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Оглавление| Introduction |
The horse of thought … that imagines itself for a while to be the one that pulls the stagecoach of history, all of a sudden rears up, runs wild, then falls down.
—JACQUES LACAN, Anxiety
Here too corruption spreads its peculiar and emphatic odours And Life lurks, evil, out of its epoch.
—W. H. AUDEN AND CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD,
The Dog Beneath the Skin
Every designation is already a step toward interpretation. Perhaps we need to retrace this step again.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Nietzsche, VOL. 4
All scientific and commonsense indicators suggest that for some time now we have been taking leave of, or bidding farewell in somnambulistic fashion to, the conceptual and institutional legacies of the modern. Faith in the relation between the modern production of wealth in the form of commodity fetishism, capitalist development, human progress, the freedom of the subject, and the philosophy of history that has anchored all of them since the Enlightenment is succumbing before a generalized sense of expiration and of growing stupefaction. It is becoming patently clear that people of all political and nonpolitical persuasions now have to confront the fact that progress “can no longer serve as the standard by which to evaluate the disastrously rapid change-processes we have let loose,” as Hannah Arendt put it back in 1972 (Crises of the Republic, 132).
Almost half a century later Alain Badiou has echoed Arendt’s concerns. In The True Life (2017), the philosopher of the communist hypothesis observes that “everybody talks about ‘the crisis’ today. People sometimes think it’s the crisis of modern finance capitalism. But it’s not. Not at all! Capitalism is expanding rapidly all over the world” (30). For Badiou the current predicament is the direct consequence of the contemporary world having accomplished the full consummation of modernity’s “abandonment of tradition.” This definitive relinquishment, he says, is provoking a gigantic and irresistible collapse in humanity’s symbolic organization, in which the mandate to “Live with this Idea and no other” of traditional society has been overrun by that of the contemporary mandate to “Live without any Ideas” (86). This immediate diagnosis is worthy of further consideration, for here an invisible historical limit has been passed, and in the face of constant variation and flux, rather than in the movement of a specific orientation, Badiou laments the fact that “we don’t know what the positive side of this destruction or negation is” (28).
This reference to the positive side of our times is where our questioning begins. Badiou suggests that our only legitimate task is to struggle against the finitude and perplexity—against the uneasy sense of a perishing—that the crossing of a certain limit appears to have brought into full view but that remains beyond any definitive meaningfulness, representation, and therefore understanding. Contrary to every attendant understanding of finitude, Badiou proposes the extension and application of a new directive principle—the true life, communist militancy, the subjectivation of a new subjectivity—which he strives to bolster and legitimize as the definitive Platonic solution to the current historical and social predicament. Something strikingly similar occurs in his book The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2012), in which he seeks to attend to the significance of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. Here Badiou opens his reflection by giving voice to an inaugural sense of anxiety:
What is going on? Of what are we the half-fascinated, half-devastated witnesses? The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world? What is happening to us in the early years of the century—something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language? (1)
What is at stake in the opening lines of The Rebirth of History is the determination of a question for the meaningfulness of contemporary social up heaval. This leads to the question of how to conceptualize collective action in a “weary world” in which any transitional time appears to have succumbed in the face of a relation of utter indeterminacy between “end,” “continuation,” and “advent,” a phenomenon that indicates that our age, which is no longer that of modern Revolution, is characterized by an increasing inability to distinguish clearly between eschatology and the entire planetary infrastructure of capitalist development, or value extraction.
Having said that, the title of Badiou’s 2012 work indicates that he seeks nothing less than the definitive closure of the exhaustion of significations and the subordination of all thinking to the expediency of that closure, the conditions and determinations of which the author has already decided upon. Just for a minute, Badiou invites us to linger on the tragic condition of the contemporary as an incommensurable theoretical and practical experience of expropriation and abandonment. However, his point of departure is also that we get over that condition immediately and move in the direction of the commencement of a new political story, toward the manufacturing of a new epochality, of a new empowerment and uniformity of value guided by “the urgency of a reformulated ideological principle, a powerful idea, a pivotal hypothesis … a new figure of organization and hence of politics. So that the political day which follows the reawakening of History is likewise a new day. So that tomorrow is genuinely different from today” (42). For this reason, rebirth and the closure of the “weary world” are not only synonyms in Badiou’s questions regarding “what is going on” but appear to be absolutely necessary preconditions for pulling the shutters down definitively over the anxiety that had produced the question regarding contemporary turmoil in the first place. “This is the state of historical, political, and existential disarray in which we find ourselves; now get over it!” Badiou seems to want to say in The Rebirth of History. What the book uncovers, therefore, is the fact that anxiety—“What is going on? Of what are we the half-fascinated, half-devastated witnesses?”—should be actively concealed when considering contemporary patterns of political action and social turmoil. Badiou seeks to inhibit the movement of disarray, demise, and collapse via the rediscovery and extension of doctrinal militancy.1
There is certainly much with which to concur in Badiou’s political analysis of the contemporary, which is for the most part resolute and incisive. However, his categorization of the prepolitical forms of contemporary riot and uprising (immediate riot, latent riot, and historical riot) are entirely predetermined in terms of their relation to a transitional understanding of history and to the current absence of a countercapitalist Idea (21).2 His gestures toward the (in)existence of those who find themselves in but not of the fallen world of globalization are fundamental to our understanding of the question of riot now, though these gestures remain essentially anthropological in their deployment because they are grounded largely in doxa.3
But it is in relation to the question of epochality and to the absolute suture of the contemporary phenomenon of riot not only to the demand for a process of subjectification grounded in doctrinal fidelity to the “Idea”—the “communist hypothesis”—but also to an unmovable principle of historical predetermination that The Rebirth of History raises questions. Indeed, this is the case to such a degree that the self-confident pronouncement that “riot is the guardian of the history of emancipation in intervallic periods” (41) ends up resonating like an article of faith manufactured to guarantee the closure of the anxiety that had opened up the question of the contemporary in the first place, while in the process also grounding the subjectification of the subject as the sole placeholder of meaningfulness and sense-making throughout modern and contemporary history.
