 1965, in his course about Heidegger: the Question of Being and History, Derrida
spelled out the paradoxical condition of the philosophical work thinking through the destruction of
metaphysics by the means of language:
The work of thinking is nothing but . . . this operation of destruction of the
metaphor, of determined and motivated reduction of the metaphor. This does not
mean that one comes out from the metaphoric element of language, but rather that
in a new metaphor the previous metaphor appears as such, is denounced in its origin,
in its metaphorical function and its necessity. It appears as such. One can perhaps
call thinking and thinking of Being (the thinking of Being insofar as horizon and
appeal to an impossible non-metaphoric thought) the one that appeals to such a
gesture of de-metaphorization. (My translation, 278)
In this sense, the thinking of/in the passage finds itself trapped in what Derrida called in his lecture
an incontrollable paradox of replacement, of re-building as replacementand of replacement as the
very possibility of place, the originary and non-supervened possibility of all placement (24,
emphasis in original). Such a paradox constitutes, actually, the affirmative kernel of deconstruction,
which too often gets lost because of the grammar of the word (de-), as Derrida complains in his
Letter to a Japanese friend.5 Deconstruction is to be understood in its link to re-building:
In this respect it would be easy to demonstrate that between re-building and
deconstruction there is no opposition, nor even any difference: because
deconstruction is affirmation, no doubt, but also because the displacement of the
accent, the strategy of the emphasis, that seems to privilege sometimes (here)
deconstruction and sometimes (there) re-building, will never erase this hard
paradoxicality. (24)
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So, what is at stake when Heidegger inquires about the Japanese word Iro, Ku, or about the sense of
emptiness of the stage or of the gesture in the No-play, or moreover when he is asking his
interlocutor: What does the Japanese world understand by language? Asked still more cautiously:
Do you have in your language a word for what we call language? If not, how do you experience what
with us is called language? (23) It is not, certainly, a hunt for a universal essence of language that is
found in the dialogue itself. Nor is it a quest to name the nameless site to which the passage is
passing. It is not a matter of metaphorical representation of the new beginning either. It is no more
and no less than what we could call, paraphrasing the title of an important book of Gianni Vattimo
of 1980, an adventure of difference. In this sense, we can also begin to understand the displacement
toward Japan, which the dialogue stages, as a trope of thinking just as well as the displacement into
the poetic horizon of Hlderlin or Rilke. Tropological adventures mark our philosophical time as
the time of the end of philosophy. In the closure of metaphysics, a-principial thought is assigned to
adventurous thinking, to that kind of thinking that is a gathering of quasi-random traces off the
beaten track dwelling within the passage to the transformation of that very same thinking. As
Derrida put it in 1968:
For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a rightful beginning, an
absolute point of departure, a principial responsibility. . . . In the delineation of
diffrance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent
truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the
field. Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in domination, a
mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a
strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics, or empirical wandering if
the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in its opposition to
philosophical responsibility. (Diffrance 6-7, my emphasis)
The strategies are adventurous, they are always singular and eventual, free from the mastery of
teleologies or final destinations. They are neither necessary nor contingent, rather beyond the
metaphysical dichotomy between necessity and contingency, in the unity of necessity and chance.
The adventures are, indeed, strategic, they are not rigidly oriented toward a goal, but they are not
arbitrary either, rather they rely upon traces, which are the traces of the ontological difference
haunting the experience presumed exhausted in the presence. Those traces are never simply present
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by themselves: as trace of what can never be presented, they themselves can never be presented. But
they are to be found in the repetition of the history of metaphysics as the forgetting of the onticoontological difference, as well as in the excess with respect to what we have provisionally called
tropological adventures, which are the other side of the deconstruction of metaphysics. The
historicity of thinking, after the closure of onto-theological historicity, consists precisely in
corresponding to those twofold traces, which come as much from the past as from the future: This
point, where the metamorphosis of metamorphosis or migration of migration is achieved, can only
be invested with phantasms, with images of these extra- or hypo-historical processes. The enigma of
history, in the double sense of Historie and Geschichte, is the spatial and temporal location of the point
of collision between philosophy and what is not, between metaphysics and its destruction (Malabou
68). Through the triad of change, Malabou suggests that such a collusion occurs in a fantastic
margin, in both the light and the shadows of the philosophical imaginary (68), and those are the
tropological adventures and the specter of their failure/impossibility that always haunts them: What
is fantastic is the simultaneously metaphysical and non metaphysical visibility of being (68). Once
the domain of hegemonic metaphysic principles that found the epochality of Being is brought to its
end, another historicity has to be thought. Here in question is not just the ambiguous historicity of
the passage as such, but also the historicity of a new beginning and of who would exist there (Dasein). Those are also the questions involved in the Kojvian note and in Derrida engaging with it in
the second chapter of Specters of Marx.
3- End of History and Japan
Before starting to examine the emendation Kojve wrote as a footnote for the second
edition of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, a review of the Kojvian interpretation of the end of
History is opportune. According to Kojve's reading of Hegel, if the revealed human reality is
nothing but universal history, that history must be the history of the interactions between Mastery
and Slavery: the historical dialectic is the dialectic of Master and Slave (9). This is because at the
ground of the dialectic of Master and Slave there is human desire, that is, the anthropogenetic
desire for recognition,that is, for the other's desire. It is the desire directed toward another desire,
instead of toward a natural object, which triggers the struggle to death that first determines the
distinction between autonomous and dependent existences, or between Mastery and Slavery as the
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essential determination of the social reality that is the only human reality. Risking its own life for the
sake for recognition, the animal becomes human, becomes the man that is nothing but his
becoming(9). This means that human reality is the historic fight for the satisfaction of his Desire
and that, once the dialectic interaction of Master and Slave finally has ended in the overcoming of
both of them, History will necessarily end too. The first Human action, the anthropogenetic action,
is the fight for domination in the search of recognition, or rather the war: man is human only to the
extent that he wants to impose himself on another man, to be recognized by him(13). The dialectic
overcoming (Aufhebung) of the other is, at this point, his enslavement. The Master, however, finds
himself in a tragic existential impasse because he has been recognized by a Slave, that is to say, by
someone who is not human yet since he has not freed himself from Nature risking his life in the
name of human desire for recognition. The recognition achieved by the Master is thus worthless
because it comes from a natural being and not from a peer. And, he can never become a true selfconscious Man. The satisfied man will be rather the Slave who dialectically overcomes his slavery
through his work, upon which the surviving of the Master depends. By working, the Slave becomes
master of Nature freeing himself from his own nature, from the instinct that tied him to the Master
in order to preserve his life: The future and History hence belong not to the warlike Master, who
either dies or preserves himself indefinitely in identity to himself, but to the working Slave. . . . If the
fear of death, incarnated for the Slave in person of the warlike Master, is the sine qua non of
historical progress, it is solely the Slave's work that realizes and perfects it (23). The Master finally is
the catalyst of the historical anthropogenetic process, but does not participate actively in it, because
it is by means of work that man becomes man, that is transforming both himself and the world at
the same time. The transformation of man and the world (i.e., universal history) is the long and
bloody process toward the realization of the human ideal of freedom, which will be assured just
when the Master will be overthrown and the full recognition of everyone by everyone will have
taken place. As part of the progress, which is described by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, selfconsciousness goes through Christian religion and philosophy (up to Hegel). The end of history, as
the ultimate accomplishment of freedom, is also the end of philosophy (philo-sophia) and the coming
of wisdom (i.e., sophia): not only does the coming of Wisdom complete History, but this coming is
possible only at the end of History (95). And here, we are exactly at the point where the famous
footnote comes into play.
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In the first edition, the sixth footnote of the chapter devoted to the interpretation of the
conclusion of the Phenomenology of Spirit asserted the disappearance of man at the end of history,
postulating that such a disappearance should be understood just as disappearance of the man as
subject of the action negating (transforming through his work) the object. What survives the end of
history is rather man as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being (158, emphasis in original).
This means the cessation of wars and revolution, as well as philosophy, since there is no more need
for the man returned to animality to pursue any change for/of himself or of the world: But all the
rest can be preserved indefinitely; art, love, play, etc., etc.; in short everything that makes Man happy
(159, emphasis in original). And this would be what Marx called the realm of freedom.
The long Note to the second edition is comprised of three parts. First, Kojve rectifies the
striking contradiction of the note in the previous edition about a return of man to animality that
would not affect his arts, loves or play, and his ability to enjoy them and be happy because of them; a
return to animality that would not affect the discursive understanding that bears wisdom itself. The
second part is a distillate of what Derrida in Specters of Marx called the neo-Marxist and paraHeideggerian reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Kojve (91), that has already been picked up
by Aim Patri, an unsympathetic critic quoted by the editor of the book in the introduction, who
wrote: M. Kojve is, as far as we know, the first . . . to have attempted to constitute the intellectual
and moral mnage trois of Hegel, Marx and Heidegger which has since that time been a great
success (vii). Indeed, this second part of the Kojve's note combines the Hegelian-Marxist end of
history with Heidegger's repeated evening out of Americanism and Bolshevism as embodiment of
the essence of modern technology, and his characterization of the world wars as already beyond the
difference between war and peace,6 recounting that, after several voyages to the US and to the Soviet
Union (between 1948 and 1958), he was led to conclude from this that the American way of life
was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, ...prefiguring the eternal present future of
all of humanity (161). The third part of the note, which is undoubtedly the most interesting, again
turns the perspective on its head: It was following a recent voyage to Japan (1959) that I had a
radical change of opinion on this point. There I was able to observe a Society that is one of a kind,
because it alone has for almost three centuries experienced life at the end of Historythat is in the
absence of all civil or external war . . . Post-historical Japanese civilization undertook ways
diametrically opposed to the American way (161). The post-historical civilization that captures
95
Kojves interest is the anything but animal existence of Japanese nobles, whose Snobbery
created disciplines negating the natural or animal given which in effectiveness far surpassed those
that arose, in Japan or elsewhere, from historical Action (161), that is work. Even though the
peaks of such a Snobbery (i.e., the Noh theater, the ceremony of tea, and the art of bouquets of
flowers) are a prerogative of noblesKojve clarifiesall Japanese have access to a formalized life,
that is, a living according to values completely empty of all human content in the historical
sense (162). Here, the annihilation of animality goes together with the annihilation of the Human
Desire for recognition, but in no way is a definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called at
stake. The action negating the object, namely its content, that aims to transform the world according
to the human ideal of freedomwhich would be the universal fulfillment of the Human Desire for
recognitionrepresents the kernel of History. Therefore, in the post-historical of content throughout
time, what vanishes is this very content of the action insofar as being susceptible to historical
transformation. No less surprising, as Derrida highlighted in his reading, are the last few lines
concluding the note introducing the projection of a duty for the future: This means that, while
henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man
must [doit] continue to detach form from content, doing so no longer in order actively to
transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure form to himself and to others
taken as content of any sort (162). Such a projection betrays that also Kojve, at this point, is
taking his stance in the passage that left off from the end of history to the nameless post-historical
site, which is also the post-metaphysical site, the conceptually depatriated place, or the very enigma of
our philosophical moment that we have been discussing with respect to Heidegger. In the
conclusion of The Heidegger Change, Malabou brings together Heidegger and Hegel; she says [they]
are not strangers to each other (281), emphasizing that the incision that severs them one from the
other has to be thought of as jointure uniting and articulating them while it maintains their distance.
I would venture to say that we could and should consider this Kojvian note such a jointure, even
though Malabou does not take Kojve into consideration (and this is surprising on many levels) at all
in her book. The Kojvian perspective on the passage draws attention to the other-humanity of
man, to the other-existence of the who of the new-beginning, that is, after the end of History,
while it raises implicitly the question about the historicity of it, namely about the historicity of the
end of history as an event closing the historicity as teleologically-oriented development and
96
transformation of man. Doing so and doing it in a perspective that looks at a future to-comethis is
a bridge between Hegel/Marx and HeideggerKojve is also introducing the issue of the kind of
historicity that is to be grant to the event that comes after the end of history, to the new-beginning
itself, to Heidegger's Ereignis, and, so, also of the possibility of transforming thinking.
Redeeming it from Fukuyama's manipulation, Derrida sees in Kojve's perspective on the
future beyond history the purely necessarily form of the future as such, the form of the historicity
of what he called the messianic without messianism (Derrida Specters 92). In this sense, he reads in
the lines quoted the enunciation of a law, that can be taken, with the paradox that this implies, as the
anarchic law of the passage: in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, there
where a certain determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of
history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itselfof promising itself (93). It is a
matter of opposing what Derrida calls the onto-theo-archeo-teleogical concept of history that
locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity (93), in order to think another historicity:7 not
a new history or still less a new historicism, but another opening of event-ness as historicity that
permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of
the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or
teleo-eschatological program or design (94). In this context, what does Kojve's tropological
adventure in Japanese snobbery finally tell us about the nameless site that is promised in the
passage? Does he give us any key to understand the enigma of our philosophical time? I believe that it
points up at least four pivotal indications, traces to find our way out from metaphysics, toward and
through the Other of metaphysics.
First, Kojve says that the post-historical life is in the absence of all civil and external wars,
that is, a life that is not at risk. Second, he says snobbery created disciplines that negate the animality
more effectively than the historical action, that is, warlike and revolutionary Fights or forced
Work (161). Third, it is a matter of living according to totally formalized values, free from any
determination on the ground of historical values that have social or political content, like in the
case, quoted by Kojve, of a perfectly gratuitous suicide (162, emphasis in original). Finally, and
most importantly, he says post-historical man has to detach himself as pure form in order to oppose,
that is, to counterpose, himself and the others taken as content of any sort, and, that is, as objects
of Desire, recognition, exploitation but also as content entirely accessible to technical-calculative-
97
manipulative thinking. Kojve, appealing to the formalism of post-historical man, is appealing to an

