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Exordium Extinction and Everyday Infrapolitics

Did you hear what I just said? Is my English OK? Is the microphone on? Because I’m beginning to wonder.

—GRETA THUNBERG, “YOU DID NOT ACT IN TIME”

This book proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant conceptual determinations and violent symptoms of globalization, to make a case for the “infrapolitical” as a thinking and acting to come. For this reason, while still at a preliminary detachment from the principal corpus of this work, I begin by offering the reader a brief illustration of the innermost relation between infrapolitics and the everyday language of contemporary turmoil, anxiety, and disquiet.¹ The Introduction that ensues from this exordium will then offer a more comprehensive account of recent debates around the importance and relevance of infrapolitical thinking for our times.

What follows, then, is merely one initial example among countless others, since the infrapolitical only ever registers and strives to account for the most quotidian of sayings and experiences, while doing so in their most uncanny proximity and estrangement. The preliminary illustration of the contemporary infrapolitical, then, is the following.

In the context of the “Extinction Rebellion,” which occupied and disrupted the streets of central London for more than a week in April 2019, the then sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg stood in public before a microphone, admonished the political classes for having failed, and wondered out loud whether she was isolated in public, speaking in the absence of all interlocution, or whether her words actually touched upon a commonality of some sort, thereby staging the very question of the proximity to, and of the distance from, the existence of a social bond. It was not the first time she had embraced the classical form of parrhesia, and it will most likely not be the last.²

In Thunberg’s public interventions the politics of contemporary global capital is portrayed as a race to the bottom of reason itself, played out in the wake of the subordination of all thinking and living to the economized relation between means and ends, a relation that, thanks to the overall mastery of contemporary technicity, has brought humanity and the planet to the threshold of potential existential collapse. We can discern that for the young Swede political, economic, technological, and historical business as usual merely serves to conceal the underlying and ongoing question of existence and, as such, of Being.

In order to get the point across that what is needed is a passage toward alternative ways of thinking and acting, Thunberg renders the previously inconspicuous conspicuous by placing the routine political calculations internal to capitalism in another light, reconverting the familiarity and ordinariness of home, for example, into the unfamiliar ground of an existential conflagration: “I don’t want your hope…. I want you to panic…. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is,” as she said at Davos in January 2019. The simplicity of her formulations indicates a potentially complex hermeneutic operation: She simultaneously upholds a figurative order of experience (“I want you to act as if the house is on fire”) and immediately destroys the legitimacy of the figuration itself (“because it is”), thereby imploring that the political classes quit storytelling and get real for once. She overturns the apparently commonplace and the insignificant (the signifier “house”) by daring to place the question of extinction—and therefore of finitude and death—at the heart of contemporary concerns. Thunberg does not address such ontological questions explicitly. Rather, they are implicit in her overall concern as part and parcel of everything she communicates at such moments. They are at the heart of the distress she voices as she unveils the political, or at least the neoliberal politics of global resource extraction extended in the name of accumulation at all costs, as the only form of life available to humanity, as the active concealment and oblivion of all fundamental existential concerns.

Of course, entire communities throughout the world have been saying exactly the same thing for decades but were never allowed access to Davos or central London. But that is a slightly different, though no less significant, question. What is noteworthy for us now is that through Thunberg’s perception, language, and persona we encounter the two intertwined registers not of the political but of what precedes and underlies it, namely, the “infrapolitical.” The first register is sociological and everyday (or ontic). But this everyday is also precisely the place where the second register is posited and, in its positing, breached from within, uncovering in the process an ontological relation to the question of Being (of ek-sistence) itself.