How, then, does Badiou reckon with time in such a way as to go about manufacturing the rebirth of history? In this endeavor, the question of the “intervallic period” becomes central. The “intervallic period” is a specific locus in time akin to the transitional time and experience of the interregnum. However, it applies not to the death of a certain form of sovereignty but to a latent protosovereign form for the future:
What is an intervallic period? It is what comes after a period in which the revolutionary conception of political action has been sufficiently clarified that, notwithstanding the ferocious internal struggles punctuating its development, it is explicitly presented as an alternative to the dominant world, and on this basis has secured massive, disciplined support. In an intervallic period, by contrast, the revolutionary idea of the preceding period … is dormant. (38–39)
The “intervallic” is a moment of latency in the history of modern representational consciousness, and, as a period of latency (rather than as negativity), it is a moment imbued with a pregnant now that exists solely in function of, and is therefore subordinated to, that which is inevitably yet to come, which is another selfsame “now.” The primacy of the future is anchored by the intervallic period. As such, what is at stake in the passage from “now” to “now” is the closure, via a humanist historicism that places time within a “real” space of empirical existence, of each and any indeterminacy that might underlie the conceptual or historical relation between “continuation,” “end,” and “advent.” For this reason, the communist Idea is also the name—the assigned locale or “thereness”—of a supposedly new sovereign Age, of a new name and onto-theological ground of Being.
When the “intervallic,” or the interregnal, is applied retroactively to time there is no need for the recognition of a state of collapse and equally no need for anxiety. All that is needed is the reaffirmation of the cogito and its will to orient thinking and action back in the direction of a future transcendence.4 “The Idea,” in the form of the subjective decision for it (for Idea in Badiou refers to the visibilization of the militant will in its being, in its essence as will to power, and therefore as the thinking of everything as value, valuation, and representedness) returns in the form of a historical negation of historical negation. In this sense, thanks to the intervallic as a period of historical latency, cogito and subjective will alone offer the tools for the rebirth of history, or for the Spirit of a new Age. Moreover, by maintaining the validity of the “intervallic period” as the conceptual point of departure for the consideration and guarantee of a potential rebirth of history, Badiou also posits his thinking—and, of course, the communist “Idea,” the “True Life”—firmly within the ongoing unfolding, from Plato to Nietzsche, of the history of metaphysics. The rebirth (or reactualization) of history is also the rebirth of idealism and metaphysics, the most intimate presupposition of which is the value and will to power of subjectivity.
One could say that the “intervallic period” in Badiou provides history with a messianic principle of exclusion or with an experience of dormancy (though not necessarily of a negativity or of an abyss). This principle is anchored necessarily to the most intimate subjective decision for a metaphysical surmounting and transcending of the prior moment. It is therefore internal to the unfolding and extension of the modern, revolutionary spirit as the dialectical elevation and preservation of things past. For this reason, despite the seismic shifts in the scope and scale of capital’s “spatial fix” (Harvey), forms of war (from “total” to “global”), and technological domination on a planetary scale, Badiou can draw a relation of absolute equivalence, of infinite selfsameness, between for example the “now” of the capital-labor relation in the Paris of 1848 and the myriad manifestations of that same relation on the planetary scale of the twenty-first century (12–14). The system of elevation and preservation is still the same for Badiou. Historical shifts in the biopolitical arrangements of commodity fetishism, for example, appear to be of little concern to Badiou because the visibleness of the decision of the subject is still, and only ever, the primary and necessary subordination of existence to a normative genealogy and to the understanding of an invariant subjectivist will to power traversing universal history. Neither is there reason to contemplate negativity, the void, the abyss, the inhabitual, or the uncanny within the intervallic period or in its relation to the nonintervallic, for the surmounting, and therefore the transcending, of latency—or of any a priori—is always determined, a posteriori, as a locus internal to the understanding of history as a succession, that is, as a flowing torrent of nows. Furthermore, to the extent that the “intervallic period” is essentially a spatialization of time (the extension of a locus of ideological dormancy), we can see that it appears to be of little concern to Badiou that the forms of modern political space from out of which a counter-Idea could rise up against contemporary capitalism are in an increasing state of collapse. What is perhaps not so uniquely at stake in Badiou is the safeguarding of the primacy of subjectivity above all else, which then absorbs and subordinates modern and contemporary political space, its relation to shifting means and forms of war, and the myriad forms of the capital-labor relation throughout time.