exodus, a withdrawal from the dynamics of appropriation-expropriation as the dynamics that lie
beneath and bear the onto-theo-archeo-teological dialectic of history. Therefore, he calls for a
twofold retreat from the ontology of war as well as from the ontology of work/value. This way, he
also implicitly suggests renouncing any emancipatory logic founded in the identitarism of the
proper, in identitarian subjectivation.
4- Infrapolitics and Shibumi
At the end of philosophy, a transformation and a displacement of thinking are announced.
But such a transformation depends upon the impossible task of thinking thoroughly the closure of
metaphysics; and such a displacement is actually a displacement into the passage by which thinking
itself should be brought from the end of ontotheology to the new beginning. The passage itself is
the very enigma of our philosophical moment because there, the rupture and the suture between
metaphysics and its other take place. Through Heidegger and Kojve, in the first instance, and
through Derrida, Malabou and Schrmann, in the second instance, we have depicted the fading
horizon of thinking such an enigma, because this horizon is where infrapolitics occurs.
Since what is passing away in the passage is philosophy itself, at the opening I suggested that
the question is whether the death of philosophy belongs to our philosophical time still or too.
Whether our philosophical time may be still the same Blanchot was referring to or whether we are
actually inhabiting another, new philosophical time that is marked by the death of philosophy, too. Now,
I would venture to answer: both. On the one hand, indeed, the passing of metaphysics is still the
phantasm that haunts our philosophical reality, as a passing on that never passes away. And the
juncture, which is the point of rupture and the suture between metaphysics and its other, is still what
we ought to think. On the other hand, I do believe that infrapolitics, insofar as an event and a
practice of thought of our philosophical time, does belong to the passage too, but in a way that
produces a radical incision in it.
Infrapolitics is not to be understood either as an attempt to name the nameless site to which
the passage is passing or just as another tropological adventure. In the first case, it would mean to
objectify it, surrendering it to the representative metaphysical thought. In the second, it would just
fall within Deconstruction, and that is only partially the case. Infrapolitics is a deconstructive
98
theoretical practice, or discourse, which takes place in the time of the closure of onto-theology, that
puts into question the history of thought with a view to the affirmation of the transformation of
thinking. Infrapolitics dwells in the passage. The motor of infrapolitical thought is still the very
same unlocatable, undatable, and unthinkable juncture between metaphysics and its other. But,
nevertheless, it aims to introduce a radical turn in the philosophical gaze, a shift in the thinking of
the end. This shift consists of the fact that it seeks access to an affirmative and emancipatory
thinking, through the thinking of another historicity, a radical historicity as event-ness, not as ontotheological or teleo-eschatological program or design, but not as a messianic promise either, rather
in the perspective of an always-already-there. Infrapolitics takes the post-historical promise of
Kojve among the possibilities of the existence always-already-there. With Derrida, infrapolitics can
say in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, there where a certain determined
concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it
has the chance of heralding itself (Specter 94), but not as a promise, not as a new beginning rather as
a dimension of experience that has always-already been there neglected, covered up by onto-theoarcheo-teological thinking and language. This way, the phantasm of the fissure between metaphysics
and its other is incorporated into the thinking of the passage, into this new thinking of the passage:
so that the transformation occurs as a passage, and the displacement takes place within the
passage. In this sense, I believe infrapolitics is the attempt to take one step further with respect to
deconstruction.
One could say that infrapolitics is a vertigo in the thinking of the passage; it is the vertigo of
the thought that escaped from ontotheology and is facing the breach of language. This vertigo
occurs as a new dimension of experience is brought into play. This is the infrapolitical dimension.
Infrapolitics, insofar as it is an-archic thinking, occurs through tropological adventures that begin in
the infrapolitical dimension and measure themselves with the nearly impossible task of demetaphorization of metaphysical language. But it occurs also in the form of a kind of Heideggerian
backtracking, specifically concerned with retrieving traces of the previous heralding of the
infrapolitical dimension. This is the hermeneutical effort of dialoguing with a certain tradition of
thinking involved in dealing with the end of onto-theological thought.
Infrapolitics depends upon a thinking of the ontico-ontological difference, although it does
not coincide with it. One could say that infrapolitical thought is a manner of relating to the ontico-
99
ontological difference as the abyssal, and always forgotten, obscure ground8 of experience through
the attempt to dwell in this ulterior and arcane dimension. This is a dimension of experience that
exceeds subjectivity and cannot be captured by politics or ethics, otherwise it irremediably challenges
war and work as paradigms of understanding of action and historicity. The vertigo, then, is
engendered by infrapolitical affirmation, that is, the affirmation of the fact that human experience
overflows its onto-theological articulation in ethics and politics. Infrapolitical dimension overflows
representative thinking, that is, the thinking that proceeds from the assumption of the essence of
truth as adaequatio of thought to things. As Alberto Moreirasin dialogue with Levinas's Totality and
Infinitysays in one of the first pages of Infrapolitical Literature: Experience is therefore the
essential non-adaequation to the reality of war, to the reality of politics (185). This is, in other
words, the affirmation that the possibility of an action, which is anything but animal, that is free
from any determination on the ground of historical values that have social or political content
(Kojve 161), is always-already there. It a matter of postulating the possibility of a singular acting
that exceeds any determination from normative principles, warlike logic or productive perspective,
and that exceeds subjectivation and challenges it. As Moreiras explains, infrapolitics is not directly
political.9 But pointing to this region and/or possibility (in the sense of a dunamis) of experience that
exceeds subjectivation as a condition of politics intended as what brings together the historical
dialectics of exploitation/domination, infrapolitics unconceals the possibility of withdrawal, exodus
from any politics of exploitation and domination. This possibility is not a possibility to-come, it is
not a future projection, but it is a spectrality that always already haunts the experience itself that
pretends to be exhausted by an ethical-political matrix of comprehension. There, infrapolitics is the
practice of thought that concerns itself with this dimension of experience and the affirmation of the
possibility of withdrawal that is always-already there. In these last pages I shall explore the
affirmation of the possibility of a similar withdrawal in the form of a style of existence, in what we
could call an infrapolitical style of existence or form of life. I will do it through a tropological
adventure into a novel: the 1979 Trevanian's novel Shibumi. As Moreiras has shown,10 the
infrapolitical affirmation has in literatureor better in some, therefore infrapolitical, literaturean
important instance. And I consider Shibumi to a certain extent a paradigmatic instance of literary
infrapolitics.
The whole novel can be read as a literary engagement with the post-historical life sketched
100 | Cerrato, M. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)
by the last part of Kojve's note. The principal character of the novel, Nicholai Hell, embodies, at
the same time, the sunset of Western ontotheology and the paradoxical displacement to the Orient
to find a form of life that exceeds and survives it. He isas a Japanese friend mocking him saysa
man of the twilight! (196). Nicholai Hell is somehow Occidental, since he is the son of an
aristocratic Russian woman and a German father. But, he was born in Shanghai during the chaos of
World War I, and there gets adopted by the Japanese General Kishikawa and then is sent by him to
study with a G master in Japan, where he survived the destruction of Hiroshima: But then
considering that Nicholai was born of the best blood of Europe but raised in the crucible of China
was he really Western? Certainly he was not Oriental either. He was of no racial culture. Or was it
better to think of him as the sole member of a racial culture of his own? (72). From the beginning,
he lives at the margins of political subjectivation since he has neither citizenship, nor a proper
homeland or national sense of belonging. He speaks six languages and thinks in five. When he is
asked by the general Do you ever think about the war?, his answer is No, sir. It has nothing to do
with me(75). Thanks to this originally ex-patriated/de-patriated condition, he finds himself alwaysalready outside and beyond war and capitalism, which appear more and more intimately connected
in the background. In general Kishikawa's words: All wars are lost ultimately. By both sides, Nikko.
The day of battles between professional warriors are gone. Now we have wars between opposing
industrial capacities, opposing populations. The Russians, with their sea of faceless people, will
defeat the Germans. The Americans, with their anonymous factories will defeat us. Ultimately (95).
The old general is still in some way committed to an us:
Oh, yes, Nikko. I am a patriot after all. Not a patriot of politics, or ideology, or
military bands, or the hinomaru. But a patriot all the same. A patriot of garden like
this, of moon festivals, of the subtleties of G, of the chants of women planting rice,
of cherry blossoms in brief bloomof things Japanese. The fact that I know we
cannot win this war has nothing to do with the fact that I must continue to do my
duty. Do you understand that, Nikko? Only the words, sir. (95)
On the contrary, Nicholai belongs always already to the infrapolitical dimension. This means that he
is already beyond the history as dialectics of recognition through fight and labor: since he does not
act from a proper identitarian position, he remains excluded from any dynamic of appropriation and
expropriation. He is tied yet to Japan insofar as Barthes's fictive nation, as the birth place of the game
of G and the ideal of Shibumi, the two elements by means of which he builds his infrapolitical style
of existence, the two elements where he finds refuge in his retreat from the ontology of war and
capitalism. Japan is the object of his cathexis, and the site of his super-egoic projection. But, it does
not become a motive of political subjective militancy for him. He is not a patriot and cannot be a
patriot. He cannot understand patriotism from the uncanniness-homelessness (Unheimlichkeit) of the
infrapolitical position: No one observing the delicate young man standing at the rail of the rusty
freighter, his hooted green eyes watching the wallow and plunge of the sea as he contemplated the
two gifts the General had given himthese G ke, and the lifelong goal of Shibumiwould have
surmised that he was destined to become the world's most highly paid assassin (78). The entire
structure of the novel is built around the phases of the game of G. Through G the relationship
between the teenager Nicholai and general Kishikawa is first established. But even before, it is by
learning how to play G from reading books, when he is still a boy in Shanghai, that Nicholai
initiates the exodus toward his fictive Japan. The first time they play, asked by general Kishikawa
about the qualities necessary to a fine player, Nicholai says: Well, of course one must have
concentration. Courage. Self-control. That goes without saying. But more important than these, one
must have... I don't know how to say it. One must be both a mathematician and a poet. As though
poetry were a science; or mathematics an art. One must have an affection for proportion to play G
at all well (72). He also recognized that his initial weaknesses lie in what he called poetry, or rather
in what exceeds linear logic. Because of this excess, because of this poetry G is to philosophers
and warriors, chess is to accountants and merchants (73), or, as he will say later, G is to Western
Chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting(165). In rapport to the game of G, life
shows itself in its lacks: Do we still speak of G, Teacher?Yes. And of its shadow: life. For
Otake-san life was a simplistic metaphor for G (107). Whereas life is dominated by the simple
problem/solution grid of Western culture, by the principle of equivalence that holds the logic of
value, that it, ontotheology, G calls for a thinking of liquid permutation and for an extremely
complicated abstract strategy about balance and internal tensions. Dealing with this deficiency of life
calls into play the search for shibumi. It is a non-achievable goal, a non-subjective ineffable quality
that ought to be discovered more than attained. It requires going beyond the rigid metaphysical
dualisms (activity and passivity, form and content, subject and object, natural and cultural) to keep
them in a non-dialectical relation, in a paradoxical unity that makes their reciprocal deconstruction
happen and makes appear the excess of experience they could not account for. I would say that it is
indeed an infrapolitical style of existence, since it is an-archic, free from principial normative
prescription, and demands a transformation of thinking and a displacement into an infrapolitical
dimension of experience.The general describes it to Nicholai, this way:
As you know, shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace
appearances. It is a statement so correct that it does not have to be bold, so poignant
it does not have to be pretty, so true it does not have to be real. Shibumi is
understanding, rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence. In demeanor, it is modesty
without pudency. In art . . . it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity. In philosophy . .
. it is spiritual tranquility that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming.
And in the personality of a man, it is . . . how does one say it? Authority without
domination? Something like that. . . . Meaning that one must learn a great deal to
arrive to shibumi? Meaning, rather, that one must pass through knowledge and
arrive at simplicity. (77-78)
Shibumi becomes the lifelong goal of Nicholai Hell and his fate. Gardening and caving are exercises
on the path toward it, and they correspond to post-historical Japanese snobbery evoked by Kojve
in his note; especially caving, where the foes are the specter who haunts you, where there are no
public or lighted and praised victories, comes as a figure of infrapolitical practice insofar as a singular
engagement with the facing of one's own demon. Both G and shibumi get combined in the book
Blossom and Thorns on the Path toward G that, at the end of the war which had nothing to do with him,
Nicholai Hell writes to find a mental post-historical escape from the mechanical work he had to do
to survive:
The book was an elaborate joke in the form of a report and commentary on a
fictional master's game played at the turn of century. While the play of the masters
seemed classic and even brilliant to the average player, there were little blunders and
irrelevant placements that brought frowns to the more experienced of the readers.
The delight of the book lay in the commentary by a well-informed fool who found a
way to make each of the blunders seem a touch of audacious brilliance, and who
stretched the limits of imagination by attaching to the moves metaphors for life,
beauty, and art, all stated with great refinement and demonstration of scholarship,
but all empty of significance. (130)

This booka subtle and eloquent parody of the intellectual parasitism of the criticis at the same
time the ultimate gesture of snobbery and allegory of the very same Shibumi and of all the work of
Trevanian (viz. Rodney Whitaker), which is a sarcastic constant deconstruction of genre literature,
of literary genres and the dichotomy between high and low literature. His explicit attack on the
reduction of the literary to value judgment, his emphasis on the fictional character of the author, his
refusal of the priority of the subject creator and of the mastery of capitalist/consumerist logic over
the literary, place Trevanian in an infrapolitical position.
Nicholai Hell is an infrapolitical, post-historical, anti-hero. Indeed there cannot be heroism
from an infrapolitical position, because it is always-already beyond subjectivation. He isas the
Gnome makes explicit in his long speech toward the end of the bookan anti-hero in the sense that
leads toward a different kind of salvation: There was a time in the comedy of human development
when salvation seemed to lie in the direction of order and organization, and all the great Western
heroes organizes and directed their followers against the enemy: chaos. Now we are learning that the
final enemy is not the chaos, but organization (376). Such organization, which is depicted as the
conjunction/submission of the ontology of war to the logic of capitalism, is called twice in the book
infragovernment. Is not, finally, the infrapolitical form of life, or style of existence, insofar as a
withdrawal from the appropriation/expropriation dynamic, the only possible interruption of the last
figure of ontotheological mastery, that is, infragovernment? Such a discussion ought to be a matter
for further research. But, as seen here, the most important contribution of an infrapolitical thought
consists of bringing back, from a messianic perspective, the possibility of such a withdrawal; even
though it implies a displacement into a less bright, sunny, and open horizon of thinking. In this
sense, and staying within the frame of reference of this essay, we could oppose the displacement of
thinking toward the Orient as prefiguration of a coming dawn, with the speleological displacement
of infrapolitics, under the surface of experience, into the dark of its subterranean system of faults,
fissures and caves.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Diffrance. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Brighton: The Harvest, 1982.
1-27. Print.
---. Faxitexture. Anywhere. Ed. Cynthia C. Davidson. New York: Rizzoli International, 1992. 2033. Print.
---. Letter to a Japanese Friend. Derrida and Diffrance. Ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1998. 1-5. Print.
---. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
---. Violence and Metaphysics. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass London: Routledge, 2002.
Print.
---. White Mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass
Brighton: The Harvest, 1982. 207-71. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. A Dialogue on Language Between a Japanese and an Inquirer. On the Way to
Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971. 1-54. Print.
---. Overcoming Metaphysics. The End of Philosophy. Trans. Joan Stambaugh Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 2003. 84-110. Print.
---. Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference. Trans. Kurt F. Leidecker New York: Philosophical
Library Inc. ,1960. Print.
Kojve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Trans. James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1969. Print.
Malabou, Catherine. The Heidegger Change. On the Fantastic in Philosophy. Trans. Peter Skafish Albany:
State University of New York P, 2011. Print.
Moreiras, Alberto. Infrapolitical Literature: Hispanism and the Border. The New Centennial Review
10.2 (Fall 2010): 183-203. Print.
---. The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.2
(2002) article 9. Print.
---. Infrapolitics and the Thriller. A Prolegomenon to Every Possible Form of Antimoralist Literary
Criticism. On Hector Aguilar Camin's La guerra de Galio and Morir en el golfo. Wd. Erin
Graff Zivin The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism. Reading Otherwise. New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. 147-79. Print.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage books Edition, 1979. Print.
Schrmann, Reiner. What Must I Do? at the End of Metaphysics: Ethical Norms and the
Hypothesis of a Historical Closure Phenomenology in a Pluralistic Context Selected Studies in
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy; 9. Ed.William L. McBride. New York: State U.P.,
1983. Print.
Trevanian. Shibumi. New York: Broadway Paperbacks. 2005. Print.
Notes
When I refer to infrapolitics or infrapolitical, I am referring to the work of Alberto Moreiras that introduced the
term in 2002 with the essay The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges, then developed it in Linea the Sombra
(2006) and in the following work in the sense that then became the center of the discussions of the collective research
project, The Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective that in 2014 started on the idea of the need to discuss the
legacies of deconstruction in contemporary thought and that incorporates many scholars from Europe, Latin America,
and the United States.
2 The expression actually refers to the title of Derrida's 1984 essay Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in
Philosophy.
3 See Freud Mourning and Melancholia, in particular pp. 256-257.
4 Here I am referring to Pierre Fontanier's definition of Catachresis quoted and discussed by Derrida in his essay
White Mythology: Metaphor in the text of philosophy. Catachresis, in general, consists in a sign already affected with
a first idea also being affected with a new idea, which itself had no sign at all, or no longer properly has any other in
language. Consequently, it is every Trope of forced and necessary usage, every Trope from which there results a purely
extensive sense; this literal, proper sense of secondary origin, intermediate between the primitive proper sense and the
figurative sense is closer to the first than to the second, although it could itself be figurative in principle (White 255)
An extensive discussion of tropology and the end of ontotheology would take me away from the focus of this essay even
though I recognize that it would be an important and necessary integration of the discourse here at stake.
5 See Derrida Letter 2. For a discussion on this text of Derrida, see Alberto Moreiras's contribution to this issue:
Infrapolitics: the Project and its Politics. Allegory and Denarrativization. A Note on Posthegemony.
6 See Heidegger's Overcoming Metaphysics 103-104.
7 It has to be noticed that, here and in other occasions, Derrida denies Heidegger access to such another opening of
event-ness referring to his epochal thinking.
8 On infrapolitics as relation to obscure ground see Moreiras' Infrapolitical Literature.
9 For a discussion of the political implication of Infrapolitics, see here Moreiras's Infrapolitics: the project and its
Politics
10 See Moreiras Infrapolitical Literature, The Villain, Infrapolitics and the Thriller.
1
El poema de la universidad: nihilismo e infrapoltica1

________________________________________________
SERGIO VILLALOBOS-RUMINOTT
UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS
No slo la poca, el modo de produccin general, no va
ms. Tal vez nunca hubo poca, salvo como ilusin y mito
desde una tecnologa singular cuyo marco comprensivo
organiza endgenamente la multiplicidad, nihilizndola bajo
un prinicpio comn o mediacin general.
Willy Thayer, Hacia un concepto heterocrnico de lo actual.2
Y quiero plantear la hiptesis fuerte de qu quiz slo un
pensar de la des-legacin pueda ser un pensar propiamente
democrtico y anti-subjetivista, en el sentido de que slo el
pensar de la des-legacin puede eventualmente lograr el
abandono de la estructura sacrificial de la historia. El legado,
incluso en su sentido ms autntico, como otorgador de una
simplicidad de destino, es creador de sacrificio y
entronizador de dolos.
Alberto Moreiras. Lnea de sombra.3
Introduccin
El objetivo principal de las siguientes pginas es presentar la nocin de infrapoltica
como una constelacin de pensamiento que no puede ser reducida, sin ser disciplinada, a
ningn campo acadmico o tradicin conceptual. Es decir, intentaremos pensar qu es la
infrapoltica no desde el punto de vista de su identidad conceptual o paradigmtica, sino en
cuanto gesto que interrumpe y pone en vilo a la misma lgica reproductiva del aparato
universitario, lgica tramada por la produccin de tradiciones y por la disputa en torno a
legados de pensamiento y formas de la herencia que autorizan y legitiman una determinada
lectura del mundo, o del qu hacer en el mundo, pues en dicha disputa universitaria se
juega la impotencia del pensamiento para trascender la voluntad de poder que lo
constituye y lo justifica en la moderna divisin social del trabajo.
En efecto, la infrapoltica no es ni una tradicin ni una poltica, sino un intento de
interrupcin de la oferta universitaria de teora (o de crtica de la teora), que no promete
107 | Villalobos-Ruminott, S. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)
un ms all ya articulado. Se trata de suspender la inercia del discurso universitario que tiende
a producirse como postulacin de una cierta lectura de lo real y del qu hacer en lo real; pero
suspender esta inercia no puede ser el resultado de una operacin crtica o categorial fuerte,
fundacional, articulada por la lgica de la ruptura y del nuevo comienzo, del ahora s por
fin con el que cada nuevo pensamiento accede a la escena de su bautizo universitario. Por el
contrario, esta interrupcin se da en el contexto de un cierto agotamiento de la modernidad
categorial, poltica e institucional, cuestin que nos exige ponderar cuidadosamente sus
mismas condiciones de emergencia para evitar convertirla en una etapa ms de la moderna
historia del pensamiento disciplinar. Sin esta cuidadosa consideracin, la interrogacin
infrapoltica quedara limitada a la condicin de reflejo negativo de la destruccin de la
metafsica, es decir, se la dejara inadvertidamente alojada en los departamentos de filosofa,
pero de una filosofa ya convertida en tradicin y legado. En este sentido, ms que una
escuela o paradigma, la infrapoltica es un nombre, una nocin, que apunta a una posibilidad
del pensamiento, siempre que este pensamiento est dispuesto a cuestionar radicalmente sus
propios procesos de constitucin, genricamente asociados con las lgicas de la valoracin
nihilista y con las polticas de la legacin, y por lo tanto, en cuanto nombre de una
posibilidad sin garantas, la infrapoltica es tambin un nombre que debe ser desechado antes
de convertirse en el ncleo de una nueva fantasa terica en el mercado universitario.
Por supuesto, en cuanto nombre ste no surge ex nihilo, sino que emerge desde una
compleja tradicin de pensamiento filosfico relacionada con los nombres de Martn
Heidegger y Jacques Derrida, con la destruccin de la metafsica y la deconstruccin del
logocentrismo occidental.4 No obstante lo anterior, la infrapoltica no intenta constituirse
como una re-elaboracin actual de viejas problemticas filosficas, precisamente porque no
se trata de ofrecer una versin actualizada de la filosofa como clave de acceso a lo real. No
siendo ni una teora sobre la poltica ni una filosofa sobre la historia, resistindose a devenir
paradigma o imagen de mundo, la interrogacin infrapoltica entonces ya no puede ser
organizada, sin mayor esfuerzo, en la historia convencional de los paradigmas, las escuelas o
los principios estructurantes de la historia del ser o del saber. Por el contrario, concebida ella
misma como un preguntar infinito e irrenunciable, la infrapoltica es tambin la pregunta por
el fin, por la finalidad de una poca en la que todava lo real puede ser categricamente
configurado o representado y, as, es una reflexin no solo sobre el fin de la metafsica, de la
razn, del sujeto, etc., sino tambin una pregunta por la finalidad misma del pensar. En
otras palabras, hablamos de un nombre para una situacin sin nombre, indita, situacin sta
que ya no puede ser organizada segn la historia del pensamiento, de las ideas o de los
principios hegemnicos de la historia del ser, pues como interrupcin, la infrapoltica supone
un cuestionamiento radical de los principios hegemnicos que organizan la inscripcin del
pensamiento en la filosofa y de la filosofa en la universidad.5
Antes de entreverarnos con lo que llamaremos el desplazamiento infrapoltico en
general y al interior de los estudios hispnicos, necesitamos abordar el problema de la
universidad y del discurso universitario en cuanto discurso ejemplar de lo que Jean-Luc
Nancy ha llamado principio de equivalencia.6 Solo mediante un cuestionamiento de dicho
principio indiferenciador, seremos capaces de diferenciar la infrapoltica de la compulsiva
escena terica universitaria caracterizada por la permanente produccin de marcos
tericos sucesivos. Para tal efecto, recurriremos al trabajo del filsofo chileno Willy Thayer a
quien debemos una problematizacin substantiva de la relacin entre neoliberalismo,
nihilismo y agotamiento de la crtica como forma moderna del discurso universitario. A
partir de ah, sostenemos, se hara posible pensar el desplazamiento infrapoltico sin restituir
los mecanismos que abastecen la inslita plasticidad del nihilismo para regenerarse,
permanentemente, incluso en la crtica orientada a su superacin.
El principio de equivalencia
En una serie de trabajos que resumen, tal vez demasiado escuetamente, su revisin
de la ontologa heideggeriana, Jean-Luc Nancy ha propuesto continuar su indagacin sobre
el ser singular-plural en trminos de una crtica del principio de equivalencia como elemento
caracterstico de una cierta actualidad del capitalismo y de la democracia.7 Permtasenos
pensar la proposicin de dicho principio como definicin de un verosmil epocal:
La democracia puede tender as a convertirse en el nombre de una equivalencia ms general
an que la referida por Marx: fines, medios, valores, sentidos, acciones, obras y personas,
todos intercambiables, por no tener ninguna relacin con nada que pueda distinguirlos, por
estar relacionados con un intercambio que, lejos de ser un reparto segn la riqueza propia
de esa palabra, no es ms que sustitucin de los roles o permutacin de los lugares. (La
verdad, 44)
Lo que est en juego ac no es solo la homologacin de capitalismo y democracia, aspiracin
fundamental de la tradicin liberal, sino la reduccin de la misma democracia a un rgimen
de intercambio generalizado, cuestin que obviamente debilitara el imaginario democrtico