In his 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger recuperated Aristotle’s De partibus animalium in relation to a tale told regarding the philosopher Heraclitus: “The story is told of something Heraclitus said to some strangers who wanted to come visit him. Having arrived, they saw him warming himself at a stove. Surprised, they stood there in consternation—above all because he encouraged them, the astounded ones, and called to them to come in, with the words, ‘For here too the gods are present’” (Aristotle, quoted in Heidegger, 269–70). For Heidegger Heraclitus is telling his visitors that “‘even here,’ at the stove, in that ordinary place where every thing and every circumstance, each deed and thought is intimate and commonplace, that is, familiar, ‘even there’ in the sphere of the familiar … it is the case that ‘the gods come to presence’” (270). For Heidegger the most familiar, ordinary, and commonplace (that is, the ontic) is the very dwelling place of the question of Being. But, Heidegger asks, “can we obtain from such knowledge directives that can be readily applied to our active lives?” (272). The answer is no: Such knowledge is not necessarily conducive to any particular form of act or order of decision, since it “is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of being and nothing else…. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. But it is by saying its matter…. For it lets being—be” (272).

Similarly, in the specific context of Greta Thunberg’s concern for the question of the place of human dwelling expressed at the Extinction Rebellion of 2019 and elsewhere, we merely encounter an a-principial, infrapolitical recollection of being and nothing else, little more than a call, by saying its matter, to let being be in a way that it is not being allowed to be. This call extends itself along two simultaneous and adjoining transmissions, which together comprise the touch or trace of the infrapolitical register in thinking. Allow me to explain more explicitly.

1. Thunberg is, like me and most likely like you the reader, neither a politician nor a Philosopher and, like everybody else on a daily basis, is not political to the extent that she speaks neither entirely nor exclusively from within the calculations of the technical relation between means, ends, subjects, and specific processes of political subjectification. In other words, aside from the fact that she does not have the right to vote, she does not “do politics,” and her discourse is not subordinated to any preordained ideological principle, grammar, belief system, or conceptual origin (arche). Neither does this mean, however, that she is or that her words are depoliticized, apolitical, postpolitical, biopolitical, or merely unthoughtful. Her words, while certainly unpretentious sayings, are more than mere doxa, since against doxa she upholds at all times the contemporary episteme of climate science, which, it must be said, is not necessarily independent from the contemporary global technocracy that reigns supreme in its myriad forms of calculation, instrumentalization, and value extraction. But perhaps more significant at this point is the fact that Thunberg insists on safeguarding in her words a distance from all reigning forms of political calculation and power brokering. She does this in order to speak freely, in such a way as to tell a few home truths about the epoch that is ours and about the community of beings that dwell in it, existing fully estranged from it. If it were not for that incalculable yet most commonplace distance from political calculation, which is, however, a distance that only ever touches upon the ambit of every political calculation, she would be just another bureaucrat of the given, just another political “talking head,” media, or university subject in search of reinstating or of finding a way to live just a little more comfortably in the shadow of a given and fully accepted master discourse. But at this point in her life Thunberg steers clear of anticipating a new master, sovereign power, reparative metaphor, unifying world picture, thetic order, or specific “way of life.” She does not offer a healing or promise of any kind, merely a distance that nevertheless touches upon the political from afar. This distant yet most intimate touch is what makes her words infrapolitical rather than political per se. She is not interested in the technicalities of any particular form of belonging in contrast to others or in defining or advancing the essence of a particular form of community. Like so many who have come before her and who have been ignored or disposed of accordingly, she merely implores that we as beings lend an ear and take a decision in light of existence and in the face of an increasingly conspicuous finality of sorts. The distance that is marked so necessarily by Thunberg offers not the parameters or conditions of a specific political hegemony, counterhegemony, subjectivity, process of subjectification, or essence of community for the future but merely the democratic language of an underlying nonconformity that she extends before the practitioners of a politics that only ever administers (and with increasing force and increasing impunity) the means of global value extraction and, therefore, ultimately of devastation. For this reason, the “Extinction Rebellion,” which cannot be considered to be explicitly “Marxist” in either formation or performativity, is nevertheless a street-level injunction against the translation of life into the social codes of commodification alone. In an era in which the ontology of the commodity form has saturated all recognizable forms of life and death, the “Extinction Rebellion” is an act sustained from within an infrahegemonic, or infrapolitical, register.³ A turn toward the underlying postulation of existence is required, Thunberg suggests, in such a way as to concern itself with the relation between human and world. She merely asks that we let this turn come and that we do so by showing, and sustaining, a concern for the beingness of beings. This is a concern regarding the ruin wreaked by climate breakdown, certainly, but presumably it must also pass through the question of fundamental ontology, that is, through the question of the Being of human being. This would no longer be just a question of specific ways or concepts of life folded into the political, such as the conceptualization of the distinction between ordered social life and biological life, of bios and zoe, but of that which precedes both: that is, an infrapolitical thinking in light of the question of Being. Whether such a thing is possible is only ever an open question, dependent upon what Jean-Luc Nancy has referred to as a “decision of existence,” an order of decision that is incompatible with the metaphysical principle of subjective certainty and all the common forms of politics that accompany it.