Perhaps Badiou and his adherents will say that such is the critical assessment of “a dupe of the dominant ideology” (10). A fitting response would be to indicate that while his thinking is certainly more noteworthy than the vast majority of the demagogic protofascist and biopolitical rot currently on display as conceptual thinking or “politics,” there is an underlying thoughtlessness that comes to light in Badiou’s devotion to a Hegelian dialectic that remains the sole metaphysical site for the synthesis of consciousness of all that comes and becomes before it. In other words, for Badiou’s prophetic, transcendental “Idea” it is only the unconcealment of a synthesis of consciousness (the experience and expression of a disciplined and fully unified We) that can coerce thinking and acting in the direction of the realization of what is essentially an absolutely ordinary and average understanding of history. It is the upholding of an infinite transitional time between one “now” and another—a humanist historicism, in other words—in which the reproduction of the will of the subject offers the only guaranteed overcoming of any given past, and it is therefore ultimately the dominant figure and metaphorization of the Enlightenment ideology of progress in its “communist” variation.
And yet, all indicators now suggest that precisely this absolute metaphorization of the humanist suture of the cogito, will, subjectivity, history, and progress has entered its definitive terminal phase in the age of total biopolitical subsumption, or “globalization.” In Badiou’s evaluation of the historical relation between riot and history, the phenomenon and experience of turmoil itself is immediately brought to closure in such a way as to privilege the Enlightenment-based subjectification of a political subject that is, in fact, not just wanting but, by the author’s own admission, lacking in contemporary forms of social upheaval. The subject is asked to dispose of the Idea in all its potential metaphysical representedness, but the Idea itself is actually absent. Quite the quandary …
Perhaps a shift of a certain kind might be beneficial in our approach to the question of the relation between the contemporary and the turmoil it produces. In the same year Hannah Arendt published Crises of the Republic (that is, 1972), Jacques Lacan also signaled the unmarked passing of a historical limit, the sense of perishing that accompanies it, the impending absolute self-realization of capital, and a fundamental limitation in our way of thinking, which to this day stands as an obstacle to transformative thinking: “It is already too late,” Lacan omened, “for the crisis not of the discourse of the master but of the capitalist discourse which has substituted it has opened up…. [Capitalism] runs on casters, it couldn’t run better, but for that very reason it runs too fast, it consumes itself, it consumes itself so well that it is consumed” (“Discours de Jacques Lacan,” 10). Half a century ago Lacan had already envisioned the problem that Badiou is now signposting for the present and future of mass action via The Rebirth of History and The True Life.
But we are faced, Lacan noted in the wake of the events of 1968, with a constitutive limitation, which is the self-certainty of Cartesian mental representation: “It is an effect of history that we are handed over to questioning ourselves not regarding being but existence: I think ‘therefore I am’ in quotation marks: Therefore I am being that from which existence is born; the there that we are. It is the fact ‘of what is said’—the saying that is behind everything said—, which is, in the contemporary, that something that comes to the fore” (14). Despite the somewhat imprecise relation between signifiers such as “being” and “existence” in these phrases, Lacan indicates that the question of Being precedes and is occluded in the Cartesian certainty of the “therefore” that situates logos and the subject as coextensive and coterminous, together and complimentary in the everyday (ontic) experience of subjectivity and its representations.5
Lacan announced in these formulations that a fundamental historical limit—a limit inaugurating the full planetary accomplishment of the ontology of the commodity—had been crossed. It is too late, he said in reference to the capitalist discourse, thereby implying that the history of the modern can no longer be salvaged. From now on, he seems to indicate, thinking can only ever position itself on the side of a mourning for, and of a ceaseless commemoration of, what Martin Heidegger referred to as “the a priori, the prior in its ordinary temporal significance [meaning] an older being, one that emerged previously and came to be, and was, and now no longer comes to presence” (Nietzsche, 4:157).
Lacan was indicating in 1972 that a prior understanding of the ontological difference between being and beings—an understanding crystallized in the infamous and foundational therefore of René Descartes—had already run its course. From now on, conceptual attentiveness should orient itself not toward the primacy of the future—for example, toward the will to power and rebirth of the history of Western metaphysics—but toward care for the possibility of a departure from the value-thinking of that history. However, as Badiou’s formulations in recent years demonstrate, in the wake of 1968 thinking remained, and for the most part still remains, firmly entrenched in the Enlightenment tradition of the logic of the master discourse and therefore in the domain of subjectivity, empiricity, logical commonsense storytelling, and the metaphors of subjective proximity and gathering. With this fundamental limit and problem in mind perhaps it could be suggested that, from Lacan’s perspective, unflinching Platonic fidelity to 1968 under the auspices of the “communist hypothesis” would place Badiou’s thinking within the frame of a fundamental unwillingness to address—to mourn—the historical shift signaled by Lacan in 1972, in the wake of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In contrast, Badiou’s position would always be something akin to an announcement of the glad tidings that “there was 1968 and ‘therefore I am’ and ‘therefore’ there always has been, there is still, and there always will be a ‘communist hypothesis.’” “History” can always be salvaged and transcended through recourse to subjective will in Badiou. In contrast, for Lacan this would be both unsustainable and undesirable because, rather than marking the emergence of a new relation of the subject to its desire, it would merely reinstate a traditional relation of the subject to its masterful desire in an epoch that is no longer that of modern ethics but, rather, that of its expiration. While Kierkegaard posited in an oblique reference to Kant that ethics is an “‘ideal’ science” striving “to bring ideality into actuality … the more ideal ethics is, the better” (Anxiety, 21–22), now it is increasingly apparent that Ideality itself—that of metaphysical humanism, for example—is crumbling, as Lacan pointed out over half a century ago.6
It is with the crumbling of Ideality in mind that Alberto Moreiras has speculated recently that the true legacy of 1968 is perhaps that of an existential experience that has since been concealed under a mountain of subjectivism designed, against all possible forms of deconstruction, to guarantee the coextensiveness of the political with life itself. In this light, Moreiras points to the secret possibility of an overturning, or of a turn in thinking:
The true legacy of May 1968 could in fact be the dissolution—the cut—of the link between the notion of the political and that of life, between politics and life, in favor of the reformulation of the notion of existence. But we say this without knowing: Wasn’t 1968 the effective end of the old politics in favor of a new existential, though not for that reason any less anti-political, experience? This has, I fear, been forgotten. (Infrapolítica: La diferencia absoluta, 20)
Something has withdrawn from the field of perception and thinking, Moreiras notes. We are living in, and paying the hermeneutic and existential price for, a labor of historical concealment in which what is obscured via the ceaseless elevation of subjectivism is the facticity of the closure of metaphysics. From this perspective the ongoing legacy of Badiou’s thinking in relation to the events and political inheritance of 1968 or of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 would certainly appear to forge a question regarding the termination of progress, the end of modern understandings of freedom, the ongoing will to power of the subject, and the demise of a certain philosophy of historical development. But it also points in the direction of an occluded analytic in which the possibility of a new existential thinking of experience is folded back into the historical coordinates of Enlightenment subjectivation in such a way as to guarantee militant faith in the will to power of revolutionary subjectivity, and that alone and above all else.