moderno, articulado por las figuras de la libertad y la igualdad. Sobre todo porque la
intercambiabilidad absoluta reposa en una equivalencia generalizada que no es, ella misma,
equivalente con el horizonte poltico de la igualdad. En la diferencia entre equivalencia e
igualdad se juega, entonces, el destino de la democracia, pues la equivalencia general no debe
ser entendida como una degradacin de la identidad o de la especificidad de los valores, sino
como el predomino absoluto y ampliado de la valoracin capitalista, respecto del cual la
democracia es una forma sin fuerza, un simple procedimiento regulativo de las diversas
transacciones ya sometidas a la equivalencialidad. En tal caso, la crtica del principio de
equivalencia es fundamental para liberar el destino de la democracia, pues dicho destino ya
est plenamente cado al rgimen del intercambio planetario:
El destino de la democracia est ligada a la posibilidad de un cambio del paradigma de la
equivalencia. Introducir una nueva inequivalencia que no sea, desde luego, la de la
dominacin econmica (cuyo fondo sigue siendo la equivalencia), la de las feudalidades y las
aristocracias, la de los regmenes de eleccin divina y salvacin, y tampoco la de las
espiritualidades, los herosmos o los esteticismos: este es el desafo. No ser cuestin de
introducir otro sistema de valores diferenciales: se tratar de encontrar, de conquistar, un
sentido de la evaluacin, de la afirmacin evaluadora que le da a cada gesto evaluador
decisin de existencia, de obra, de portela posibilidad de no ser medido de antemano por
un sistema dado, sino, al contrario, ser en cada oportunidad la afirmacin de un valor o
un sentidonico, incomparable, insustituible. Slo esto puede desplazar la supuesta
dominacin econmica, que no es ms que el efecto de la decisin fundamental por la
equivalencia. (La verdad, 44-45)
En tal caso, resulta en extremo relevante determinar, en este prrafo, la continuidad del
proyecto filosfico de Nancy marcado por la modulacin de la destruccin heideggeriana de
la ontologa clsica y por la proposicin de una concepcin singular de la diferencia
ontolgica, articulada por el carcter constitutivo de la historicidad del ser, en el mundo y
con otros, junto a la aparente insinuacin de una cierta diferencia epocal marcada por la
preponderancia de la equivalencia general, constituida como un principio que vendra a
ejercer, en la larga historia de la metafsica y ya ms all de Marx y su crtica del intercambio
capitalista, algo as como una acentuacin o radicalizacin del mismo capitalismo como
forma universalizada de la equivalencia y que convertira a la democracia en una forma vaca.
El predomino de la equivalencia como principio epocal marcara entonces un momento

revolucionario al interior del capitalismo, momento ste que antes que remitir a una
superacin de la lgica capitalista de valoracin, supone su intensificacin, es decir, supone
una revolucin propiamente capitalista. Lo que constituye nuestra actualidad, por lo tanto,
no es el capitalismo clsico articulado en trminos de subsuncin formal o universalizacin
de los valores burgueses, sino el capitalismo como realizacin de la subsuncin real o total de
la vida al capital y predomino de la equivalencia como dispositivo inherente a la valoracin
capitalista, es decir, el problema no radica en la suspensin de la democracia sino en su
irrelevancia o vaciamiento procedimental. As, la equivalencia es una indiferenciacin radical
donde todo comparece a la medida del intercambio, pues el intercambio automatizado
operara homogeneizando las singularidades que pueblan el mundo, en trminos de recursos
y valor agregado.
De manera complementaria, en una pequea intervencin titulada Despus de
Fukushima. La equivalencia de las catstrofes, dedicada a pensar el estatuto de Fukushima, el
accidente nuclear que sigui al ltimo gran terremoto en Japn (2011), Nancy extrema la
reflexin sobre el principio de equivalencia preguntndose por la singularidad radical o
inequivalencia de las catstrofes modernas, naturales o no, en trminos no solo de su
fenomenologa sino de lo que ponen en juego: ya no solo un accidente que amenaza al
gnero humano con la muerte como fenmeno empricamente acotable, sino una catstrofe
que cada vez ms se manifiesta como posibilidad de la misma devastacin de la humanidad.
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima, son nombre singulares, no intercambiables, de
una historia en reverso de la modernizacin capitalista, y en ellos se cifra la consecuencia
brutal del nihilismo contemporneo, a saber, la indiferenciacin equivalencial de toda
experiencia segn la lgica de convertibilidad del valor cambiario. La equivalencia de las
catstrofes es ya la catstrofe, esto es, el hecho de que stas pierdan su singularidad,
naturalizndose, rutinizndose, volvindose parte de un horizonte de posibilidades que las
contiene, homologndolas. Al hacer de la catstrofe una posibilidad permanente, recurrente
y homognea, la poca actual, el presente, se distinguira de otras pocas histricas porque
[n]inguna otra cultura ha vivido como nuestra cultura moderna en la interminable
acumulacin de archivos y expectativas. Ninguna cultura se ha hecho presente el pasado y el
futuro hasta el punto de borrar del presente su propia condicin de pasaje. Todas las otras
culturas, por el contrario, han sabido cmo tener cuidado al aproximarse a una presencia
singular (After Fukushima 40). As, si el capitalismo es el rgimen de la equivalencia

generalizada, su opuesto, segn Nancy, sera el comunismo de la inequivalencia(41), es
decir, no la intercambiabilidad universal, sino todo lo contrario, el comienzo de la
democracia debera ser pensado solo desde la igualdad de los inconmensurables:
singularidades que no corresponden a individuos o grupos sociales sino a apariciones
eventuales, llegadas y salidas, voces, tonosaqu y ahora, en cada momento(41).
Hasta ah todo bien, es decir, la globalizacin como mundializacin no solo
conllevara la latinizacin o predomino del cristianismo como religin universal, sino
tambin el predomino de la forma de vida hegemnica en la historia occidental, en cuanto
cristalizacin onto-teo-antropolgica de la historia como historia del poder y la dominacin.8
La mundializacin aparecera entonces como inauguracin de una epocalidad en la cual el
olvido de la pregunta por el ser, su sentido o su verdad, habra llegado a su mxima
expresin, lo que implica asumir dicha epocalidad como realizacin de la metafsica. Esta
realizacin de la metafsica, entonces, radicaliza la condicin sacrificial del capitalismo,
llevando a la humanidad hasta el extremo de la auto-destruccin. Sin embargo, hay dos
elementos que deben ser problematizados en esta argumentacin:
1) Primero, la posible continuidad con el tono modernista del Manifiesto comunista, en
el que se describe la revolucin burguesa como una aceleracin de la temporalidad que
transvolara todos los valores tradicionales, sometindolos al mercado mundial. Por
supuesto, en Nancy dicho tono modernista con el que Marshal Berman, por ejemplo, ley el
pensamiento de Marx,9 queda neutralizado o desplazado, pero su postulacin del principio
de equivalencia no puede esconder su relacin analtica con la crtica marxista, incluso a
pesar de que el mismo Nancy estipule que la equivalencia actual sera distinta de la sealada
por Marx, pues la equivalencia marxista pareciera darse a nivel de la produccin y del trabajo,
no a nivel de la forma de vida capitalista ahora globalizada. En este sentido, habra que
problematizar, ms all de Nancy, la condicin ontolgica del anlisis del capitalismo en
Marx, es decir, distinguir el alcance de su aparato categorial respecto de sus modulaciones
histricamente acotadas (las diversas formulaciones del materialismo histrico), pues de esta
manera, podramos argumentar, la crtica de la teora del valor de cambio ya parece contener
una consideracin sobre la equivalencia como condicin histrica-ontolgica de la sociedad
moderna. De ser as, el predominio del principio de equivalencia postulado por Nancy sera
una traduccin filosfica desatenta de la formulacin marxista sobre el paso desde la
subsuncin formal a la subsuncin real, como condicin de la valoracin y la circulacin

ampliada del capital, en un contexto donde predominan formas flexibles de acumulacin y la
combinacin axiomtica de extraccin de plusvala absoluta y relativa.10 En otras palabras, se
trata de preguntarnos hasta qu punto la concepcin del ser singular-plural, como
inequivalencia fundante del comunismo, no est ya contenida, y por tanto, histricamente
datada, en la formulacin de Marx. Pero, por supuesto, no se trata de desacreditar el
trabajo reflexivo de Nancy, sino de pensar la pertinencia de su ontologa singular-plural en el
contexto de un modo de produccin capitalista globalizado que ya no funciona segn las
edades de la metafsica, sino como un collage de diversas temporalidades que se acoplan en
una intercambiabilidad sin prinicpio.
2) En tal caso, necesitamos interrogar la postulacin de este principio de equivalencia
generalizada como verosmil epocal, lectura o imagen de mundo, pues en tanto que tal,
la crtica de Nancy no lograra sustraerse del mismo horizonte principial que organiza la
historia del ser o del acaecer segn determinados principios hegemnicos. Es decir, en la
pulsin que comanda la necesidad de producir una crtica de la equivalencia habita no tanto
la condicin desesperada de la respuesta dada por Nancy (digamos, su inespecfica
invocacin del comunismo), sino la inseminacin de un cierto estado de la cuestin que
funciona como verosmil sobre el que se ejerce el pensamiento como crtica. Si el
comunismo de las singularidades in-equivalentes es pensable, lo es como anverso del
principio general de equivalencia, pero ah mismo dicho principio funciona como
diagnstico del nihilismo de la intercambiabilidad infinita, y, a la vez, como efecto de la
misma nihilizacin producida por esa economa principial. En otras palabras, si hay
equivalencia general no hay principio, pues la condicin de generalidad de esa equivalencia,
digamos la universalidad fctica del intercambio capitalista, supone no una concepcin molar
o epocal sobre la que la crtica operara restituyendo una identidad o una singularidad (y con
Nancy ambas palabras son opuestas), sino su condicin radicalmente axiomtica. En este
sentido, el comunismo de la inequivalencia es un reflejo de la misma construccin del
principio de equivalencia, es decir, una proyeccin utpica basada en una crtica del
nihilismo todava rigidizado por la cuestin de la edad del ser, de la epocalidad. Para ir
ms all de estas generalidades, y exculpando a Nancy de ellas, esta interrogacin nos debe
llevar hacia la reformulacin de la pregunta por la tcnica y por el humanismo, por la
universidad y por la filosofa, segn una concepcin del nihilismo advertida de su propia
plasticidad. Es decir, necesitamos repensar el problema de la equivalencia generalizada como

nihilismo, pero ah mismo, necesitamos pensar el nihilismo ya no segn el esquema de la
epocalidad del ser y ms all de la dialctica entre destruccin de la metafsica y metafsica de
la destruccin.11
Nihilismo, universidad, heterocrona
En una serie de trabajos que arrancan desde su temprana consideracin sobre la
crisis de la moderna crisis universitaria, segn las transformaciones de la universidad
actual, hasta sus reflexiones sobre el nihilismo contemporneo y sobre las Tecnologas de la
crtica, Willy Thayer ha venido elaborando una sutil reflexin sobre el nihilismo como
condicin de partida para pensar la contemporaneidad, ya no desde una ontologa temporal
fuerte y diacrnica, sino desde una anacrona heterotpica que se expresa en la flexibilidad
no solo del patrn de acumulacin del capitalismo contemporneo, sino en su correlato
universitario: el curriculum flexible de la universidad neoliberal, capaz de incorporar (y
debilitar) cualquier contenido que se resista a la universalizacin fctica de la lengua mayor
universitaria, pues esta misma lengua se habra pluralizado infinitamente para captar, de
manera flexible, las tonalidades de las diversas lenguas madres, provinciales y subalternas. En
su texto La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna (1996) ya se nos advierte que la
caracterstica de la crisis actual es su inactualidad, el hecho de que, como tal, sta no constituya
presente y por tanto, ocurra ya siempre como debilitamiento de la institucin categorial de
relevo destinada a refundar su dinmica ntima. Crisis de la crisis, en la medida en que no
hay crtica que logre superar dicha situacin mediante una institucin categorial sustituta: La
caracterstica de la crisis actual radicara en la imposibilidad de una nueva, ms moderna y
progresista institucin de relevo. En este sentido la crisis actual habra que nombrarla como
crisis de la crisis moderna tal como se haba venido dando hasta ahora (36). En este
sentido, si la historia del pensamiento universitario poda ser articulado, modernamente,
como una cadena cuyos diversos eslabones paradigmticos emergan de la dialctica entre
crisis y crtica (crtica kantiana, dialctica, crtica de la economa poltica, genealoga,
psicoanlisis, teora crtica, estructuralismo, etc.), la indiferenciacin producida por la plena
articulacin de la valoracin capitalista no solo se expresara en la imposibilidad de platear un
afuera de la circulacin (pues ste sera rpidamente incorporado o valorado como diferencia
y, as, indiferenciado en la pintoresca etnografa culturalista contempornea), sino en la
imposibilidad de marcar una preponderancia paradigmtica desde la cual leer el mundo y la

misma historia fallida de los paradigmas anteriores.
En efecto, en la cadena de sustituciones y legados propios del discurso universitario
moderno, cada nuevo eslabn se legitimaba no solo en la disputa de una herencia, sino
tambin en la reivindicacin de su pertinencia como lectura del mundo. La historia de las
disciplinas universitarias no es sino la historia de esta permanente sucesin. Sin embargo, el
debilitamiento o nihilizacin de la crtica moderna no se presentara como imposibilidad de
crtica, sino como su proliferacin sin hegemona. El problema actual no consiste entonces
en la ausencia de aparatos categoriales pertinentes para dar cuenta de una forma indita de
facticidad relativa al agotamiento de la arquitectnica moderna, con sus economas de saber y
de organizacin nmico-territorial, sino en la ausencia de una institucin categorial
(disciplina, escuela) lo suficientemente fuerte como para dar cuenta de las dems. La
indiferenciacin no opera por homogeneizacin, sino por proliferacin sin meta-texto. En
otras palabras, el problema no sera la carencia de teora, sino su abundancia, pero se tratara
de una abundancia sin potencia, de un poder de diagnstico y de metaforizacin sin
reflexividad, es decir, de una forma del acaecer sin acontecimentalidad, de una eventualidad
sin experiencia.12 As lo plantea Thayer en un texto posterior:
El da en que el trabajo intelectual ingres en la era de la reproduccin tcnica,
desauratizndose 1) en la filosofa universitaria, informando con precisin sobre la historia
de los arjai; 2) o poniendo a trabajar los cdigos reflexivos en la restitucin empresarial
maximizante; 3) o en la restitucin de la transicin en la totalidad kitsch del poema; ese da la
distancia crtica, la pregunta por el sentido, se convirti en trabajo fsico, indiferenciado de
la accin misma. (157)13
Ese da no es una referencia vaga, sino un da clave con un ensamblaje empricotrascendental: por un lado, es un da inmemorial, como el da aquel en que los hombres
habran firmado el contrato social, da entonces que hace posible el orden sin pertenecer al
orden, da en el que arranca la historia sin ser un da de la historia; pero, por otro lado,
tambin es un da bien especfico, es el martes 11 de septiembre de 1973, da del golpe de
Estado en Chile y momento inaugural de un nuevo rgimen soberano que terminara por
diluir a la misma soberana en un excepcionalidad vuelta regla y cotidianidad, ms all de la
comunidad nacional y su nomos, precipitada en la globalizacin como realizacin de la
intercambiabilidad generalizada. Ese da, da inmemorial y da efectivo, es el da no solo en
que la divisin social del trabajo pierde potencia y se produce un proceso general de
indiferenciacin, de abolicin de la distancia crtica, de la misma relacin entre trabajo
material e inmaterial, sino tambin es el da desde el cual ya no sera posible seguir
sosteniendo la diferencia entre crtica y facticidad, modernismo y modernizacin, capitalismo
y democracia. En efecto, hasta ahora Thayer lee la configuracin nihilista del valor capitalista
como realizacin no solo de la circulacin planetaria, sin afuera, precipitada por la
globalizacin cuyo Big Bang habra sido el golpe, sino tambin lee en ella la verdadera
transicin experimentada por la universidad, el Estado y la nacin no como aquella
transicin promovida y festejada por las ciencias sociales (la transicin formal a la
democracia de los aos 1990), sino como la transicin desde una epocalidad histrica
marcada por las figuras de la autonoma, la soberana, la territorialidad y la subjetividad, hacia
una instancia en que ya no habra ms epocalidad, cuestin que hara imposible restituir la
crtica como crtica del presente, pues la transicin que ese da inmemorial hizo posible fue la
transicin como fin del movimiento moderno de restitucin, cuestin que imposibilita, de
paso, la reconfiguracin de las instituciones categoriales relacionadas con la universidad
moderna, con la facultad de filosofa y con el conflicto de las facultades. En el libro sobre la
crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna, Thayer lo dice con una cierta fuerza que
deberemos interrogar:
La transicin como pasaje de la era de la subsuncin formal del capital, a la era de la
subsuncin real del capital, abolira la divisin social del trabajo, la lucha de clases, el
conflicto de las facultades, la diferencia trabajo fsico-ejecutivo, trabajo intelectual-crtico,
poniendo en jaque la teora moderna de la revolucin e instalndose como inmovilidad
definitiva. Un capitalismo sin Estado, sin lucha de clases, sin revolucin. La transicin,
entonces, como final capitalista de la historia de la divisin social del trabajo, donde el
capitalismo es lo que se queda y la revolucin lo que se va. (177)
Lo que necesitamos cuestionar es, entonces, no la diferencia entre la transicin nticopoltica festejada y fetichizada por los discursos transitolgicos en Amrica Latina, sino el
estatuto mismo del pasaje desde la subsuncin formal a la subsuncin real. Aqu, lo que
resulta en extremo relevante es la alteracin radical de las categoras constitutivas de la
moderna teora del valor capitalista, pues dicho pasaje hace posible pensar la configuracin
de lo que Marx llam el modo propiamente capitalista de produccin, no como una configuracin
homognea y unidimensional, sino como una incorporacin de la dimensin heterocrnica
en el corazn de la filosofa de la historia del capital. El modo de produccin propiamente