2. This leads us to the second, less explicit yet perhaps no less urgent register that underlies Greta Thunberg’s words regarding the reality and politics of climate breakdown specifically but that also gives voice to the ontological concern for whether home, or human dwelling, could one day indicate something other than the brutal place for the absolutist commodification, and therefore objectification, of the living. The ontological presupposition in Thunberg’s concerns—which is essentially a concern for the inheritance of technologically driven death production—leads us inevitably back in the direction of Martin Heidegger’s reservations regarding Jean Beaufret’s query to him in the wake of World War II: “How can we restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’?” (“Letter,” 241). Heidegger’s response is that in the face of the technicity of reason, of what it brings to presence for thinking and the ways it goes about doing so, perhaps it is best not to restore but to learn to relinquish every facet of humanist metaphysics: “This question proceeds from your intention to retain the word ‘humanism.’ I wonder whether that is necessary. Or is the damage caused by all such terms still not sufficiently obvious?” (241). The industrialized atrocity of world war, in other words, was for Heidegger a humanism to the extent that it was a military reduction of the subjectification and objectification of humanity, of what it meant to be human, unleashed from within the modern telos of planetary technology. The damage Heidegger refers to is that of a “state of affairs in which language under the domination of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its element. Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of the truth of being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings” (243). The current state of affairs shows us that while the topographies of technological domination and exploitation have shifted drastically in recent decades, little if anything has changed in the apparent limitlessness of the planetary expansion and mastery of techne. Like the vast majority of us, Greta Thunberg is clearly not Heideggerian. There is no reason for her to be, and Heidegger would most likely be as concerned with climate science as he was with the metaphysics and instrumentalization of techne in general. But for now, that is a slightly different matter. Having said that, Thunberg’s words can certainly be considered an illusionless response to the subordination of all social language to the modern politics of will and subjectivity, which now, more than ever, comes to the fore as a destructive instrument of economic and existential command over beings and over the planet they inhabit. Neither is Greta Thunberg a Marxist, and she most likely cares little for the historical difference between “Left” and “Right.” From within the legitimacy of her concern, however, she clearly appears to call for a transformative inception of sorts or at least for a clearing away of obstacles in current thinking and acting that might allow for such a thing. Paraphrasing Heidegger in the wake of World War II, learning to relinquish the metaphysics of humanism just might be an invitation to consider how one can perceive and think in such a way that we let being in its mortality, rather than in its technological reproduction as everyday humanist subjectivism and planetary destruction, be. If “thinking acts insofar as it thinks” and “lets itself be claimed by being so that it can say the truth of being,” and if “thinking accomplishes this letting” (Heidegger, “Letter,” 239), then perhaps we can conjecture that Thunberg’s unannounced yet primary concern is with the potential accomplishment of a thinking and acting that allows itself to be claimed by Being. Such a thinking might be entirely other than what we have, and indeed it might be what we have never had, but if it were to come into view at the threshold that is our common lot, it might come to dwell within the language of being in the same way “clouds are the clouds of the sky” (276). Such might be the conceptual urgency that touches upon the existential finitude that has been announced with utmost clarity by this adolescent of the post–Cold War and post-9/11 world. In his prominent 1946 essay, Heidegger observes that “the talk about the house of being is not the transfer of the image ‘house’ onto being” (272). In other words, it is not merely a question of translating the ontic into the ontological and have done with it in the name of achieving specific and practical knowledge regarding Being and acting. Rather, it is a matter of clearing a way for thinking and for positing the question of acting via the uncanny relation of the two transmissions in question, that is, being-with as the ontological difference between, say, the turmoil of planetary extinction and the most intimate, familiar, and commonplace, such as warming oneself by the stove or the unembellished expressions of an unpolitical adolescent. But such a perception and thinking, for Heidegger at least, can only be preparatory: “One day we will, by thinking the essence of being in a way appropriate to its matter, more readily be able to think what ‘house’ and ‘dwelling’ are” (272). On numerous occasions Thunberg has told the political and economic powers that be that they did not act in time, that it is too late, that the Enlightenment ratio by which they have existed and by which they still insist on existing—that is, the willful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity—is catastrophic, since therein ending is fashioned and manufactured internally to the technocratic calculations of domination rather than being what merely comes to pass to the living in their being. In the wake of the events of 1968, Jacques Lacan said something strikingly similar regarding the destructive force of what he called the capitalist discourse. It is too late, he said. Herein lies the urgency of demarcating an infrapolitical passage to let being say its matter, in such a way as to let the ontological difference (or ek-sistence) be, at a distance from the forms of life generated and determined by the political.