Having said that, this is not a work about la pensée 1968. My interest at this initial point lies in highlighting that, deep down, Arendt, Lacan, Badiou, and Moreiras are all signaling the fact that while the modern, and to a large extent world-defining, faith in progress and development provided the basis for much of the historical-materialist conceptual apparatus in the wake of Marx, that essentially constitutive faith is now revealed to have been hollowed out entirely: not only unfilled but perhaps even vacuous. In this regard Badiou’s true life and rebirth would stand as flawed monuments to a largely unexamined will to close over any potential abyss in thinking the political, via the language of a metaphysical doctrine of political subjectivism in an age in which the history of that metaphysics has already run its course.
Hannah Arendt pointed out in the early 1970s that the nineteenth-century doctrine of progress had united liberalism, socialism, and communism into the “Left” (Crises of the Republic, 126): “The notion that there is such a thing as progress of mankind as a whole was unknown prior to the seventeenth century, developed into a rather common opinion among the eighteenth-century hommes de lettres, and became an almost universally accepted dogma in the nineteenth” (127). She continues this insight in the following terms: “Marx’s idea, borrowed from Hegel, that every old society harbors the seeds of its successor in the same way every living organism harbors the seeds of its offspring is indeed not only the most ingenious but also the only possible conceptual guarantee for the sempiternal continuity of progress in history” (127). But, she adds, such a metaphor is not a solid basis upon which to erect a doctrine of continuous progress (128). Progress, she says, is, and always was, an article of faith “offered at the superstition fair of our times” (130–31).
Let us take up briefly the example of Antonio Gramsci’s recuperation of Engels’s understanding of “historical materialism” as the supposed discovery of a law of historical processes capable of orienting thought and action toward freedom. This recuperation bears witness to the way that much of the modern tradition of emancipation has been predicated on a superstition, on something other than Marx’s fundamental thinking of value and of the ontological function of the commodity in the movement of modern society. Gramsci defined the transitional temporality of historical materialism—the time of progress—in the following terms:
That historical materialism conceives of itself as a transitory phase in philosophical thought should be clear from Engels’s assertion that historical development will, at a certain point, be characterized by the transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom…. Every philosopher is, and cannot but be, convinced that he expresses the unity of the human spirit, that is, the unity of history and nature. Otherwise, men would not act, they would not create new history. (Prison Notebooks, 2:194).
Badiou is certainly not Gramscian in his thinking, but what they share remains striking. This is the case even though their conception of the law of the movement of modern society and of intellectual life, in which the dominant ontology of the commodity form leads to the subjective realm of transcendental freedom from necessity and in which the proletarian spirit (or militant subject) is posited in such a way that it is to the future what the bourgeois spirit is to the present, is increasingly, if not entirely, unconvincing now. In contrast, Felipe Martínez Marzoa’s words stand as a welcome and necessary antidote: “Engels’s works … present such a lack of rigor that it makes no sense to address them in a work of philosophy,” for it was Engels’s positivism, rather than Marx’s thinking of value and of the commodity form, that produced the entire pseudoscientific apparatus generally referred to as “historical materialism” and “dialectical materialism” (La filosofía de El Capital, 26).7
Potentially this leaves a good part of the tradition of Marxism beyond Marx without one of its primary articles of faith. There is probably nothing new or unknown in any of this. But if, as Alain Badiou puts it, we are currently undergoing the apotheosis of the modern abandonment of tradition (the hollowing out of a certain suturing relation between conceptual inheritance and world), then it appears that the full consequences of the definitive and ongoing demise of the ideas of the nineteenth century are only coming to light in full force in the first decades of the twenty-first century, despite all attempts to safeguard against that conundrum. But as Lacan put it, it is already too late.