capitalista no es un modo de produccin sino la comparecencia de todos los modos
analticamente diferenciados, de todos los tiempos tericamente postulados, de todos los
regmenes de sentido histricamente sostenidos, ya no en un tiempo homogneo y vaco,
sino en una temporalidad heterclita que hace inviable no solo la operacin de la crtica
tradicional (como crtica del presente), sino incluso nos obliga a pensar la relacin entre
nihilismo y valor ms all de las nociones fuertes que marcaron la crtica epocal del nihilismo
en la filosofa contempornea. Incluyendo en esto la misma idea de un principio general de
equivalencia siempre que se quiera as mismo como rendimiento de una articulacin
principial del sentido.
Este es el plano de consistencia en que se instala el nihilismo, como tecnologas
diversas de la crtica, ya no universalizables, sino ensambladas en distintos regmenes de
produccin de valor, ya no decodificables analticamente segn un esquema unitario. No
solo la crtica como prctica ilustrada no va ms, no solo la pregunta por el presente no va
ms, no solo la promesa ideolgica de un tiempo mejor no va ms, sino que la misma
concepcin del nihilismo como crisis y agotamiento de los valores, no va ms:14
Bajo este encuadre, las crticas del nihilismo como proclamacin de acciones y gestos
vanguardistas contra el nihilismo, la afirmacin de una voluntad antagnica que superara el
nihilismo cruzando su lnea, los gestos crticos soberanos, fundacionales o consulares,
abastecen las tecnologas de su equipamiento. Tales gestos y acciones contaran
incautamente, como presupuesto suyo, con el nihilismo, abastecindolo. La crtica incauta
del nihilismo, no experimenta que su posibilidad recin comienza a activarse cuando se ha
comprendido que la crtica, exaltada desde hace mucho, es la ms tenaz enemiga de la crtica.
Nada crtico se opera en la reafirmacin de la negatividad, que es resorte del nihilismo. Ni la
crtica progresista, ni la voluntad terica de la crtica, constituyen chance alguna contra el
nihilismo. Porque viven del nihilismo y se adhieren a l como uno ms de sus pliegues,
abasteciendo su tecnologa. La posibilidad de la crtica est suspendida para cualquier
actividad que se plantea en trminos de superacin, de una autonoma discursiva del
nihilismo, o de la restauracin de una presunta realidad ms all de su horizonte. Ms bien, la
chance nihilista es la que se activa cuando sus impugnadores lo hacen en trminos de
vencimiento, superacin y fundacin de otros horizontes de sentido y presencia, o en
nombre de la movilizacin. O cuando comprenden incautamente el nombre consumacin
como fin absoluto de la representacin. El crtico incauto abraza el nihilismo al enfrentarlo

en la tonalidad vanguardista de producir quiebres, cortes significativos respecto de l.
(Thayer Hacia un concepto heterocrnico de lo actual, 208-9)
Cmo pensar el nihil sin abastecerlo?,15 se pregunta entonces Thayer, y esa pregunta nos alcanza
en toda la gravedad de su formulacin, toda vez que la posibilidad de un pensamiento que
suspenda la lgica soberana del discurso universitario y la demanda permanente de ofertas
polticas, deber entreverarse, desde siempre, con la misma plasticidad del nihilismo para
recomenzar en cada intento de superacin, de desplazamiento, de crtica, de abandono. Pues
el nihilismo no sera una concepcin dbil, negativa, infundada de la existencia, sino su
condicin material. No una superestructura o un epifenmeno con respecto al sentido de la
pregunta por el ser, sino la pregunta por el ser en su trnsito a travs del tiempo mltiple y
descentrado de la realizacin de la metafsica como articulacin del modo de produccin
propiamente capitalista.16 El poema de la universidad no es sino el montaje heterocrnico de
sus diversos regmenes de saber, sin preponderancia, sin hegemona, en una suerte de collage
sin bordes, donde todo se inscribe, indiferencindose. Pero, la posibilidad de suspender el
nihil del poema universitario no reside en su superacin, incautamente nihilizante, a partir de
postular una nueva imagen de mundo, una nueva filosofa o teora poltica, un nuevo
comienzo o una refundacin de cualquier campo profesional, sino en la consideracin de
esta transformacin del nihilismo ms all de la restitucin del valor que vale ms, del valor
ms verdadero. Este es, precisamente, el tipo de problemas que caracterizan a la constelacin
infrapoltica, y para los cuales no hay soluciones ni respuestas, sino cuidadosa consideracin
e infinita reflexividad.
Infrapoltica y des-legacin
Lo que se desprende entonces de dicho desplazamiento es la proposicin de un
concepto de nihilismo no homologable con la concepcin estndar o tradicional, pues ms
all de la problemtica del fundamento y del valor, lo que caracterizara al nihilismo
contemporneo sera su condicin flexible y axiomtica respecto de la cual ni la crtica como
juicio ni la crtica como distancia funcionaran como alternativas efectivas, sin activar, a su
vez, los mismos mecanismos restitutivos de la nihilizacin contempornea. En la pregunta
cmo pensar el nihil sin abastecerlo?, se pone en juego la suspensin de los discursos del
vencimiento y de la voluntad, de la accin, la decisin y la afirmacin activa, pero tambin se
nos permite problematizar la misma idea de superacin tal y como se usa en las consignas
superacin del problema, superacin del nihilismo y superacin de la metafsica. Pues
la misma superacin reinstala el mecanismo constitutivo del nihilismo, articulado por las
figuras de la afirmacin, el vencimiento, la victoria o el valor. Gracias a este desplazamiento,
se hace necesario pensar la infrapoltica ya no de acuerdo con la filosofa o la teora poltica
convencional, pero tampoco de acuerdo con las figuras afirmativas (nihilistas) de la
politicidad, de la hegemona y de la lucha por el poder, pues en todas ellas se relanza la
misma condicin nihilista de la razn principial que funda, da razn y da cuenta, de la
actividad poltica.
Cmo pensar la infrapoltica sin confundirla con una versin (ella misma nihilista)
pasiva del nihilismo, como si la infrapoltica fuera una poltica de la derrota, del abandono,
pero, a la vez, sin convertirla en una nueva afirmacin, un nuevo principio, una nueva
imagen de mundo con implicaciones ticas y prcticas? Sobre todo porque en esta
demanda de sentido se reducira la infrapoltica al principio de razn que abastece a la misma
captura metafsica de la poltica, convirtindola en rendimiento de la nihilizacin. En ltima
instancia, ms que una superacin, crtica o transvaloracin, 17 la infrapoltica
interrumpira, esa su apuesta, al nihilismo sin abastecerlo, esto es, sin dotarlo de un nuevo
verosmil, invitndonos a habitar en ese umbral de indecidibilidad donde la soberana de la
poltica y de la accin, junto a la axiomtica del valor, quedan interrumpidas.
Como advertamos al principio, es el trabajo reflexivo de Alberto Moreiras el que
marca una escena fundamental al interior de esta constelacin, pero sera errneo presentar o
intentar resumir dicho pensamiento, como si estuvisemos determinando una fuente, un
legado o una referencia. Se trata de un trabajo que no se inscribe cmodamente en el orden
universitario y que, a pesar de surgir especficamente en el campo de estudios
hispanoamericanos, no se reduce ni a un problema de campo ni a una poltica de
refundacin paradigmtica. Entonces, lo que muchos de nosotros compartimos no es solo
esta precaucin con respecto a la flexibilidad del nihilismo, a la ampliacin de la valoracin y
al poema kitsch de la universidad actual, sino tambin una cierta desazn con respecto a la
misma proliferacin incauta de formas de pensar la poltica y la relacin entre teora y
prctica, todava inscritas en el repertorio nihilista del saber contemporneo. De la misma
manera, y quizs porque aqu est en juego una cuestin ms obvia y ms directamente
poltica, la relacin con el pensamiento que problematiza el fin de la metafsica resulta
relevante para este colectivo porque nos permite confrontarnos con una serie de condiciones
que definen algo as como el estado del hispanismo universitario o de los estudios de rea
asociados con esta lengua y tradicin. Siguiendo una serie de variables que ya aparecen en el
temprano trabajo de Moreiras,18 podramos coincidir en los siguientes puntos:
El agotamiento del paradigma asociado con los estudios culturales (con la ciencia de la
cultura y las ideas).
La necesidad de una historia crtica de las izquierdas occidentales, en particular de la

izquierda latinoamericana, y de su presente.
La insatisfaccin con las pragmticas y las formas del humanismo y la solidaridad

dominantes en el discurso intelectual, con las ontologas pluriversales y con las inversiones
valorativas al interior de la metafsica que operan como vernacularizacin de la otredad (Identity
Politics, postcolonialismo y delinking decolonial, etc.).
La necesaria crtica de la domesticacin de la deconstruccin que habra ocurrido en su

historia americana universitaria, ms all de si se trata de una traicin o si dicha
domesticacin est posibilitada por cierta complicidad del mismo Derrida.
La necesaria problematizacin del marranismo en el horizonte del subalternismo como

eslabn silenciado y sobre-codificado por el humanismo intrnseco a la intelligentsia
latinoamericanista e hispanista, pues el marranismo como forma no identitaria de la
existencia, nos abre hacia la interrogacin cosmopoltica ms all de la moderna geopoltica
imperial.19
La necesidad de avanzar en la constitucin de un horizonte problemtico articulado por la

relacin entre post-hegemona como forma aprincipial de la poltica e infrapoltica, como
reflexin sobre la existencia ms all de la demanda poltica.
A partir de estos elementos, que de ninguna manera constituyen ni un diagnstico ni un
programa, se perfila entonces un trabajo intelectual constelado mondicamente en diversas
intensidades. Una de tantas es la que me permite pensar la infrapoltica como interrupcin o
desistencia de la valoracin y as, como inversin del parntesis fenomenolgico que pone al
mundo en suspenso, para poner al nihilismo en una epoj puntual. No hay salida del
nihilismo, pero el nihilismo tampoco constituye una interioridad homognea, sino que est
constituido por pliegues y mesetas en las cuales siempre se reproduce y siempre puede ser
interrumpido.
Bibliografa
Berman, Marshal. Todo lo slido se desvanece en el aire. La experiencia de la modernidad. Mxico D.F.:
Siglo XXI, 2001. Impreso.
Marx, Karl. Resultados inmediatos del proceso de produccin (Captulo VI, indito). Mxico D.F.: Siglo
XXI, 1971. Impreso.
Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche I. Barcelona: Destino, 2000. Impreso.
Moreiras, Alberto. Tercer espacio. Literatura y duelo en Amrica Latina. Santiago: ARCIS-LOM,
1999. Impreso.
_____. The Exhaustion of Difference. The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001. Impreso.
_____. Lnea de sombra. El no sujeto de lo poltico. Santiago: Palinodia, 2006. Impreso.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. La creacin del mundo o la mundializacin. Madrid: Paids Ibrica, 2003.
Impreso.
_____. La verdad de la democracia. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 2009. Impreso.
_____. Ser singular plural. Buenos Aires: Arena, 2010. Impreso.
_____. After Fukushima. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Impreso.
Nancy, Jean-Luc y Jean-Christophe Bailly. La comparecencia. Madrid: Avarigani editores, 2014.
Impreso.
Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology. Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2006. Impreso.
Schrmann, Reiner. Broken Hegemonies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Impreso.
Thayer, Willy. La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna (Eplogo del conflicto de las facultades).
Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1996. Impreso.
_____. El fragmento repetido. Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2006. Impreso.
_____. Crtica, nihilismo e interrupcin. El fragmento repetido. Santiago: Metales Pesados,
2006. 47-94. Impreso.
_____. Fin del trabajo intelectual. El fragmento repetido. Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2006.
135-61. Impreso.
_____. Tecnologas de la crtica. Entre Walter Benjamin y Gilles Deleuze. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto
Propio, 2010. Impreso.
_____. Hacia un concepto heterocrnico de lo actual. Contemporaneidad(es). Ed. Ramn
Ramos et. al. Madrid: Sequitur, 2012. S/P. Impreso.


Notas
1Quisiera
reconocer el intercambio permanente con los miembros del colectivo deconstruccin infrapoltica, con el
seminario dirigido por Alberto Moreiras durante el semestre de primavera del ao en curso, y con Luis Garca
en particular, pues todo pensamiento, toda inspiracin, no es sino una impostacin del dilogo y su don.
2 Jos Gandarilla, Ramn Ramos y Guadalupe Valencia (Coords). Contemporaneidad(es), 2012. 197-232. Pgina
217.
3 Alberto Moreiras, Lnea de sombra, 2006, pgina 29.
4 Y ms all de esos monumentos referenciales del pensamiento moderno, habra que sealar el uso especfico
que esta nocin ha adquirido en el trabajo de Alberto Moreiras desde comienzos del actual milenio, como
puede confirmarse en una serie difcilmente citable de textos e intervenciones, adems del ya referido libro
Lnea de sombra. Desde hace un ao, ms o menos, funciona tambin el colectivo deconstruccin infrapoltica como
grupo cerrado en Facebook y como blog pbico en Wordpress (https://infrapolitica.wordpress.com), donde se
realizan discusiones sostenidas de temas relevantes y donde cada miembro puede y debe aportar con sus
intensidades y ritmos especficos. En ese sentido, aun cuando el trabajo reflexivo de Moreiras es inaugural, no
constituye legado en la medida en que no solo l se resiste a ser considerado como tal, sino tambin porque la
misma organizacin del grupo hace imposible hipostasiar al mismo grupo en trminos de una unidad de
discurso o de una operacin crtica sustantiva.
5 Por supuesto, lo que est en juego en esta afirmacin es la relacin con el trabajo de Reiner Schrmann,
particularmente su Broken Hegemonies (2003), donde se desarrolla una crtica an-archeolgica destinada a
suspender la razn principial como forma de organizacin de la historia del ser y del pensar sobre el ser que ha
caracterizado a la metafsica como tradicin y legado. La imposibilidad de restituir un nuevo principio
hegemnico, sin embargo, no nos lleva automticamente a habitar lo que sera un territorio post-metafsico,
sino que nos precipita en un horizonte general asociado con el fin, la finalidad y la misma realizacin de la
metafsica, respecto de la cual no es posible calcular, estimar, segn los criterios de la concepcin vulgar de la
temporalidad, un momento posterior. En tal caso, en cuanto reflexin a-principial, la infrapoltica no es una
promesa sobre el fin, o sobre lo que viene despus del fin de la metafsica, sino un habitar en el horizonte de su
finalidad, cuando sta se realiza y despliega planetariamente, como Razn Imperial (Pax Americana), como
capitalismo global (subsuncin real), o como telemtica (convergencia de metafsica e informtica).
6 La verdad de la democracia, 2009. After Fukushima, 2015.
7 Junto a los ya citados, habra que mencionar Ser singular plural (2010) y La comparecencia (2014).
8 Ver de Nancy, La creacin del mundo o la mundializacin, 2003.
9 El objetivo de Marshal Berman es, precisamente recuperar a Marx desde los discursos econmicos y societales
y mostrar el modernismo de su prosa y de su relacin con el presente, hacindolo parte de la reaccin crtica a
la modernizacin capitalista que puede leerse como re-actualizacin romntica en el espritu de las vanguardias.
Ver, Todo lo slido se desvanece en el aire, 2001. A pesar de la aparente convergencia en las diatribas anti-mercantiles
que pueblan al manifiesto, Berman sigue pensando contra el capitalismo desde el punto de vista de un cierto
valor de la experiencia modernista, lo que le permitira oponer al discurso socio-econmico uno cultural o
artstico. En Nancy, el principio de equivalencia opera a un nivel ms radical pues ya antes de la posible
oposicin entre modernizacin y modernismo, el valor cambiario de la equivalencia se ha articulado como
actualidad.
10 De ah la centralidad de El capital y del famoso Captulo VI, Indito. Resultados inmediatos del proceso de produccin,
1971.
11 Para poner en suspenso dicha dialctica necesitamos cuestionar, permanentemente, la misma lgica del
discurso que tiende producir un efecto inseminador a pesar de su vocacin diseminadora. En este sentido, la
destruccin de la metafsica arriesga siempre quedar convertida, subsumida, a la metafsica de la destruccin en
tanto que discurso y promesa de un cierto fin, de una cierta finalidad de la misma metafsica. Entonces, no
deberamos confundir la suspensin de dicha dialctica con los discursos contemporneos sobre el fin de la
filosofa en los que, paradjicamente, se adivina una forma incauta de filosofar, prxima al nihilismo y su
arsenal volitivo, rupturista, refundacional.
12 Un ejemplo de esta transferencia sin densidad y de est reduccin de la experiencia a informacin est dada
por el paso desde el taller a la sala de clases como prctica distintiva del ingreso de las artes visuales a la
universidad, y de la universidad a la poca de su privatizacin telemtica. Con esto, Thayer diagnostica la
situacin de las artes visuales en Chile, pero no para determinar sus posibilidades, sino para debilitar las
operaciones vanguardistas de la crtica que siguen pensado el potencial rupturista del arte, su innovacin, como
una forma viable de poltica esttica. Vase, Crtica, nihilismo e interrupcin, en: El Fragmento repetido, 2006.