These two intertwined transmissions of the infrapolitical register in thinking and saying—the everyday ontic, or sociological, distance from the modern metaphysics of subjectivity and the technical calculations of sovereignty, in conjunction with that distance’s simultaneous touch upon a thinking of being uncaptured by the ontology of commodity fetishism—are the point of departure for Infrapolitical Passages.

This is not, however, a work about climate collapse or the Anthropocene specifically. It is, rather, a modest invitation to consider just some of the sociohistorical consequences and conceptual passages that might yet remain, as “inconspicuous furrows in language” (276), after having passed a historical and conceptual limit or point of no return (that is, global capital as the “total subsumption” [Balibar, “Towards a New Critique of Political Economy”] of all forms of human and planetary life). It is this passing that concerns us now in the form of capital opened up fully to the extinction that it has always carried within itself.

My insistence on referencing Martin Heidegger writing, responding to, and essentially using Jean Beaufret in the wake of World War II, and this in the context of Greta Thunberg’s speech on climate breakdown and the threshold of existential collapse at the Extinction Rebellion in April 2019, is not happenstance. After all, the point of mediation between the two instances is what Jacques Derrida referred to in 2005 as the concept “of the ‘world’ or of the end of a world (in globalization [mondialisation] and in world war), and especially that of ‘war,’ a wholly other end of war that we are perhaps living at this very moment, an end of war, the end of the very concept of war, of the European concept, the juridical concept, of war (of every war: war between nation-states, civil war, and even what [Carl] Schmitt calls ‘partisan war’” (Rogues, 123). In the 1930s Heidegger had already referenced the dilemma in question as “the disappearance of the distinction between war and peace,” adding that as a result “nothing remains any longer in which the hitherto accustomed world of humankind could be salvaged; nothing of what has gone before offers itself as something that could still be erected as a goal for the accustomed self-securing of human beings” (The History of Beyng, 154).

This leads us to the second point of mediation between the two instances and languages in question, namely, the question of intellectual responsibility in the face of globalization as a tumultuous world of war, as much as in world war. It is, of course, well documented how despicably Heidegger fared in this regard.⁴ On the other hand, it is precisely the end of the juridical concept of war that upholds the relation between the end of world war, the planetary devastation of the present under the auspices of a world of endemic war, infrapolitical actions such as those of the Extinction Rebellion, and the everyday language of Greta Thunberg and of millions of others.

For Derrida, in his incessant distancing from Heidegger’s Nazi commitment, the stakes and responsibility unveiled by the end of the concept of war “appear inseparable, in fact, from the future of reason, that is, of philosophy, everywhere that the concepts of international law, nation-state sovereignty, or sovereignty in general, tremble from this tremor that is so confusedly called “globalization” [mondialisation])” (Rogues, 124).⁵ Likewise, Infrapolitical Passages is an attempt to contribute, from within the neoliberal university, which is as deficient in this regard as it was in the 1930s, to the question of the inseparable relation between existence, responsibility, and the future of reason. The extent to which this endeavor fails or succeeds is an entirely different matter.