Following a path that echoes but steps back from the overall area of con cern portended by Badiou—for what follows neither obeys nor seeks to reinstall a directive principle of subjectivation for present and future thinking and acting—Infrapolitical Passages implies neither nostalgia for the nineteenth-century teleology of progress (of both the historical Left and Right) nor an endorsement of Francis Fukuyama’s famously misguided prophecy from the early 1990s that following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of world communism, humanity would undergo an “end of history” characterized by the utopic conditions of the classical political economy of the nineteenth century.8
In an echo of Arendt and Badiou’s overall sense of unease, the pages that follow suggest that a certain approach to and understanding of ending, of what it means to reach and even pass a certain threshold, or an existential extremity of sorts, remains incumbent upon us. It does so understanding full well that every concept carries within itself the conditions of its own decontainment to the extent that what delimits the concept is precisely, and only ever, what precedes and exceeds it. If we can only arrive too late to a crisis that already runs smoothly and rapidly, then what happens when inherited concepts that already depended for their existence on a preconceptual frontier that framed them—such as the historical reality of the Westphalian-Enlightenment world and its imperial peripheries—succumb before the crumbling of the topographical and temporal conditions of that world and, therefore, before the historical twilight now commonly referred to as “globalization”? Certainly, a peculiar form of wakefulness—of perception and understanding—is at stake in this approach to tardiness, topographic collapse, and penumbral rebordering in the face of planetary techne and the full-on quest for the extraction of surplus value at all cost.
Within the context of an enigmatic yet fully shared perishing—a mortality, however, about which we can claim no specific experience, since contemporary consciousness cannot provide it with a given moment, with the appearance of a single object or representation, and therefore with no definitive “before” and “after”—the generalized sense of expiration and mortality we should have confronted a long time ago (but when precisely?) is denied (though for different reasons) by both the acolytes of the communist hypothesis and the active pursuers of capitalist surplus value, is reconverted into administrative prowess or into a problem of the exclusion and inclusion of certain identity formations by liberals and conservatives of all persuasions, or is staged as an increasing demand for morality by the eschatologically minded devotees of Christian metaphysics.
The question emerges, however, as to what language to give to a leave-taking that fell to us as an inheritance at some point more or less recently (or maybe not so recently, since ultimately we are only ever referring to the problem of thinking from within the closure of metaphysics) but that did so without allowing us to recognize the point at which a border, perhaps even a point of no return, was passed and remains for the time being in its passing as an ongoing question of ever-shifting limits and ends and, ultimately, therefore of finitude, death, and mourning.
Toward an Infrapolitical (Non)Passage
From where, and in what direction, to proceed? In Alberto Moreiras’s 2006 work Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo politico (Line of shadow: the nonsubject of the political)—a book that radicalized some of the conceptual propositions developed in the 1990s around the experience of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group—the author provides a formidable critical response to Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential and widely commented-upon tome of 2000.9 It is in this critical reading of Hardt and Negri’s Empire that the infrapolitical begins to take shape not as a new or alternative philosophical or political concept, system, plan, school, or method hell-bent on overcoming other concepts from before. There is no dialectical or bureaucratic interest herein. Rather, it is a movement toward a quasi-conceptual attunement in thinking formulated in order to inquire into the determining power of our given conceptual systems and to propose the contours for an alternative (for example, nonsubjectivist, nontranscendental, nonutopian, postmessianic) relation to the political in the age of total (that is, of planetary) subsumption.10
The reading in question is extended in particular reference to Empire’s primary libidinal principle, which is the figuration of emancipation even from within the fact that, according to the authors, Empire not only contains counter-Empire but is the container. In other words, global capitalism, or Empire, is the achievement of capital’s own outer limit, while sovereignty remains the antagonistic container of the multitude and also its boundary (Moreiras, Línea de sombra, 206–7). It is from within this historical and conceptual conundrum that Moreiras begins to address the problem of the metaphysics of counter-Empire as a promised overcoming from within Empire’s fulfillment of Empire itself. This is the question that dwells at the heart of Hardt and Negri’s work, yet it remains largely un(re)marked, to the extent that it is presented merely as a transcendent given or as the logical and inevitable outcome of Empire in much the same way the communist “Idea,” or the True Life, is in Badiou’s recent writings.
While Empire’s presentation of the totalization of subsumption is laudable (and is perhaps consonant with the overall diagnosis also contained here in Infrapolitical Passages, though always with a divergent vocabulary, differential prognoses, and contrary hermeneutic responses), questions begin to emerge around Hardt and Negri’s figuration of the biopolitics of the multitude as the always immanent, and therefore always potentially transcendent, counterempire to the biopolitics of global capital.11 How, asks Moreiras, can the conditions of a transcendent counterbiopower—the multitude—be thought from within the total subsumption that is Empire, when the latter is already biopower at its absolute planetary limit? How could such a thing—the primacy of an immanent and future counter-Empire—bring an end to subalternity when “in Empire the end of subalternity is willfully and messianically affirmed while remaining theoretically unfounded” (213)? In other words, what price does thinking pay in the wake of Hardt and Negri’s “frankly optimistic intellectual position” regarding counterempire as the subjectivist precondition for the surmounting and overcoming of Empire (215)?
Echoing Badiou’s The True Life and The Rebirth of History, in which the will of the militant subject is both the truth of “the Idea” and the dialectical rebirth of history simultaneously, what remains at stake in the relation between Empire and the book’s onto-theological prophesy of an emergent counterempire of the poor (205) is the specter of the Hegelian dialectic—and therefore the determination of philosophy as the science or absolute knowledge—as the unmarked and therefore overlooked and unexplained instrument of subjective consciousness and common sense that lies at the heart of the modern history of the political Left in the wake of the French Revolution.