Fin del trabajo intelectual, en El fragmento repetido, 157
Y si el nihilismo ya no tiene que ver con la decadencia de los valores tradicionales, como en el discurso
conservador de Carl Schmitt, donde el liberalismo aparece como corrosin de la soberana y del fundamento
teolgico de la autoridad y del poder poltico, entonces, tampoco la crtica del nihilismo en nombre de un valor,
una autoridad, un poder ms verdadero, puede escapar la plasticidad inherente del nihilismo, que se
expresara no en la ausencia, sino en la proliferacin descentrada de valores, es decir, en la ampliacin y
multidimensionalidad de la valoracin segn el modo de produccin propiamente capitalista, que ya no
constituye poca, principio o presencia, sino comparecencia y contemporaneidad de todos los registros. As, la
crtica del liberalismo como nihilismo es ella misma, en Schmitt, expresin de una ansiedad nihilista. Ver Carl
Schmitt, Political Theology, 2006.
15 De hecho, esta pregunta parafrasea un texto de Thayer preparado para una conferencia sobre anacrona y
montaje en Benjamin y Brecht, el ao 2007, que podra ser considerado como una versin preliminar de su
texto Hacia un concepto heterocrnico de lo actual.
16 Lo que nos demanda, cuestin imposible de hacer aqu, retomar la reflexin de Thayer sobre la pregunta por
la tcnica, ms all del formato heideggeriano y de sus crticas a la hiptesis instrumental o antropolgica, para
pensar la relacin entre capital y tecnologa en su co-implicancia ontolgica, como cambio radical de la relacin
instrumental que el hombre establece con el mundo. El paso de la herramienta simple a la mquinaherramienta compleja [que podra ser ejemplificada por la invencin, por parte de James Hargreaves, de la
spinning Jenny, como mquina compleja de mltiples terminales], no reside en el desplazamiento del motor desde
la fuerza motriz humana a una fuerza motriz externa, sea el agua, el viento, el buey. Si esto fuera as, mquinasherramientas habra habido desde que Adn y Eva araban con bueyes en el paraso. La mquina-herramienta se
diferencia de la mera herramienta, no por el quien de su fuerza motriz, si el caballo o el hombre, sino porque el
nmero de terminales que puede manipular simultneamente la mquina-herramienta, excede las posibilidades
de manipulacin directa del cuerpo humano (Hacia un concepto heterocrnico de lo actual S/P, Mmeo).
De esta forma, con la invencin de la spinning Jenny accedemos a un evento cuya envergadura es similar a la
conquista del bi-pedalismo y la consiguiente desterritorializacin de la mano, pero ahora multiplicado
infinitamente, mas all de las limitaciones fsicas de la manualidad corpreo-orgnica. Con esta invencin no
solo se axiomatiza la maquinacin, sino que se diversifica la valoracin, todo lo cual termina por cambiar las
condiciones mismas en las que pensbamos, usualmente, el nihilismo. Ver tambin de Thayer, Tecnologas de la
crtica (2010).
17 Sobre todo porque la transvaloracin, ya no pensada como efecto incalculable de la misma valoracin
capitalista, sino como nombre de un proceder filosfico determinado constituira, segn Heidegger, la marca y
la firma de una forma tarda de la metafsica occidental. Ver, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I.
18 Por supuesto, ya en Tercer espacio (1999) y luego en The Exhaustion of Difference (2001), Moreiras no solo da
pistas sobre la incomodidad del pensamiento con respecto a su inscripcin disciplinaria, sino que avisa sobre la
serie de procesos que desembocarn, cada vez ms notoriamente, en la reflexin infrapoltica.
19 Necesario insistir que el marranismo no se refiere a ninguna etnicidad especfica, sino que apunta a una
concepcin post-identitaria que de suyo pone en cuestin toda poltica de la representacin y del
reconocimiento. No se trata entonces de oponer marranismo a indigenismo o a feminismo como si
estuvisemos en una competencia sobre que vale ms para un pensamiento abocado a la justicia, sino de
mostrar que la misma justicia nunca puede ser resuelta en el horizonte onto-antropolgico y jurdico de la
poltica moderna.
13
14
On a Newly Arisen Infrapolitical Tone in Theory1
NGEL OCTAVIO LVAREZ SOLS

UNIVERSIDAD IBEROAMERICANA
In 1796, Immanuel Kant denounced the mystical excesses of those who proclaimed
the end of philosophy in a piece titled On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy
(Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie). Almost two hundred years later,
Jacques Derrida delivered a lecture in Cerisy-la-Salle in which he imitates and parodies Kant's
text: On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy (Dun ton apocaliptique adopt naguere en
philosophie, 1982). Kant's text aims to address and oppose the superior tone that was being used
by the mystagogues of his time: the mystics who transgress the bounds of human reason. In
contrast, Derrida, who is more interested in the noun than in the adjective, focuses on the
apocalyptic tone of the mystagogues that proclaim the end of man, of philosophy, and of
modernity. The differences in style are important but minor. Kant is more concerned with
the superiority than with the tone itself. Derrida, on the contrary, is more interested in the tone
than in the apocalyptic. However, both texts are critical interventions, profound political
claims, and are enlightened manifestos against the excesses of modern irrationalism. Derrida
as an enlightened Kantian? Kant as a deconstructor of antiphilosophical mysticism? To
answer these questions it is necessary not to give in to an argumentative vertigo:
Enlightenment and deconstruction are two semantic devices that activate the political prejudices
of theoretical practices. For this reason, it is not the aim of this text to present a theoretical
lineage or a philosophical background. On the contrary, its objective is more modest
because, instead of following the argumentative sequence of Kant or Derrida, the task in the
following pages consists of anticipating a datum, a philosophical situation, a change in
register regarding the relationship between thought and politics: the arrival of a newly arisen
infrapolitical tone in theory.
Infrapolitics and theory are intermingled in experience, but theory by itself does not
exist. Theory is always adjectival theory, theory of something: theory of the object, theory
of literature, theory of philosophy; even theory of theory. Hence, theory is a way of
questioning phenomena, the objects of conscience, world and experience, but it also
124 | lvarez Sols, A. O. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)
constitutes an interrogation regarding the theoretical representations and the discursive

practices with which we apprehend theoretical objects. Theory is a distance as well as a
distancing from the world and, at the same time, it is appropriation and expropriation of life.
Therefore, the infrapolitical tone that has been recently adopted in theory is capable of
thinking the intersection, the limit, the frontier between theory and life. Institutionally, the
infrapolitical tone does not just suppose a total change in the tone of philosophy, literary
criticism or field studies; the change of tone is a change in the orientation of thought, a
change in the fragile conceptual structure of theory, a change in the way in which discursive
practices admit new horizons of experience.
From Superior Tone to Apocalyptic Tone
Kant is probably the last of the Enlightenment thinkers to place a normative trust in
reason and the human race. His optimism in that regard stands in stark contrast to the
extreme anthropological pessimism in which he frames his empirical investigations. For this
reason, Kantian studies should not be reduced to the analysis of the three Critiques. There are
important political concerns underlying the minor texts of one of the main critics of
Enlightenment critique. On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy is a good example, for in it
we see the extent to which, for Kant, in the impeachment of the mystagogues of reason, the
political possibility of achieving an art of living in a cosmopolitan society hangs in the balance.
In this text, Kant's concern is a political one, mediated by a philosophical discussion, for in
order to expose his political stance (republican), he must propound a politics of philosophy, an
intrinsic normativity to philosophical discourse that necessarily goes through a criterion of
political selection.
Pace the liberal interpreters of Kant, the politics of Kantian philosophy are basically
republican, cosmopolitan, and show a strong enlightened disenchantment. This implies that
the philosophies that maintain aristocratic, nationalistic and romantic presuppositions are
characterized as transgressing critical rationality. Thus, the Kantian opposition to the
mystagogues of his time lies in the political implications of his philosophical practice: the
mystagogues maintain a distinguished or aristocratic tone that is opposed to the cosmopolitan
designs of reason. Hence, it is worth questioning the political limits of Kantian philosophy.
Why does Kant denounce the aristocratic practices and simultaneously consider that the
monarch is capable of embodying the spirit of the Enlightenment? Why is revolutionary
enthusiasm compatible with the condemnation of revolutionary violence? The answer to this
apparent anthropological contradiction guides us to the political core of Kantianism: the
historical mistrust of forms of domination that lack rationality.
Thus, the first political warning that Kant makes is not to be found in the
emancipating imperative commonly associated with the Enlightenment project (sapere aude),
but in the call for actuality that is demanded by critical thought. The Enlightenment critique
is political critique because it thinks the conditions of the present. In this sense, Kant
engaged in republican critique when he denounced the aristocratic excesses of some
philosophical discourses. Particularly, in Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der
Philosophie, Kant held that the distinguished tone is directly related the possession of a secret
(philosopia arcani) because access to the secretwhich adopts the epistemic form of the thing
in itselfconstitutes a political transgression of the bounds of reason: it supposes the
existence of distinguished lords capable of knowing and revealing the arcani imperii.
On the one hand, for the distinguished lords it is enough with their prestige, they are not
obliged to account for anything because they are the direct beneficiaries of institutional
power (Kant 53). This suggests that the philosophical attitude of the distinguished lords
works to the detriment of civil equality (57). Furthermore, the distinguished lords are not
philosophers because they abandon the critical attitude in order to be identified as owners of an
elevated feeling that can be experienced without being exhaustively communicated. The
substitution of reason for an elevated feeling is an aristocratic political strategy: the
principle of wanting to philosophize under the influence of a higher feeling is, among all
principles, the one best suited to produce a superior tone (58). As the principle of the
elevated feeling contradicted the critical project, Kant proclaimed in an ironic gesture:
Long live philosophy drawn from feelings, a philosophy that leads us directly to the things
themselves! (58). The problem does not reside in the cognitive transgression of the
understanding, but in abandoning the work of the concept in favor of the mystical
presentiment of a supersensible hunch.
On the other hand, Kant explains why the philosophers who adopt the tone of a great
lord carry out a mystical operation and, by extension, establish the death of philosophy; for
without the work of the concept and of understanding, philosophy becomes the mere
dreams of a visionary:
It is immediately apparent that intimation consists in a certain mysterious
rhythm [mystischer Takt], a vaulting leap (salto mortale) beyond concepts into the
unthinkable, a capacity to grasp what evades every concept, an expectation of
secrets or, rather, a suspense-ridden tendering of secrets that is actually the
mistuning of heads into exaltation. For intimation is obscure pre-expectation
and contains the hope of a disclosure that is only possible in tasks of reason
solved with concepts. (Kant 61-62)
Concepts are thus the instrument to measure the communicative capacity of reason and the
political inflow of a philosophical practice. However, philosophy and the public use of
reason cannot be reduced to the conditioned scope of concepts because the hunch differs
from the unconditioned. The former is founded upon a supersensible intuition free from
universal concepts and the latter is based on an intellectual intuition justified by
transcendental concepts. Finally, the superior or distinguished tone of the Kantian mystagogues,
as it lacks the work of the concept and violates the principles of reason, substitutes
philosophical knowledge for a bold leap without effort (69). This epistemic act rapidly
leads to political action: the step from the mystery to the ministry. The care and the securing
of the mystery depend on an institution that has the ability to closely protect this privileged
information. The great lords are politicians dressed up as philosophers because, in spite of
acting like the initiated and adopting a distinguished tone, they fall into a sentimental
pedantry that is not worthy of the name philosophy. This critique of philosophical pedantry
represents the culmination of Kant's politics of philosophy: a republican, enlightened and
cosmopolitan project cannot support a philosophy based on mystery, secrets or dogmatic
attitude towards the experience of others. The tone of the puffed up owners of this true
mystery cannot be illustrious because it feeds only on dogmatic knowledge (69).
Kant concludes his text by claiming that, in order to avoid identifying oneself with the
mystagogues, it is important to listen to the mystical singing of the distinguished lords in
order to conjure the impossible tones of philosophical musicality. Philosophical music
should be in tune with the cosmopolitan tonality of reason because what is at stake is the
right to philosophy against the sovereignty of elevated feeling. Kant's final remark is ironic,
as he states that nonetheless we want to hear and appreciate the new tone of philosophizing
(in which one can do without philosophy) (57). Why is it necessary to listen to a new tone if
each tone shuts down the possibility of philosophical creativity? Is the Kantian irony an
enlightened gesture against the prestige of the distinguished lords or, on the contrary, is the
irony the last resort against political resentment? The answer, which is necessarily elliptic,
depends upon the distinction between distinguished tone and great lord. The equivalence of both
elements is possible because there is a personification of philosophy and an aristocratization
of thought. The great lord may have a distinguished tone because he has abandoned philosophy
in order to go into politics thanks to the power of elevated feeling. Kant's critique rests upon
the political mechanism with which the mystagogues exclude philosophical argumentation
from their field of discursive action. Therefore, the Kantian critique has an inevitable
political component: the enlightened demand as a republican imperative.
In tune with the Kantian enterprise, Derrida made his own pronouncement on the
mystagogues of his time. In 1980, during a colloquium organized by Jean-Luc Nancy and
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in Cerisy-la-Salle, Derrida delivered a lecture titled Dun ton
apocaliptique adopt naguere en philosophie. During the lecture, Derrida asked himself what is it that
sets a tone, what anticipates a change or a rupture of tone? The initial problem resides in the
property of hearing to which a tone alludes, an audible facet that writing would transform
into silence. Tonality points to musicality. Tonality supposes hearing, the disposition of a
listening ear. A tone cannot be transmitted by a written text, but this does not imply that a
text cannot be heard. As we listen to a text, we apprehend the tone, the musicality with
which it is rhetorically constructed; nevertheless, the tonality of a text differs from the style
because it needs the acceptance of ears, so it can be heard. Style is frozen tonality and tone is
a politics of hearing.
Additionally, if tone is different from style, it is worth noting why the concern
regarding tone is not strictly speaking a rhetorical issue but a political practice. The politics
of tone indicate a dispute regarding open ears, a silent battle to generate the conditions of
audibility for what doesn't have hearers that can listen. In order to answer the question
regarding the politicity of tones it is necessary to establish how the problem has been posed
by modern philosophy. For modern philosophers, tone is either a technical problem or a
subjective obstacle. Philosophical texts should make the tonal difference inaudible because
tonal neutrality guarantees the approximation to truth and, therefore, constitutes one of the
rhetorical imperatives of philosophical discourse. The concept must suppress the philosopher's
tone. Tonality must be diluted, neutralized, eliminated from philosophical argumentation.
Arguments ignore the body of whoever writes philosophy, and philosophy, as Derrida
claims, follows an atonal norm. Conversely, for classical rhetoric, tone and philosophy are
not separable elements: a text is an extension of the body and an enlargement of tone
because, for ancient philosophy, philosophical discourse is, fundamentally, oral
communication. Ancient philosophers make themselves heard; modern philosophers read
one another. But, what happens with the different tones that a theory may adopt? Does
theory comply with the same auditory conditions that philosophical discourse imposes? Is
theoretical philosophy atonal? The answer points to one of the core gestures of Derrida's
writing: the critique of phonocentrism.
For Derrida, phonocentrism constitutes a modern gaze which is derived from the
metaphysics of presence, a gaze in which implicit hierarchies operate that force orality to put
itself above writing; unjustified gazes which grant importance to the author above the reader
or the signified above the signifier. For this reason, in his reading of Von einem neuerdings
erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie, Derrida warns us that Kant is not interested in
systematizing the tone of philosophy but in denouncing a way of making philosophical
pronouncements which employ what he does not consider to be a very good tone. Kant
thinks it is not a very good tone because it signals the end of philosophy (der Tod aller
Philosophie) in its preference for a mystical, supernatural or exalted vision (schwrmerische
Vision) of human rationality (71). The exalted vision conforms a philosophical writing
articulated as an elegy, a melancholy (non)conceptuality which is incapable of reaching the
modalities of experience.
Accordingly, Derrida stresses that the tone that Kant bestows upon this position is
polemical and satirical; that is, in the end, what is adopted is a political tone: This is a social
critique, and its premises have a properly political character. But if he derides a tone that
announces the death of all philosophy, the tone in itself is not what is being mocked
(Derrida 124). For Derrida, it is important to assume that Kant is one of the first
philosophers who explicitly denounce the necrotic discourses that turn to an apocalyptic
tone in order to postulate the death of a discipline. The Kantian attack, however, is not
focused on the apocalyptic element that is contained in those discourses, but rather in the
alleged political and social benefit that these agents want to obtain from its proliferation. The
politization of the death of philosophy is operated by the mystagogues: the philosophers
who adopt an apocalyptic tone. The imposture of the mystagoguesDerrida focuses his
analysis on the Kantian mystagogue's mise en sceneresides in their political use of
philosophy. The mystagogue, who is a philosopher by initiation or by inspiration, elevates
his profile by assuming the position of a great lord (Vorheme halten), an elite subject, a
normative entity outside society. The mystagogue dismisses the patience of the concept and
points to a direct connection with intellectual intuition; he assumes superiority with respect
to others and exhibits himself as the police in the realm of science (die Polizei im Reich der
Wissenchaften). The mystagogue unsuitably bestows the title of philosopher upon himself to
garnish his tone of great lord, his distinguished tone, and to conceal his authentic passion:
institutional power.
Finally, Derrida states that Kant confronts the mystagogues because they are not in
tune with the time of the world, for they are incapable of philosophizing in civil equality
(Derrida 129). The mystagogue rejects the work of the concept and disdains the patient
commentary of a text, opting for a faster route to philosophical truth. In order to deal with
the mystagogue's thrust, Kant points out the possibility of revenge from the professional
philosophers, who err when they act as if they were the great lords. The philosopher, when
he acquires the tone of a great lord or a tone of epistemic authority, becomes a thought
policeman and, paradoxically, stops being a philosopher in order to operate as a prophet: he
confuses reason with the voice of the oracle; he physicalizes thoughts for the sake of a truth
which is only accessible to the initiated: Their crime is properly political; it is a matter for
[relve de] a kind of police (129-30).
For Derrida, Kant indicates more than a textual strategy: he took a position with
respect to the politics of philosophy and, for this reason, an affirmation of the impossible
political horizon to modernity. It should be recalled that Derridas lecture is from the
beginning of the 1980s, immersed in byzantine debates on postmodernity. The exhaustion of
the discussion about the end of modernity, in which Habermas accused Derrida of being a
postmodern conservative, show how much the crisis of the modern is the consummation of
a historic time to come. This explains the anger and firmness with which Derrida makes his
pronouncement against the signs of end of time and the death of philosophy, because the
apocalyptic tone is not a symptom of the speeches on the end of time, but the rhetorical
strategy to position itself politically in discussions about the end of the Enlightenment as
unfinished condition of the historical time of modernity. The new mystagogues, against
whom Derrida is writing, are, therefore, advocates of the end of the Enlightenment and the
end of philosophy as principles of political rationality.
Derrida discloses the political impulses of these false prophets, who have converted
to the political rhetoric of the end of times. For this reason, an attentive reader, a reader
necessarily anachronistic, detects Derridas warning about the ironic tone of the Kantian
text; find out the philosophical impossibility of the new mystagogues and the apocalyptic
reactivation of anti-apocalyptic criticism. This implies that the Derridean text not only takes
an ironic tone, but that all criticism of apocalyptic speech is, ironically, an apocalyptic
imposture. Writing about the revelation supposes an apocalyptic tone. The renunciation of
discourses on the end of times is an ironic gesture that accepts an unusual enlightened
attitude:
So we, Aufklrer of modern times, we continue to denounce the impostor
Apostles, the so-called envoys not sent by anyone, the liars and unfaithful
ones, the turgidity and the pomposity of all those charged with a historic
mission of whom nothing has been requested and who have been charged
with nothing. Shall we thus continue in the best apocalyptic tradition to
denounce false apocalypses? (Derrida 158-59).
As a result, the denunciation of "the false revelation," ironically enunciated by Derrida,
records the importance of demystifying the political charge of the apocalyptic ploys,
exposing their conservatism. Underlying the tone of the apocalyptic end of philosophyor
even the post-apocalyptic tone that announces the end of the endis a political sham that
seeks the blessing of the powerful at the expense of the imagination of the people. Indeed,
for Derrida apocalyptic rhetoric oscillates between the grossest apocalyptic conservatism and
the most sophisticated cryptic strategy to evade political censorship:
And above all because the ethicopolitical motif or motivation of these
stratagems is never reducible to some simple. I recall thus that their rhetoric,
for example is not only destined to mislead the people rather than the
powerful in order to arrive at retrograde, backward-looking, conservative
ends. Nothing is less conservative than the apocalyptic genre. And as it is an
apocalyptic, apocryphal, masked, coded genre, it can use the detour to
mislead another vigilance, that of censorship. (Derrida 159)
Derrida responds directly to the new mystagogues who accuse him of putting apocalyptic
themes back on the philosophical agenda. The answer, less elliptical but more ironic that
others have offered before, indicates that it is directed almost exclusively at the American
reception of his work, since it is supported by the U.S. apocalyptic culture, where people
are always more sensitive to phenomena of prophetism, messianism, eschatology, and

apocalypse-here-now (160). However, Derrida maintained a permanent discussion with the
Americanized mystagogues, regardless of their philosophical quality. From John Searle to
Jrgen Habermas, philosophical disagreement has been part of the political
and
philosophical reception of deconstruction. With this public appearance, deconstruction

adopted a controversial tone, a belligerent tone, a reactive tone. It prompted a hasty
American domestication, but it also did not help in changing the fact that it lacked a major
audience in Foucaults France. One of the most abundant accusations of the mystagogues
was that Derrida was an apolitical character, and that deconstruction necessarily entailed a
depoliticization. Motivated by this epochal gesture, Derrida began, more and more directly,
to write about political issuesnot that the "grammatological phase" of deconstruction was
not interested in politicswhich centered on the importance of a radical enlightenment, the
slogan of the lights to come and, which, gave the lie to the criticism of deconstruction as an
advanced irrationalism or nihilism.
The Infrapolitical Tone and the New Mystagogues
Above, I state that there is an infrapolitical tone adopted in theory. This tone arises as
a vindication of theory, but one that is marginal to disciplinary politics. Infrapolitics emerges,
then, as a (de)political practice in the current economic and political conditions of the neoliberal University, which is the reason why it is not only a theoretical model or a reading
strategy, but part of a deconstructive practice that rejects the domestication and depoliticization of the American reception of deconstruction. In fact, infrapolitics is part of the
history of deconstruction, but not of the American history of deconstruction. Although
infrapolitics is intricately related to discussions stemming from Latin American studies, it is
not aimed at that field exclusively, as it has a strong cosmopolitan and marrano thrust.
Infrapolitics is, therefore, a form of deconstruction, but it is not only an epigonal offshoot of
the work of Derrida. For this reason, infrapolitics rejects the ethical and political overdetermination of deconstruction.
Before touching on the texture of the infrapolitical tone, it is necessary to locate the
current anti-deconstructive climate as a political, more than a critical, gesture made by the
new mystagogues. The contemporary mystagogue is the policeman of academic correctness:
the censor of proper forms who appeals to philology, positive science and the humanistic
tradition in order to announce the downfall and inoperability of theory. The mystagogue
confuses the power of knowledge with the knowledge of power because it is not an
exclusive agency, nor specific to a discipline or institution. On the contrary, the mystagogue
is a type of political agent of an academic practice, who aspires to be an organic or inorganic
intellectual, who uses any means to politicize his own ends or to rule out alternatives of
intellectual production whenever they are theoretical. He is interested in politics, literature or
theory in order to prove that there is a consistency between his elevated and distinguished
tone and his political practices and intellectual habits. The mystagogue is a knowledgearistocrat who reigns but does not govern because his indiscreet arrogance exposes him
politically, which renders him vulnerable even as it fosters suspicion.
Nevertheless, the contemporary mystagogue is not easily identifiable or recognizable
because this practice is not an action or a property of a subject, but an incorporation of the
economic logic of (vigilant) institutions of knowledge. For example, a historian becomes a
mystagogue when he renounces historiographical thinking completely and begins
accumulating empirical facts as a direct correlate of the value that the university (institution)
places on the accumulation of registered data in a scientific article. In this context, a
theoretical intervention capable of widening the field of historiographical experience counts
for very little. In turn, the literary critic has adopted mystagogical practices when he employs
philology as the absolute knowledge regarding his field and discredits other routes to the
literary in complicity with the State, as philology has historically been an essential resource in
the formation of the canon and the hypostatization of official languages.
The mystagogues defend, even if it doesn't seem so, a type of heliopolitics: a political
principle which illuminates all the rest of experience and which empowers him to
subalternize, educate or free from the conditions of everyday oppressions. Because of this,
the mystagogues understand that politics is a conflict regulated by consensus and that
domination is violence without consent, because he follows an archetypal and hegemonic
methodology. The mystagogue discards the possibility of the unconditioned and denies the
existence of tones because he defends, with his own peculiar and elevated tone, the
importance of hierarchies without scale, nobility without people, objectivity without
solidarity, neutrality without the neutral, clarity without opacity or obscurity without false
conscience, the secret without democracy or democracy without risk, the decomposition of
the king's two bodies without the openness of the plebeian body. To explain the mystagogic
procedure, and since infrapolitics begins with a deep suspicion regarding the high tone of the
new mystagogues, it is necessary to begin with a specific case. Here, that of a German critic
who initially gave a warm welcome to deconstruction and, subsequently, took hold as a
detractor, due to the anti-theory bias of his latest interventions: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.
Gumbrecht denounces the alleged textualist excesses of deconstruction because he
considers them a paradigmatic strategy of the linguistic turn and, therefore, a critical strategy
that reduces the real to its textual manifestation. In order to avoid the negative traps of
deconstructive practice, Gumbrecht proposes a literary ontology based on the paradigm of
subjectivity, which consists in equipping the category of Stimmung with a philosophical status
beyond its Heideggerian version. For Heidegger, the Stimmungen is an ontic disposition of
Dasein because it is an everyday affective exposition (Befinflichkeit). On the contrary, for
Gumbrecht the quest for the Stimmung of a text enables feeling the literary work, or any work
in general, in its ontological singularity. This suggests that critique, either historical or
literary, must read the texts of each discipline looking for the Stimmung or the tonalities of
each work without necessarily commenting upon the text. In this way, critique abandons the
paradigm of representation and significance in order to locate itself in a space that
transcends the linguistic-textual sphere: the production of presence and the recovery of the
physical dimension of objects (cf. Gumbrecht The Production). Accordingly, the literary
ontology proposed by Gumbrecht is an anti-hermeneutical modality, which contrasts with
the textualist version he associates with deconstruction. For this philologist,
deconstruction failed because it did not solve the problem of the link between the text as a
semantic-material product and the extra-linguistic reality independent of it. The evidence of
this epistemological misreading is represented in the deconstructive motto There is nothing
outside the text; for Gumbrecht, this epistemic imperative is proof that, despite its
innovative efforts, deconstruction is part of the tradition of the linguistic turn (cf. Gumbrecht
Atmosphere).
Within the framework of the decline of hermeneutics and the recovery of speculative
realism, Gumbrecht claims that his Stimmungen theory is a third stance which enables the
resolution of the aporias of deconstructive textualism and the identitarian limits of Cultural
Studies. Instead of focusing the critical operation on the allegories of the text, or on its
evocative capacity, the Stimmungen describe emotional states not as debris of the reader's
subjectivity but as a measurement of physical phenomena capable of producing a presence.
Gumbrecht opts for the German word Stimmungen because, in contrast with mood or
atmosphere, this term emphasizes the tonal dimension of the emotional states that appear
during the reading of the text. The German word Stimme understood as voice and the verb
stimmen explained as tuning points directly towards a musical connotation: tuning an
instrument. Therefore, tracing the Stimmungen of historical and literary texts supposes the
discovery of the voice and the tone in which they are composed, for they commonly employ
musical or climatological references to express the underlying emotional states. Gumbrechts
claim is that the focus on atmospheres and moods offers literary studies a possibility for
reclaiming vitality and aesthetic immediacy that have, for the most part, gone missing
(Atmosphere 12).
However, even though literary ontology could be understood as a complement to
deconstruction, Gumbrecht announced his proposal after rejecting this type of analysis.
Gumbrecht claims that deconstruction has been constantly defensive and, for that very
reason, maintains a tone that was not foreseen by its apologists: a tone of ascetic self-pity. What
does it mean to assume an ascetic tone in deconstruction? What political configuration is at
stake with this curious ad hominem argumentation? If deconstruction maintains a subjective
component activated by melancholy for the referent, why is Derrida understood as the
visionary who renewed the field of literary studies, humanities and philosophy?
Gumbrecht holds that deconstruction cultivated an ascetic tone, sustained by a state of
permanent mourning, due to the fact that it is the affective heir of postwar existentialism:
the pathetic mood of refusal transformed into melancholy at the loss of reference
(Atmosphere 130). The affective indeterminacy (fahlen Ungestimmtheit) of deconstruction,
materialized in an ascetic tone when it became detached of all possible materiality.
Deconstruction was oriented by a postmetaphysical pretension in which language lost all
reference, external world, and body, becoming pure linguistic instability. The melancholic
pathos, which acquires its ultimate deconstructive gesture in the concern regarding its traces
and its promise, did not manage to form a serious critical project due to its programmatic
frugality and its unavoidable nostalgia for meaning, diffrance and the supplement: Like the
heroes of Existentialist literature, Deconstructionists congratulated each other for the ascetic
rigor with which they carried out their mission (Atmosphere 131). Are the ascetic tone and
the alleged loss of materiality the result of deconstructive practice or of its unwanted
affective consequences?
Gumbrecht explains that the ascetic tone of deconstruction stems directly from the
prophetic figure of Derrida and, especially, from the adoration of his more radical American
advocates: Derridas most ardent enthusiasts wanted to view him as a prophet, pure and
simple. Photos that are still in circulation show a youthful philosopher with ascetic traits, his
eyes gazing into the distance, as if he were a visionary (Atmosphere 131). Gumbrecht is
probably confusing Derrida's oeuvre with the American history of deconstruction. Contrary
to what one could imagine, rather than elaborating a caricature, he has built a straw man to
justify the emergence of the distinguished tone in literary studies. What is relevant is that
Gumbrecht accused Derrida of adopting the tone of a great lord and did not notice an
oversight grounded in his own distinguished tone: the accusation of ascetic pathos does not
belong to the gesture but to the signature, to Derrida's first name, to the domestication of a
corpus, to the national history of a form of thought. For this reason, Gumbrecht maintains
the existence of a strong correlation between the ascetic tone and the figure of the expressive
visionary, since deconstructive practice is in greater need of expression and feeling rather
than of rationality and critique: Certainly not in literature, whereunder the cover of
fictionprecisely this kind of metamorphosis has contributed to the charm and charisma of
the heroes of Existentialism. In the academic world, however, other rules are supposed to
prevail, which are intended to prevent sentiments and moods from trumping arguments
(Atmosphere 132). With this claim, Gumbrecht exposes the distinguished tone which
characterizes him as a policeman of science even though, paradoxically, his proposal is
even more radically grounded in intuition and pathos.
Finally, the institution of mystagogy is complete with the proclamation of the death of
deconstruction. In an apocalyptic tone, Gumbrecht declares that the ascetic attitude and the
melancholic gesture, strengthened by the accusation of anti-Semitism against Paul de Man, is
the blow of the trumpets of the end of Derrida's distinguished image. The pathos of ascetic
self-pity seemed to have turned into a self-indulgent license for logicallyand morally
arbitrary judgments. Deconstruction had played the first bars of its own funeral march
(Atmosphere 134). With this claim, Gumbrecht concludes his book and reveals that the rules
of rationality demanded of deconstruction are not to be followed and acknowledged by its
own critique since, as it is pronounced in the tone of a great lord, it is exempt from the
democratic demands of public reason.
Nonetheless, the denunciation of asceticism in deconstructive practice must be related
to a politics of critique elliptically sustained by Gumbrecht: he behaves like a new mystagogue

when he adopts an apocalyptic tone in the presentation of his program. Here is the first
irony. Gumbrecht rejects deconstruction because of its ascetic tone with an ad hominem
argumentation. This text recognizes, ironically, that Gumbrecht keeps a distinguished tone, a
tone of a great lord, an apocalyptic tone regarding critique and deconstruction and, in order
to do so, the essay deploys an ad hominem argumentation. Second irony: writing an argument
against the new mystagogues risks incurring in a distinguished tone. Even so, in order to
highlight the current relevance of the infrapolitical tonesince infrapolitics gets rid of the
burden of having to prove the politicity of the critiqueit is necessary to illustrate the
mystagogical operation performed by Gumbrecht in his anti-theoretical proposal and not
just in his rejection of deconstruction.
In the first place, just as the Kantian mystagogue, Gumbrecht grants a predominant
value to intuition over concepts. The work of method, the commentary of the text and the
patience of reading are captured by the tone of a great lord, through which, in the name of
humanism, the critic can trust in his hunch, in his high feeling and in the Stimmungen which
allows him to access the core of the text: Indeed, my skepticism concerning methods is
even stronger, for I believe that researchers on the terrain of the human sciences should
rely more on the potential of counterintuitive thinking than on a pre-established path or
way (the etymological meaning of method). Counterintuitive thinking is not afraid to
deviate from the norms of rationality and logic that govern everyday life (and for good
reason!). Instead, it is set into motion by hunches (Atmosphere 17).
Secondly, Gumbrecht, who accused Derrida and deconstructionists of living in a state
of mourning caused by the melancholy of the referent, ironically turns to an emotional state
based on the melancholy of presence. This aristocratic attitude adopts a disntinguished tone
because only a few chosen ones are capable of apprehending the Stimmungen of the historical
and literary texts: The yearning for Stimmung has grown, because many of usperhaps
older people, above allsuffer from existence in an everyday world that often fails to
surround and envelop us physically. Yearning for atmosphere and mood is a yearning for
presenceperhaps a variant that presupposes a pleasure in dealing with the cultural past
(Atmosphere 20). Finally, Gumbrecht adopts an apocalyptic tone for literary science and reveals
that its vitality will depend upon the rejection of the alegoresis of deconstruction, since it is
not capable of accessing the linguistic referent in the world, and the avoidance of the
epistemological negligence of cultural studies, which are incapable of obtaining a

renowned theoretical result. If deconstruction's desertion of the world and the rejection of
theory that stems from the prevalence of cultural studies in university departments, the end
of literary science is near. I believe that literary studies, as a site where intellectual forces
combine, risks stagnation for as long as it remains stuck between these two positions, whose
contrasts and tensions can cancel each other out. To overcome such dangerswhich have
already materialized in partwe need third positions (Atmosphere 3).
The relevant point is that Gumbrecht's argumentation relies on a concealed antitheoretical feeling, a feeling that becomes resentment, inasmuch as the accusation of
irrationalism made against deconstruction is activated by way of a rejection of the critical
possibilities of reason. Therefore, I claim that the first thing which infrapolitical
deconstruction upholds, against the new mystagogues, is the importance of theory and, by
extension, of a radical Enlightenment as the epigone of the democracy to come. Infrapolitics does
not admit the tone of a great lord or an apocalyptic tone. It rejects not only the
antidemocratic bias which is found in these versions of well-meaning humanism, but also the
critical operation underlying its unconditional rationalism, an unconditional critique of all
conditionalitiesparticularly the political conditionalities of unconditional politics, of a
politics without exceptions.
Following the trail of an enlightened marranism, infrapolitics does not abandon
critique, on the contrary, it radicalizes it by establishing a critique of critique, but with the
caveat that this Enlightenment does not suppose the consummation of an historical era.
Rather, it recognizes the impossible horizon of a time without depletion, of an
Enlightenment which is necessarily an Enlightenment to come. This unconditional critique of
conditionalities acquires an infrapolitical tone precisely because it is interested in politics, but
in politics in retreat, in politics that condition experience without reducing it. Infrapolitics,
therefore, does not advocate for the elimination or the totalization of the modern
characteristics of Western politics, because it considers it impossible to avoid the political
horizon of modernity; rather, infrapolitics re-frames the correlation between thought and
politics in order to do politics in a minor tone.
Just as Kafka's is a minor literature, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari, so is
infrapoltics a minor politics, an infra, a low or minor tone which produces a deconceptualization of experience instead of a de-territorialization of language. Thought and
politics are discharged from the totalizing form to which philosophy and politics have aspired
as the pure form of modernity: Neither total politics nor totalizing thought, since
experiencefragmentary and necessarily contingentcannot be captured by those forms.
Therefore, the tone of infrapolitics cannot be apocalyptic, since it does not proclaim the end
of philosophy, or the end of history, or the end of critiqueit just describes the present
situation. But it does not indulge in a distinguished tone either, because fragmentary
experience prevents the appropriation of forms of life since it rejects the heliopolitical
imperative of modernity: you will not obey for you will not reign.
The relationship between infrapolitics and theory is inevitable. Infrapolitics thinks the
concurrence between politics and thought, but also differentiates the field of each sphere,
while recognizing the impossibility of getting out of this relationship. Infrapolitics is more a
policy of thought than a kind of political thinking. Against the zero degree of theory,
infrapolitics politicizes theoretical practices, deconstructs the political momentum behind
discursive enunciations and, simultaneously, theorizes about the ontological impact of
political thought. This is not to suggest that an infrapolitical practice is exclusively a negative
practice, initially or essentially nihilistic. Infrapolitics suspects that behind every
emancipatory program there is the possibility of a new form of dominance. But infrapolitics
also retrieves the possibility of a policy of non-domination in which the sacrificial logic of
modern politics is removed from the horizon of thought politics. To halt or promote the
pathos of modern politics, infrapolitics retrieves the normative force of thought, not in the
form in which modern political philosophy has understood the relationship between
legislation and reality, but as a mode of infinite normativity, as a sort of unconditional
rationalism.
In consequence, theory adopts an infrapolitical tone the moment it assumes an
unconditional rationalism as the necessary complement to the democracy to come. In
contrast with the heliopolitical principle which originated with Aristotle and was confirmed
by Machiavelli (if one obeys it is in the condition of reigning), up to the communitarian
formulation of neo-Zapatism (the one who reigns, reigns by obeying), infrapolitics may
opt for passive action since it has been (de)institutionalized as a poshegemonic operation. In
this way, infrapolitics supposes a minor tone because it dismisses becoming a political
program or a philosophy, since it is more like a gaze, a new orientation of thought and
experience regarding the impact of politics in life. Restraining this impact, suspending it, not
allowing it to saturate our vital space is one of its minor but important tasks. Infrapolitics
reconciles politics with its shadows since it disengages them as two autonomous but
dependent spheres.
Infrapolitics seeks to radicalize deconstruction: deconstructing reconstruction of the
world of life processes. This suggests that the experience of reality is amendable, since what
is out of subjectivity cannot be corrected through a conceptual schema. The infrapolitical is
thus the experience of the impossibility of total conceptualization of experience. Therefore,
infrapolitics is a form of negative realism, a type of realism that, along with a work about the
negative, employs the negativity as an instrument for a minimalist ontology. Infrapolitics
reverses the Spinozian principle omnis determinatio est negatio and transforms it by an omnis
determinatio est negation. As a result, infrapolitical realism inhabits a negative measure that
prevents the onto-theological from talking hold of the various regimes of representation,
identity and the totalizing power of communitarian politics. The infrapolitical project is a
realist one, because it does not count on a transcendental subject, a textualist idealism, a neocommunism or a hermeneutic beyond of actuality; it is infrapolitical because it recognizes
that life in its radical immanence is the only non-conceptual, un-representable and aporetic
form of experience. Finally, as an academic artifact, infrapolitics, in its genealogy and archive,
should be measured as a medium and long-term project. In todays Posthegemonic times,
infrapolitical reflection becomes necessary, but, at the same time, neither the theory nor its
public discussion can get ahead of the radical contingency of thought. To date, we can only
say that there is a newly arisen infrapolitical tone in theory.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." Trans. Jr. John
Leavey. Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by
Jacques Derrida. 1982. Ed. Peter Fenves. Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993. 117-72. Print.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. On a Hidden Potential of Literature. 2011.
Trans. Erik Butler. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Print.
. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2004. Print.
Kant, Immanuel. "On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy." Trans. Peter Fenves.
Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques
Derrida. 1796. Ed. Peter Fenves. Baltimore; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993. 51-82. Print.
Notes
The writing of this paper has multiple debts. First, thanks to Gonzalo Bustamante Moya and, in particular, to
Jaime Rodrguez Matos, for help in the stylistic elaboration of the text. In addition, this text would be
impossible without the discussions held by the group "The Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective", those
who know balancing the courage of intelligence with the force of friendship.
1
A Conversation with Alberto Moreiras regarding the Notion of