In contrast, Moreiras advances in the direction of the infrapolitical by turning back, that is, by advancing backward for the purpose of clearing a way across and out of the imperial ground of modern metaphysics.12 His reading achieves this in such a way as to emphasize (or, rather, to actively unconceal) the Spanish Inquisition as the underlying Latin-Romanic onto-theological ground, or “infrapower” (prior, that is, to Foucault’s modern determination of the biopolitical), upon which all subsequent ontological forms of modern Western imperial and nation-state sovereignty, including that of the onto-theological biopower that Hardt and Negri recuperate in their political understanding of both Empire and counter-Empire, are construed and understood.
Moreiras’s calling into question (or destruction) of Hardt and Negri’s excessively expedient dialectical overcoming of Empire prompts us to consider the extent to which, when thinking from within the modern politics of emancipation, we are in fact thinking from within (and in our quest for a positive politics merely reaffirming) the unexamined onto-theological determinations of the historical processes by which emancipation entered the modern history of Western metaphysics as both biopower and counterbiopower, beneath the visibleness of the Christian imperial and national histories of state sovereignty.
It is important at this point that the infrapolitical not be confused with the extension of the infrapower of the Inquisition in the imperial history of modern metaphysics. They are not the same, for the latter is a reference to the working of biopolitics as the everyday naturalization of domination, while the former strives to move in a different direction. Any confusion here would lead us to embrace (as in fact Hardt and Negri do) the nihilism that dictates that one can fight the biopower of Empire by mobilizing the biopower of counterempire, which is akin to fighting the metaphysics of subjectivity (cogitatio), in the age of the closure of metaphysics, with the will to power of a supposedly better metaphysics of subjectivity (the cogitatio of the multitude).
This is the fulfilled nihilism that overlooks its own onto-theological foundation in the name of political militancy and expediency, which is then consequently overlooked by the vast majority of modern and contemporary thinking on both the Left and Right. It is here, however, that the infrapolitical register in thinking assumes responsibility for the conceptual conditions of an exodus from the biopolitical itself. This is proposed by Moreiras not in order to fantasize about the possibility of freeing oneself from nihilism but to confront the consequences of actively skimming over nihilism in the name of a transcendent, messianic counterpolitics. Such a fulfilled nihilism is, after all, what Badiou and Hardt and Negri have in common in their figurations of counter-Empire, the True Life, and the Idea.13
In 2006, the possibility of an alternative to a thinking fully determined by fulfilled nihilism was registered in the chapter’s concluding expression: “Infrapolitics is but the search for a non-biopolitical exodus” (Moreiras, Línea de sombra, 238). Almost a decade later, in 2015, the possibility of an exodus from thinking in the shadow of fulfilled nihilism came to be delineated as “an exodus with regard to the subjective prison that constitutes an ethico-political relation ideologically imposed on us as a consequence of metaphysical humanism” (Moreiras, “Conversation,” 152).14
The question of the distance between infrapolitical thinking and fulfilled nihilism was recuperated and extended in 2017 by Jaime Rodríguez-Matos in Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time.15 In this work the author grapples actively with the realization that any step back now from the onto-theological affirmations of metaphysical humanism—such as those of so-called revolutionary thinking—requires an entanglement with nihilism attuned to the possibility of doing something other than treating “the problem of nihilism as a mere pitfall or as an obstacle that can be simply surpassed” (100). In this work, Rodríguez-Matos addresses the demand for an instrumentalization of, and within, contemporary political thinking (for instance, via the revamping of Lenin’s programmatic question from the turn of the twentieth century, “What is to be done?”) in particular reference to two of the most prominent modes of political thought today, namely, postfoundational thinking (as evidenced, for example, in the writings of Marchart and Laclau, in their mutual relation to Schmitt) and communist horizonal thinking (as extended in the work of Badiou and others).16
Herein Rodríguez-Matos points out astutely that so-called postfoundational thinking stakes a claim on the nonexistence of an ultimate ontological ground for thinking (politics, for example) yet addresses the absence of foundation by actively forgetting about being, or the beingness of beings, which is the originary void itself (104). So how postfoundational is postfoundational thinking? Rodríguez-Matos seems to ask. The answer, he suggests, is not very postfoundational at all, for the “absence of arché ends up being the very legitimating mechanism for the multiplication of finite foundations, which will take on the form of a decision—as was also the case in Schmitt” (103).17 Postfoundational thinking is therefore founded on the essential occlusion of the originary ontological question regarding the difference that (un)grounds political thinking in the first place. For this reason, postfoundational thinking is “a rehabilitated form of modern thought as a whole” (104), to the extent that it is a revamped metaphysical humanism couched in the vagaries of contingency and the metaphysical oblivion of the question of Being (that is, of fundamental ontology, or the thinking of existence itself).18 The problem stems from an ideologically determined unwillingness in both forms of political thinking to grapple with the legacies of so-called Left Heideggerianism.19 It is this unwillingness that, in the case of both postfoundational and communist horizonal thinking, flattens out the problem of the ontological difference, thereby preparing “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…. The fight against nihilism continues, but it is now a fight against those who think the problem” (104). For Rodríguez-Matos, however, thinking the political in the name of an instrumentalization, and this in the absence of an essential attunement to the nothing, that is, to the void, produces both the compensatory domination of dogmatic certainty and the glorification of what is essentially a poorly occluded yet fully fulfilled nihilism. Against the dogmas of occlusion, Rodríguez-Matos reminds us that
the 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…. 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. (110)
For this reason, the failure or refusal to reckon with the void, and this in the name of a politics of emancipation against which nihilism is measured, “does not make choosing between evil and a lesser evil anything other than a forced choice for evil” (Rodríguez-Matos, “Nihilism,” 46–47). It is with the banal optionlessness of the political in mind that Rodríguez-Matos suggests a differential pathway for thinking, as he conjectures that “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 of a thoroughly a-principial thought” (Writing of the Formless, 121). In a companion text (“After the Ruin of Thinking”), Rodríguez-Matos clarifies what a-principial thought might imply for certain understandings of political action today:
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? (4)
The answer is twofold: (1) “The focus on politics runs the risk of blinding you to the problem of politics…. 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?” (4); and (2) “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 politicity—even as this entails a retreat from politics in the business-as-usual sense of the term” (5).20 It is for these reasons that infrapolitics is “not a politics otherwise” (5–6). Rather, it is the “deconstruction of politics or politics in deconstruction” (Moreiras, “A Conversation,” 144). It is a proposal for the deconstruction of every illegitimate appropriation and expropriation that is presented as legitimate, including, but not limited to, the sociological, the anthropological, and the cultural.