Infrapolitics. With Alejandra Castillo, Jorge lvarez Ygez, Maddalena
Cerrato, Sam Steinberg, ngel Octavio Alvarez Sols. July 2014-January
2015
____________________________________________
Translated by JAIME RODRIQUEZ MATOS with

revisions by SAM STEINBERG and ALBERTO MOREIRAS
The conversation was proposed and initiated by Alejandra Castillo. The first questions and
answers were discussed indirectly in a Facebook group, which led to further questions and
comments from the other signing interlocutors.
Alejandra Castillo: In your book Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en Amrica Latina, you
indicate that autographic writing is index and ruin of the figurative project of writing.
Described in those terms, autography seems to be framed between reflexivity, mourning,
and survival. Following this thread, you indicated that figurality is both the condition of
reflexivity and its very limit. In your forthcoming book Piel de lobo, you take up once again
the problem of writing and life. In the tie that binds those words together, you describe
autography as a writing in subjective destitution. I would like to begin this dialogue by
asking about this description: what are you referring to when you say writing in subjective
destitution?
Alberto Moreiras: The problem with figurative language is that it posits or invents the
necessary existence of a non-literal or catachrestic plane, and this plane is always and
necessarily phantasmatic. If I say that the horsemen approach beating the drum of the plains,
the noise of the drum is my phantasm: music. If I realize this, the music stops. And that has
destituting effects. There is a destituting drive in what you call reflexive writing (I no longer
remember what I said in Tercer espacio) that is always already tragic, and with which we can
only relate in mourning if we are to survive, which can never be taken for granted. I suppose
that there is constituting writing and destituting writing, though such a division is far from
exhaustive as a phenomenology of writing. In any case, I speak of tendencies in writing, not
of achievements: everything is always ambiguous and complicated in this terrain because
nobody owns their writing, one can only struggle with it. For some, writing could be
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| A conversation with Alberto Moreiras
constitutive in a symbolic sensefor instance, if we accept Alain Badious schema, when

writing is fidelity to some event of truth in love, science, art or politics. But I cannot believe
that writing exhausts itself in that constitution of subjective truth, and I tend to think the
opposite is the case: the writing that interests me does not seek to constitute a truth; rather,
it seeks truth and produces destitution. It seeks truth in the sense that it attempts to traverse
the phantasm in every case, and it produces destitution in the sense that traversing the
phantasm brings us closer to the abyss of the real. This is a Lacanian vocabulary, but we
could rewrite it in deconstructive terms. Where Lacan would say sinthome Derrida could
speak of the secret. For me, in fact, there is no other writing than the writing of the secret.
Or, there is another, but it does not work (for me). The question that arises, then, is that of
the use of the writing of the secret, but that is a question that I dont think I am prepared to
answer.
AC: While it is true that autographic writing leads us towards a certain politics of the proper
name, it is no less true that such a name is but the inscription of death in the ownership of
the name. In this sense, every auto-bio(thanato)-graphic gesture would imply the failed
gesture of seeking to be faithful to writing ones self, while always writing, nevertheless, an
other. In spite of this auto-hetero-graphic logic that is inscribed in writing, you seem to insist
in some of the materials for your new book, Piel de lobo, on the necessity of giving testimony
of the truth: books have to be true, you state. What is the limit between truth and fiction
in an autographic project?
AM: I think that every act of writing fails. The only act without recoil would be total silence,
which is also death. But, precisely to the extent that we write in spite of everything, death is
inscribed apotropaically: we inscribe it in order to resist it. It does not seem to me to be so
much the work of fidelity. It is more of an enterprise without fidelity, always ready to betray
everything in order to achieve its ends, if one were shrewd enough to know when to betray,
when betrayal is the best way to avoid the lethal inscription. That is why writing acts have to
be true, because without that truth nothing worksas we know, in each case, only truth
orients betrayal. Every reflexive act of writing is, therefore, never more than a theoretical
fiction. But I would also resist the notion of testimony in this context. Testimony is only one
modality of theoretical fiction among others, it does not define them all; although we could
entertain the idea that testimony is always already nothing more than the theoretical
dimension of fiction. We could say that there is always testimony in reflexive writing, there is
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always a testimonial dimension, but that testimony remains suspended in every case by what
escapes it, by what the testimony produces as its own excess. That is what I call autographic
writing.
AC: Is the definition of writing you are proposing related to the concept of infrapolitics,
which you have been developing more recently?
AM: Yes, and both are related to what, on a different occasion, I called the instance of the
non-subject. I suppose that the same intuition makes its way throughout this quasiconceptual framework. Autography and infrapolitics refer to a practico-speculative space
that is not regulated by even the slightest certainties, which are always ideological, and which
determine our relation with the everyday, and thus remain outside of the horizon of capture
defined by the legal apparatus, by the political and administrative institution, by the national
instantiation, by gender, sexuality, ethnic origin, in sum, by any identitarian artifact. It is not
only an attempt to think writing, but also the course of experience itself, in what exceeds and
from what exceeds that subjective capture.
AC. Could you elaborate on your idea of infrapolitics?
AM: I just spoke of it as a quasi-conceptual instance that resists every ideological apparatus
of capture, which refers to an unregulated practico-speculative third space, which is to say,
outside of rule and regulation. It is not that it is impossible to think it, for now (I think it is
the easiest thing to think, what is closest to all of us, but someone said that the narrowest
abyss is also the hardest to cross), but it is a contradiction to attempt to give it a theoretical
formulation, or a definition. It is important to invoke here the notion of resistance to
theory, not from the vantage point of the will that seeks to undo that resistance, but in
order to fold into it, to understand it in so far as such a thing is possible for each of us. I
imagine that what is important, then, is not to secure a stable definition, but to invoke a
reflexive process that would allow for a liberation of the ear, the eye, touch, and that leaves
space, or makes it possible to conceive of an alternative site for thought. If I knew for
certain how to do it, I would have already written four or five more books. But we can make
an attempt: let us say that infrapolitics refers to deconstruction in politics, or that it is
deconstruction of politics or politics in deconstruction. Jacques Derridas 1964 seminar, at
the cole Normale Suprieure, on the question of being and history in Heidegger, was
published last year. There, Derrida comes very close to saying that deconstruction is the
constant attempt to thematize the ontico-ontological difference, that is to say, the forgetting
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of Being which Heidegger diagnosed in Being and Time as infection or in-fiction of the
metaphysical tradition as a whole, which is the hegemonic tradition of thought in the West.
It is clear that my genealogy of work has strong Heideggerian and Derridean ties. I would
say, then, that infrapolitics is the name of deconstruction in politics, understanding
deconstruction as the attempt (always unfulfilled) to thematize the forgetting of the onticoontological difference. To carry this thematic over to political reflection has proven a
difficult taskit would be possible to think that Levinas, as much as Blanchot, Derrida, or
Nancy, among others, were always attempting to come to terms with this, but, as we know,
always in a manner that was not too frontal. We dont have to abandon the project,
however; to the extent that the modes of oppression most characteristic of our time, and
perhaps of all times, always transcend what we might call representational politics, the
politics that is mere confrontation between doctrines and positions, mere alternation of
measures that come to take on the form of law, they always enter into the region of
infrapolitics. If the latter is the place where the auto-heterographic inscription is or is not
produced in its real form, that is, if infrapolitics is the place of experience and the instance of
the singular manifestation of every politics, then, the change of perspective, with regard to
what could be termed the great heliopolitical parameters that define ostensible political life
in modernity, would be of critical importance. As we know, the problem of liberalism, for
example, is not liberalism in itself, but the falsity of its application, and the same applies to
communism. For instance, the problem of a society politically structured according to
Ernesto Laclaus theory of hegemony is not the given hegemonic articulation, but what that
articulation is incapable of dealing with. Let us say that every heliopolitics imposes a
metaphorization, a way of understanding the space of the community. The infrapolitics of
any politics is permanent demetaphorization. And in that always ongoing process of
demetaphorization, which is, among other things, time, and, among other things, what
exceeds any will to control, and, among other things, accident and catastrophe, but which
can also be freedom and jouissance, or an opening for pleasureit is here where, I would say,
the possibility of invention, which is also the possibility of revolt, of subtraction, of
restitution and even, why not, of vengeance is kept, even if it is in and through the retreat,
the permanent retreat, of that very possibility. I dont think it is banal to insist on the idea
that the attempt to resist this demetaphorization is the real name of antidemocratic
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authoritarianism, that is, of the oppression of the human by the human. From the right or
from the left.
AC: Then, do we always have to search for the demetaphorization of any system?
AM: Demetaphorization happens on its own, since political life is always in every case a
struggle that begins with the entropy of the concept. What is important, certainly in the
university, but not only there, not at all, is to remain alert to the constant attempts to avert
the entropic demetaphorization of any system. Any project of justice and freedom for all,
that is, of demotic equality, of preventing anyone from being more than anyone else, passes
through the facilitation of the work of entropic demetaphorization, which in many cases has
as a consequence the production of new alternative metaphors that are in turn provisional
and subject to new losses themselves. Democratic Republicanism is perhaps nothing other
than that sustained process of rejection of any reification or biopoliticization of the concept.
That is why I insist that we should recognize in it the call of forgetfulness. Western
metaphysics constitutes itself in that forgetting, according to Heidegger, in favor of the ontotheological constitution of the polis, or of what takes its place, perhaps the State.
Parmenidess poem incorporates in its very form the link between aristocracy and
ontological ground, which is thus defined for the next two thousand five hundred years. To
search for the difficult outside of onto-theology, or, in infrapolitics, to search for the difficult
outside of politics, is not to wager on an anarchic demetaphorization, but its point of
departure is that there is no stable archy, that any archy is already a consequence of the
forgetting that constitutes it as such. Heidegger gave the name of Being to that instance of
forgetting, to that instance which is always in retreat, because that was the word used in the
tradition, but already in the 1930s Heidegger begins to emphasize that it is not necessary to
speak of the Being of the tradition, that Being as it is understood in that tradition is not the
reference. That is why he writes Seyn, with a y, or he crosses out the word. Or he renames
it Ereignis. But we could also call that forgetting infrapolitical experience. We can only refer
to it in a tangential manner, itself metaphorical or metaphorized in every instance, precisely
because it is not vulnerable to theoretical appropriation, because our language does not allow
for theoretical appropriation without destructive capture. The forgetting cannot be fetishized
into a new name of Being, onto-theological foundation, even as infrapolitics cannot
constitute itself as a formal practice. Both forgetting and infrapolitics are only susceptible to
a poetic quasi-nomination that makes possible the intuition of a trail, a trace in which the
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future of our planet is at stake, in my estimation. We can call it the Lacanian Chose, or the
Freudian navel of the dream, Derridean diffrance or the face of the other, or the neuter, or
even all that appertains to the thought of the animal or the earthly outside of the
Anthropocenethese are impossible names, catachrestic names for thinking the forgetting,
in the same way that infrapolitics is an impossible name for thinking politics.
Jorge lvarez Ygez: One of the striking features of your thought is that you tend to use
authors that are not generally regarded as political philosophers, who dont belong to any
history of political thought as it is usually understood, whose thought is not, at least not in a
central way, political, such as Heidegger, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida but you do it, precisely,
in order to think the political or an alternative to the political as such.
AM: I have never had or attempted to have a technical relation with politics, neither in terms
of what certain academic traditions call political science nor of what yet others call political
theory. In fact, I always thought or felt, as many others, that politics oscillates, at least in
what interests me, between being essentially corrupt and despicable, and being charged with
the greatest possible dignity and importance, and that this variation within existing politics
has little to do with its concept. So when I decided, without a doubt driven, as far as I can
remember, by contextual ideological pressures within the university, when I decided that I
was to thematize politics or the political in my writing, it was always a matter of speaking
from the place where I was, without any imperative for self-reformation whatsoever. Then I
began, for example, to become interested in what there is of politics in processes of
philosophical, critical, or literary writing and thought, perhaps paying undue attention to my
own notion regarding the essential variation between its two abysses, its loftiness and its
baseness. The truth is that one discovers, without setting out to do so, that real politics, at
least in texts, is not where it says it is, or rarely. It is more common to find that the most
radical democrat, as soon as one makes an effort to read his texts, ends up revealing, more or
less naively, his intrinsic despotism, that the fiercest subalternist reveals himself as the
perfect policeman, or that the noblest feminist could be understood as an extraordinary case
of opportunism. Or that the internal contradictions of political thought end up producing
the destruction of the concept of politics itself, as perhaps is the case in the work of Louis
Althusser. It is also common, and this is obviously more interesting and productive, that
people who usually prefer to remain on the verge of a direct confrontation with political
matters, out of respect or disdain, as I mention, end up offering insights of great intensity
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regarding political life. Perhaps that is the case with the authors that you mention in your
questionHeidegger, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida, all of them are people whose work cannot be
directly classified as political, but who have nevertheless provided insights, more or less
indirect, which in many cases go further than their apparent intentions. I would say that
Heideggers work, for example, is not fascist in an organic manner, despite the catastrophic
personal fascistization of the author that lasted many years, and that Lacan is not as
conservative a gentleman as some suggest, and the writings of Derrida and Levinas, in
different ways, have yet to be politically exhausted in relation to any possible understanding
of the contemporary notion of democracy. In comparison with them, most political
scientists or political theorists, certainly during the twentieth century, appear lamentably poor
and narrow in spirit. There are exceptions, of course, but they tend to be exceptions that fall
within that rulethinkers like Hannah Arendt, Luce Irigaray or Wendy Brown, Miguel
Abensour or Claude Lefort, all figures with one leg or ear outside of the circumscribed
social-scientific disciplinary field. Another way of saying the same thing, perhaps, would be
to emphasize that what seems interesting today in the field of thought, at least for me, in
relation to politics, is not so much political thought as thought that seeks to question the
hyperbolic conditions of politics. This is not by chanceof course it has to do with the
general conditions for thought during the twentieth century, which we now inherit. They are
definable for me, taking as a point of departure what people like Althusser himself, and his
more astute followers, in the wake of Marx, or people like Roberto Esposito or Carlo Galli,
in the wake of Carl Schmitt, have termed implicitly or explicitly the conceptual end, that is,
the productive exhaustion of the political architectonics of modernity.
JAY: For some time now, your work has dealt with two key ideas, which we could say
constitute two separate research agendas, to use a concept from the theory of science,
namely, posthegemony and infrapolitics. Could you comment on their relation?
AM: Speaking of hyperbolic conditions, one of my earliest memories is how I gutted my
favorite toy, which was a model plane, I guess it must have been a Douglas or a Boeing,
which the Three Magi had brought me. That spring my parents took me to a pigeon
shooting contest in Vigos Aeroclub, but I soon lost interest in the killing because I was
much more fascinated by the two or three planes that came into or left the airport, which I
could see directly beyond the firing range. When I returned home I paid a visit to my friend
Fideln, with the purpose of finding out why my plane didnt fly like the ones at the airport. I
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couldnt think of anything other than borrowing the pliers that belonged to Fidelns dad and
setting to work. After much effort and great sadness, since, after all, it was my favorite toy, I
saw that the plane had a wooden ball inside (which was by that time all that remained usable
of the toy). I didnt know how to think of the connection between the ball and flying or not
flying, and I think that experience of perplexity and disenchantment, and of loss, ended up
causing a fixation of the fort-da type in me. I mean, it occurs to me that it could be like that,
and that therefore we could relate your question regarding infrapolitics and posthegemony to
this situation, for in the end both notions or figures are perhaps intuitively accessible as
conditions for flying and conditions for freedom. That is to say, neither infrapolitics nor
posthegemony are goals to be achieved, but conditions of life, or of practice, and of thought,
and one must reach them, perhaps, or if at all possible, through a certain labor of
destruction. They require, to enter into themselves, a certain destruction whose end result is
never assured. In my previous answer, I said that real politics is not usually found where it
seems to be but in a different place. Wherever it is, whoever finds it, neither infrapolitics nor
posthegemony claim to occupy that place; rather, they occupy the place that allows for
making the place of politics a question in each case. It is, of course, more complicated than it
seems, above all because once the necessity of that step back appears, that step back opens
another perspective, and then not even politics is a goal, and certainly not the privileged one.
But, since you ask about the relation between the two notions, we could begin by saying that
posthegemony is the intrapolitical transposition of what we have been calling infrapolitics. In
other words, infrapolitics is not politics, it is not a modality of politics, but an other
dimension of existence; yet if there is or if there were political infrapolitics, it would be
posthegemonic politics in the precise sense of an opposition to any understanding of politics
as a system of submission to hegemonic power qua hegemonic. It is, therefore, a
radicalization of the so-called demotic principle of democracy. Infrapolitics understands that
there is a region of existence, of existence in common, for which the political relation,
although it is far from exhausting it, is determining in every case, but it also tries to
understand that that political relation, as a region, is not exhaustive, does not consume or
map out the space of human existence. This already tells us, for now, that politics is no goal
at all, in any of its modalities, but is itself condition. To insist on posthegemony, in this
context, is to insist on the fact that there is a region of common facticity, a sort of
generalized state of things crossed by relations of exploitation and domination that any
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hegemony sanctions also factically. Posthegemony asks to live that state of things from a
certain distance, which is to refuse the naturalization of every system of exploitation and
domination. However, that refusal does not have a political naturalization either, that
distance does not belong to politics and is not founded upon it, for nothing in politics,
despite what Machiavelli claims, can be understood as mere abstention from participation in
the exploitation or domination of others. Therefore, infrapolitics is, to that extent, a
necessary conceptual correlate to the posthegemonic relation, or non-relation. We could say
that, even if there were infrapolitics without posthegemony, there is no posthegemony
without infrapolitics, but posthegemony is a political practice, that is, it is a mode of
inhabiting politics, whereas infrapolitics is rather the trace of a factico-temporal dimension
of existence which precedes (or sub-ceeds) and at the same time exceeds every political
determination.
Maddalena Cerrato: Infrapolitics points to a dimension of existence that exceeds both the
political and the ethical dimension, which does not allow itself to be exhausted either by the
two areas that have been understood since Aristotle as practical knowledge, or by their mere
sum; this is so because infrapolitics points to the excess, the non-subjective remainder of
experience, to the fact that not all experience falls within the subjectivist purview, not all
action can be redirected toward a structure of decision. In doing this, infrapolitics reveals the
aporetic condition of the political (which would be revealed also in the contradiction in
Althusser between the theory of hegemony and aleatory materialism) and the exhaustion of
the modern categories with which to think it, thus inaugurating the possibility of inhabiting
politics in an an-archic and non-subjective form, that is, making possible posthegemony as
a political practice. What happens with the ethical? Does infrapolitics also inaugurate the
possibility of thinking and inhabiting the ethical in an an-archic and non-subjective manner?
Would this be an ethics beyond the decision? And where would that lead? Who do you see
as your interlocutors in that path? Would Lacanian psychoanalysis have a privileged place in
it?
AM: I guess that we can say that the division of practical reason between ethics and politics
belongs still, or belongs essentially, to what Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism called
the technological interpretation of thought. That technological interpretation has a lot to
do with the Platonic-Aristotelian division between essence and existence, perhaps really
Helenistic in origin. The ethico-political relation would fall on the side of existence, but
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already from this fallen form of the division, and absolutely tied to the old metaphysical
humanism that saw the world as a mere projection of the subjectivity of the subject. For
metaphysical humanism, which is the master ideology that lives through us, the subjectivity
of the subject is the only horizon for thought and action. Thus, ethics has to be understood
necessarily as a rule of subjectivity or a field of subjective expression. From that
understanding, the ethico-political relation is subjected to the narrow predicament of
conceiving itself as predominantly ethical (in the person of the Kantian moral politician)
or predominantly political (in the person of the political moralist). The first attempts to
follow the law rather than his own convenience, while the second, the subject of radical evil,
does the opposite. But this determines our practical existence in a way that is too
reductivewe are above all good or evil, or we are indeterminately bad-and-good, and
politics is nothing but the field of action that justifies those appellations. Ethics, understood
as technics, can only correct modalities of political conduct. But already in that text
Heidegger is searching for an other thought that abandons subjectivity. The step back
from all of this, which the notion of infrapolitics announces and tries to think, is
consequently also a thought that takes a step back with regards to ethics, understood
technically. I wrote all I could about the mysterious and famous fragment by Heraclitus, ethos
anthropoi daimon, in my first book, Interpretacin y diferencia. I imagine that what was at stake for
me at that time was to begin thinking that step back. For Heraclitus, the ethos is neither law
nor a set of rules of conduct; rather, it is essentially dwelling and inhabiting, a way of being,
if we can venture that translation. In the concluding pages of his Letter, Heidegger comes
to speak of an originary ethics, although in the same paragraph he discards the term,
because for him it was no longer a matter of rescuing old metaphysical terms, with their
equivocal chronology and temporalization. If that originary ethics, assuming that we put
the first of those two words under erasure, promises a step back, promises the restitution of
a thought that is no longer techno-conceptual, no longer crossed by the techno-ontological
differentiation between essence and existence, we should understand that such a promise is
nothing but the possibility of a difficult and destitute exercise that has no end. The word
exercise can be useful if we understand it etymologically, from ex-arcare, unearthing what is
hidden, un-secreting. Let us say, then, as provisional as it might result, that infrapolitics is an
exercise in this senseit seeks an exodus with regard to the technological ethico-political
relation, it seek its un-secreting destruction, in order to liberate an other existential practice. I
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would not have any problem in using in this context an expression I have used elsewhere,
that of savage moralism. Infrapolitics, in its reflexive condition, is an exercise in savage
moralism, anti-political and anti-ethical, since it requires an exodus with regard to the
subjective prison that constitutes an ethico-political relation ideologically imposed on us as a
consequence of metaphysical humanism. Yes, that savage step back with regards to the
ethico-political relation is an-archic, because it does not submit to any principle. And I
harbor little doubt that it is possible that some kind of Lacanian or post-Lacanian analysis
can serve to think it in its radical poverty.
ngel Octavio Alvares Sols: In some of your work, particularly in Lnea de sombra, you
point to the possibility of a politics without a subject. A politics without a subject avoids the
excess of subjectivity that comes with the arrival of the other and, by extension, makes
possible a non onto-theological politics. Nevertheless, recently your work has taken an
infrapolitical turn in which experience and existence appear as a space for a savage
moralism, a space for avoiding the subjective and subjectivizing dimension of ethics. Is an
ethic without subject possible? Is infrapolitics the anticommunitarian correlate of infraethics?
AM: Allow me to clarify that I dont believe I have ever proposed a politics without a
subject and, in any case, certainly not in order to settle the problem of the other by
eradicating it from the start. What I was after in Lnea de sombra was a dismantling of the odd
equation that identifies the political field with the field of subjectivity, as if the subject were
the final horizon of politics. To say that there is politics also and immediately beyond the
subject, that there is politics beyond any figure of subjectivity, even if there is, of course, a
role for the political subject at the same time, this seems so scandalous that even today it is
cause for all sorts of misunderstandings and confusions. Yet what exceeds the activity of
politics with regard to the subject is everywhere and is, in fact, much more overwhelmingly
self-evident than the nave notion according to which politics is always what the subject
wants and seeks. For my part, I confess that I dont understand why there are so many
misunderstanding regarding this point. Or in any case, I should think that the constant
misunderstanding is already proof of the ideological consecration of opting for the subject in
politics. That our late modernity insists on making subjectivity and action coincide is, of
course, consistent with the reluctant Cartesianism that still inspires our world, even when no
one believes in it by now. But what one believes doesnt matter, what matters is that one
kneel before the altar. And that is a busy altar, it looks like a bar. I think that what you call a
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turn with regards to Lnea de sombra is in fact not the case. Lnea de sombra is a book written
against political philosophy, and from a certain deconstructive subalternism to which I
sought to give some rigor. What has come after it, very slowly in terms of written
production, for biographical reasons that are not irrelevant in this evolution, is an
abandonment of politics as a primary thematic in my work, but it is a special kind of
abandonment: it establishes itself as a critique of politics. It abandons politics in so far as it is
a critique of politics and thus rather than depoliticize it hiperpoliticizes.
Though it
hiperpoliticizes not according to a new political will, but precisely in accord with an
existential exodus that I understand as infrapolitical exercise. This existential exodus has
consequences at every level, and each one will have to decide if these consequences are to
their liking or not. The classic figures are those of retreat, refusal, abandonment, not by
virtue of a quietist or contemplative path, but in relation with a possible radicalization of
existential intensities, which in our world only find vulgar substitutions or ridiculous
placebos. It is clear that the infrapolitical exercise is countercommunitarian, and that it does
not seek any unifying subjectivizing process of the multitude la Badiou or Rancire, Negri
or Laclau (whose theories of politics seem to me ultimately consistent with the Cartesianism
I was just alluding to). Clearly, it is not a question of proposing an opposition between a
politics of more or less dirty hands and an ethics of more or less clean hands, but of not
giving a damn about either of the two options. Politics is a massive factum in our lives,
which are traversed by it in ways that far surpass our control; but ethics, in our time, and
without entering into what it might have been in other epochs, is either farce, pretense and
deceit (in so far as it is based on by now untenable faiths) or it is just pragmatic opportunism
(a series of rules that it is convenient to follow in order to get along with friends, at work, or
in the street). So there is no infraethics; ethics is always already fallen below itself. It is
interesting but pathetic how ethics (as farce, pretense and deceit) is offered in a generalized
and unquestioned manner as, for the most part, the obvious justification for the politics of
the left in the academic world. Saying that can cost you your head, if you still care about
having one or are still carrying it (not me). In short, no, there is no infraethics because there
is no ethics, and in turn, there is infrapolitics because there is politics. It is important to be
precise regarding savage moralism; it is not a new ethics, nothing of that sort. It is what
befalls in a situation in which neither politics nor ethics are instances for an interesting
praxis. Savage moralism is not a goal but a procedure, not a theology but a phenomenology,
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and the formation of style, without which there is no existential intensity, depends on its
specific forms in each case. This is why it is still possible to say that savage moralism is a
hyperbolic condition of democracy, hence of the only possible politics we should care for.
AOAS: Literature in greater measure and cinema to a lesser extent are a constant presence
in your writing. Yet this interest has been traversed by a preeminent concern with theory:
literary theory as a modality of critical theory. Based on your way of writing, specifically in
your latest texts and conferences, is there a critical nexus between autography and
infrapolitical literature? If there is an infrapolitical cinema, what kind of images or what kind
of thought about the image does infrapolitics produce?
AM: In fact, I have written what I have been able to on literature, but very little on film,
even though I watch movies every day and incessantly. I imagine that I have the right to
pose the question differently in order to be able to answer it. I dont think that there is in all
rigor infrapolitical literature or infrapolitical cinema or anything of the sortthere are ways
of approaching experience that can allow us to say, for example, that Gogol is closer to
infrapolitics than Gorki, or Proust closer than Brecht, or Beckett closer than Faulkner.
Without a doubt, one could extend that exercise to the whole of the western canon. We
could say that Don Quijote is an infrapolitical book, and La Celestina also, but not particularly
War and Peace or Demons. The Czanne of the Mount St-Victoire series is an example of
infrapolitical practice on the visible. Or the Velzquez of La mulata at the Art Institute of
Chicago. As far as film goes, certainly the work of Ral Ruiz is infrapolitical reflection, but
with moments of intensity that vary quite a bit. His Potica del cine could be understood as a
manual for infrapolitical cinema, couldnt it? Albert Serra is infrapolitical also, but not so
much Bernardo Bertolucci. Laura Poitrass documentaries are, in a sense, infrapolitical.
However, what matters is not that we create a new canon, but that, in order for these kinds
of judgments to make sense, we change the way that we read. And the way that we read is
always autographic. And autography changes, it moves. I have spent most of my life
believing erroneously that the university is a friend to thought, and it is only recently that I
have come to understand that this is not the case, that today the university is rather the
enemy of thought, that it is necessary to think against the university, without negating the
benefits we can garner from working in it. I always thought that, in any given field, the
absolute priority was to take that field to its limit, only in order to realize very late that the
professional field is nothing but a roost whose denizens seek constantly to reproduce in the
155
same form. I always believed that deep personal and institutional loyalty was a respectable
moral value, until I found out that, if it is, it is so only for a few unhappy ones. The
philosophical figure that interests me is that of the stranger in Platos Parmenides, whom I
imagine as the archetypal infrapolitical being, for whom there is no thought that is not
autographic, precisely to the extent that his personal experience does not count and does not
prevail. The stranger comes from other places above all because he is always on his way
elsewhere, and this movement defines his freedom, unshareable, dangerous and so much
more valuable in so far as it is the only conceivable dimension of real experience. To read
others always as the stranger, to live narrated existence vicariously as the strangerthat is
the best lesson of theoretical critique. And in comparison, banalities related to things like the
eternal and interminable gloss of the novel from a particular country, or the poetry of such
and such a generation, not to mention culture here or there, have little traction. I am not
saying that these things are not necessary, or that there isnt a market or a desire for them.
But it is not my desire. And it is less so every day. The other day in a discussion someone
was telling me that in the US I am not white, but also that I could not usurp the person of
color denomination. Then, if I am not white nor a person of color, I dont exist, or I only
exist as abjection, I am a stranger at the borderline. Instead of lamenting it too much, I have
to opt for making a virtue of such a paradoxical necessity, which was somehow chosen for
me beyond any voluntary choice, and which also belongs to those non-subjectivizable
conditions of my life.
Sometimes we prefer to act as if our lives were perfectly
homologizable to those of others, but I believe one must have the courage to realize that this
is not the case. Perhaps that is the first commandment of the infrapolitical catechism,
because all others follow from it, whatever they might be.
Sam Steinberg: In your writing I have found a certain resistance to canonization, or, to take
up the term you used above, a certain intransigent task of demetaphorizationand I say this
in a way that is necessarily equivocal and even foolish and navewhich is governed, to say
it somewhat ironically, by the development of different names that serve as a conceptual
reserve against the instrumental capture of thought: third space, subalternity (at least in the
sense you give it), posthegemony, infrapolitics, up to deconstructive practice (different from
that practiced in Comparative Literature departments in the US). Do you identify with this
pseudo-genealogy?
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AM: Yes, those terms, and others that you do not mention, but among which are many that
once were my favorites, I dont know, such as dirty atopism, or critical regionalism, or
second order, I guess they are at once something like milestones in my itinerary and
concentrations of desire, indifferently. Bergson used to say that no one gets to really think
more than one idea, and that it is possible to spend an entire life thinking only to find out in
the end, if you are lucky, that everything that was done goes to configure it. Maybe it is not
true, maybe there are two or even three idea people around, perhaps even the occasional
Don Juan of ideas who can have them all or buy them by the dozen; I have known some of
those. In my case, I think that it is true that I never stopped thinking the same thing, without
ever realizing what it could be. In other words, everything I write or say in my classes or
meetings or papers are stubborn approaches to the same thingI can glimpse enough of it
now to understand it is this way. Certainly the terms condensed in those constellations that
you mention are so many fleeting fetishes that are nevertheless indispensable for my own
mental economy, and which after a time become useless and have to be renewed.
Meanwhile, the truth is that nothing produces more solitary excitement than hitting upon
one of those terms shining from the bottom of some drawer or some nook of the soul, as a
Zahir that only the one who possesses it can feel as such, and which remains opaque or even
irritating for others. It all depends on the kind of intellectual one has wanted to be. I dont
think that I am or have wanted to be an organic intellectual or to militate in the name of any
cause, that I am a specific intellectual or an intellectual of the state, that I can consider
myself an academic intellectual except in an unbelieving and uncomfortable way, that I am
an identitarian or that I enjoy unconditionally adhering to this or that. I am not even a
specialist in anything. I have to entertain myself by allowing some stranger to arrive, perhaps
a word that is usually announced by other words, and I honor it with a good meal and a glass
of wine. That is why I like conversation. That has always been my problemI like to talk to
people that may not like to listen to me, I like to offer little nave gifts that are sometimes
received as shots. I get peoples ears mixed up oftenbut then maybe not. But I havent
learned to domesticate my own tongue and to silence myself in the way that so many others
keep quiet, which is by repeating what others say. In all modesty. The devil knows what it
takes. But la procesin va por dentro and in the end, the important thing is to enjoy what one
does.
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SS: As it is always the case, one never finishes all the books that one should write or has to
write or wants to write. What are Moreirass unpublished books? And I am not only
referring to future books (though I am also referring to those), but to those books that were
left behind. I am thinking, for example, about a book on the narco. Where do you locate
those books, from the past as well as the future, in the intellectual map?
AM: Thanks for the question, though I am going to blame you for the forced narcissism of
the answer. Hell is cobbled with books that were left behind, and the truth is that it is a good
place for them. The regime of intellectual production in which we live hypocritically wants
that our publications proliferate on the basis of some vague appeal to competitive
excellencein which, moreover, no one, or no one in the administration, believes. For every
iek or Derrida, capable of writing several books a year, and of making all the rest of us
bite the dust, there are dozens of colleagues, excellent as they may be, from whom it is
perhaps not advisable to ask that they write more than one book every fifteen or twenty
years. I am not either iek of Derrida, and so everything that has been left behind deserves
to have been left behind. The sorry fact, but there it is, is that I began my professional life
mistakenly, I chose wrongly, with the wrong foot, for reasons that are hard to explain (Ill
leave it for one of those books that I will never write), and I had to take on the responsibility
of forming students, from the very beginning, for a career in an academic field that has
inspired little personal interest in me, no particular passion (I dont think this is a mystery).
For the last thirty years, I have carried that like a bird hanging from my neck, after the
novelty wore off, the mere curiosity. But it was too late. Now, on the one hand, it could well
be that the world is thankful for my relatively low, or, at best, medium rate of production.
On the other, it is true that only recently (I can date it precisely: since July 2012) have I
begun to think that there are books that I would like to write, and which are starting to
knock at the doorstrictly because now I no longer feel tied to any institutionally
recognized professional field, and so I will never again write under a relative obligation to do
so. Until now, truth be told, this has been a difficult issue. So, in addition to Piel de lobo,
which will be published in Madrid this year, I have about five more or so in preparation,
each one is semi-secret, and I hope to finish them all in two years (which, of course, wont
happen). Then, I would like to write a book, I dont know, on the Marquis de Sade, and
another on Antonio Gramsci, and another one on my favorite contemporary Spanish
writers, Juan Benet and Javier Maras. And I have promised to write one on the infrapolitical
158
cinema of Ral Ruiz. But I am sure that, among all of these that I just mentioned, perhaps
Ill only write one or two, and that in turn other themes will emerge. What I do believe that I
will be able to do, now that I have decided not to move anymore and to decline any
invitation that would distract me, will be to write one book every year or year and a half,
until my time comes to watch movies and read detective novels per omnia saecula saeculorum.
Or perhaps not.

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Transmodernity

JAIME RODRGUEZ MATOS

| Rodrguez Matos, J. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

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| Rodrguez Matos, J. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

apparatus of domination can no longer assume a number of things:

| Rodrguez Matos, J. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

| Rodrguez Matos, J. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

Moreiras, Alberto. Introduction: From Locational Thinking to Dirty Atopianism.

Infrapolitics: the Project and its Politics. Allegory and Denarrativization.

| Moreiras, A. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

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misunderstandings, I am already slightly misplacedthis is a Conference on political

| Moreiras, A. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

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neoliberal avatar, and ceased to be particularly interesting as a usable institution, except in

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rather as the criteria for a task to be accomplished. (190)

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ground, in politics, contradicting what you say about my supposed abandonment of

| Moreiras, A. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

true counter-systemic counter-violence. I believe that one of the consequences of Del

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Alemn, Jorge. Apuntes sobre la emancipacin. Eldiario.es 28 March, 2015. Web.

| Moreiras, A. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

Chilean State, 1906-2001. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.

| Moreiras, A. Transmodernity (Spring 2015)

Nihilism and the Deconstruction of Time: Notes toward Infrapolitics

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The general horizon of the era is communist. . . . But at this moment it is

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