As illustrated in the opening Exordium, infrapolitics can be understood as a significant withdrawal or retreat from the political field that touches nevertheless upon the political “to the extent [that] it seeks to glimpse and reflect upon a certain outside of politics” (Moreiras, “Infrapolitics: The Project and Its Politics,” 9–11).21 The notion of withdrawal, or of difference from the political, has also been extended by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, who observes that infrapolitics “points toward a dimension of existence that has not dropped into the will of will … it supposes a relation of withdrawal [desistencia] from the political itself” (“¿En qué se reconoce el pensamiento?,” 52). In the same vein, infrapolitics has been approached as “the non-place from which the place of politics is radically interrogated … 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 … infrapolitical questions lie and die as questioned questions that are incapable of mastering their own questioning” (Mendoza de Jesús, “Sovereignty,” 53–60). It is precisely for this reason that infrapolitics marks “the experience of the impossibility of the total conceptualization of experience. Therefore, infrapolitics is a form of negative realism that … prevents the onto-theological from taking hold of the various regimes of representation, identity and the totalizing power of communitarian politics” (Álvarez Solís, “On a Newly Arisen Infrapolitical Tone,” 139). It therefore exists at a distance from “what was understood as politics throughout modernity, that is, since the foundation of political theory, as a so-called science” (Álvarez Yágüez, “Crisis,” 23). In specific reference to the Heideggerian legacy, infrapolitics “insofar as it is an-archic thinking … occurs 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” (Cerrato, “Infrapolitics and Shibumi,” 98). For this reason, infrapolitics resists becoming a paradigm or world image, since its “questioning cannot be organized easily into the conventional history of paradigms, schools or structuring principles for the history of being or knowledge. On the contrary, conceived as infinite and irrevocable inquiry, infrapolitics is the question regarding the end, or the finality, of an epoch” (Villalobos-Ruminott, “El poema,” 107). Finally, for Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís infrapolitics inaugurs a modification in tone and, as such, “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…. The politics of tone indicate a dispute regarding open ears” (124–27). The author then continues, “Infra politics is part of the history of deconstruction, but not of the American history of deconstruction” (131). It is, in this sense, a return to and a renewal of the legacies of deconstruction.22
From all of this, one can discern that infrapolitics inaugurates a diagnosis of the epochal collapse of modern thought. However, rather than apocalyptic thinking, infrapolitics thinks from within the end, for it is extended in conjunction with the attempt to elucidate a turn in our inherited metaphysical legacies. It comes with a particular attunement to the ontological difference between beings and the beingness of beings and moves in such a way as to give language to the ontological difference’s relation to “the active infra-excess of the political” (Moreiras, “Infrapolítica y política,” 56). This infra-excess of the political is the excess to the ontology of the subject, or the opening to existence itself. As Martin Heidegger named it, it is ek-sistence, or being-toward-death. It is the unconditional nonplace of politics in retreat, which is understood as the potential uncovering of what cannot be captured and remobilized from within the Hegelian metaphysics of absolute knowledge, political consciousness, subjective will, and the dialectic of experience.
In retreat, infrapolitics strives to clear a way toward a thinking uncaptured by the modern history of subjectivity, ethics, and politics. The act of clearing is therefore carried out in the name of freedom.23 In this regard, Maddalena Cerrato (“Infrapolitics and Shibumi,” 2015) has addressed the importance of the question of passage in the age of the end of metaphysics, which in Infrapolitical Passages I take up in conjunction with what Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís has referenced as a modification in tone and as a change in the orientation of thought. In her reading of Heidegger, Schürmann, Malabou, and Derrida, Cerrato frames the question of the passage in the following terms: “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” (84). Passage voids the demand for a new topology from which to think: “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 … what is passing away in the passage is philosophy itself” (89–97). For this reason, infrapolitics, as a denarrativizing activity, “dwells in the passage” (98).
Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State is, in this regard, an extension of two tropologies without return that attempt to give an orientation to the task of denarrativizing the contempo rary inheritance of the political. In 1931 Walter Benjamin denoted something analogous and referred to it as the work of the “destructive character”:
Some people pass down things to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive…. The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble—not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it. (542)
Both Benjamin’s destructive character and infrapolitics seek to situate themselves in the passage toward another beginning, though not in the onto-theological terms of surmounting, overcoming, or transcending, since they both spurn the dialectical movement of Spirit. However, this does not mean that Benjamin’s destructive character and infrapolitics are entirely coincident, for in Benjamin the destructive character still derives from “the consciousness of historical man” (542). In the wake of the economic collapse of 1929, consciousness remains the ultimate arché of both subject and experience, and there is still present in Benjamin a residual romanticism in the delineation of the destructive character as the exercise and affirmation of the ego cogito. As a result, both the rubble and the possible beyond are established by and for consciousness, with destruction as the self-conscious experience and consequence of knowledge and understanding. Herein experience can only be understood as the experience of (self-)consciousness, without anything cast off. In the “destructive character,” then, we remain in the land of the self-certainty of mental representation, or of the “I think, therefore, I am” that was unmoored by Lacan throughout his intellectual trajectory and, as already referenced, in his brief exposition of the capitalist discourse in 1972.
In a slightly different tone to that of Benjamin’s destructive character, as we now come to the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century we can but strive to desist from romanticism, since we can no longer place faith in the determination of a way through the rubble or accede to an “other side” via the Enlightenment “consciousness of historical man.” Now the struggle is to delineate a way to backtrack from the Hegelian metaphysics of consciousness—from the humanist metaphysics of the ontology of the subject—that helped accumulate the underlying rubble of modernity in the first place. This backtracking is the basis for the infrapolitical exodus from all the metaphysical legacies of the dialectic of consciousness and the politics of intersubjective recognition that we have inherited since the Enlightenment. Now our only task is to think in a relation of mourning to a world of humanist promise now essentially obsolete. Infrapolitics in this regard is neither melancholic nor apocalyptic. Rather, it is a thinking that dwells in the closure of the metaphysical humanism that previously anchored our faith in “the consciousness of historical man.” Such is the negative realism of the infrapolitical register in thinking.
Within this context, the passage is not handed down as a given. Rather, it can only be given an orientation via thinking and writing. For this reason, Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State comprises two passages across the normative horizons of the political, the sociological, the historical, and the cultural. These passages are formulated in the name of elucidating the necessity of the infrapolitical, of explaining what attunement to the infrapolitical might imply, and of thematizing the possibility of wresting experience from the age of planetary subsumption, that is, from the contemporary ontology of commodity fetishism, or globalization.
Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State
It is as a result of all of the above that I have opted to structure this work not via chapters with specific thematic differences or dissimilar forms of development between them, or with a historicist sense of metaphysical closure orienting and accommodating the work in the story it tells from start to finish, but as the problem of the experience of a border, of a boundary, and therefore of a (non)crossing between two intertwined infrapolitical passages. My purpose in configuring this work thusly is fourfold:
(1) to register and formalize the specifically historical question of whether in the tremor we call globalization we are “going through a time that can in fact be gone through, hoping to go through it so as one day to get beyond it” (Derrida, Rogues, 124);
(2) to register and demarcate the interrelated spatiotemporal question of whether in globalization there is in fact a traversing to be experienced, or simply no passage, “not yet or … no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides … no longer a home and a not-home … no more movement or trajectory, no more trans (transport, transposition, transgression, translation, and even transcendence)” (Derrida, Aporias, 20–21);
(3) to register and orient the conceptual question of inheritance in view of the necessity, similarly registered by Giacomo Marramao in The Passage West and Alberto Moreiras in The Exhaustion of Difference, that “from now on the demand for meaning has to go through the exhaustion of significations” (Nancy, Gravity, 48);
(4) to register and demarcate, or strive to clear a path for, the possibility of a decision of existence (which cannot be fully coincident with a subjective decision for existence) from within the endemic violence of a world of war.24
Therefore, this is a book that makes no progress, and intentionally so. Rather, it circles around these four problems internal to the question of a certain indiscernibility between passage and nonpassage—time, space, concept, and decision—striving to provide orientation nevertheless to the existential, infrapolitical register that comes to pass prior to the distinction between the theoretical and the practical and that haunts the demise of the modern ideologies of progress and development, the total subsumption of life to capital, or (and this is the same thing, though in inverted form) the planetary extension of the “necropolitical.”25
Some might feel that this offers in fact the formalization of very little, since herein there is no implementation of a specific political agenda, program, or solution. Perhaps it could be countered that in the same way “by definition, one always makes very little of a border” (Derrida, Aporias, 21), by definition one also makes very little of the infrapolitical register of the ontological difference. Having said that, the very little in question in both cases just might be what is most worth the risk in terms of the demarcation and formalization of a thinking to come. Moreover, the experience of attempting to clear a way is, to my mind at least, as sizeable as conforming officiously to preassigned conduits for so-called responsible (which some will doubtlessly opt to understand as historically recognizable, representable, and therefore readily translatable forms of) thinking and acting in the name of a program or of a specific political conscientiousness.
In light of this formalization of very little, that is, of the intimate distance that exists prior to and in conjunction with every infrapolitical touching upon, what specifically is the work advanced in the movements comprising Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State?
The first passage, on the figure of decontainment as the origin of contem porary turmoil, is titled “Posthegemonic Epochality, or Why Bother with the Infrapolitical?” and passes through four essential and intimately connected conceptual configurations related to the problem of the meaningfulness, and therefore to the factic life, of the contemporary turmoil we refer to as post–Cold War globalization. The latter is understood here as the master discourse of the ontology of the commodity, unleashed and enforced planetarily. The first two sections (“Prometheus Kicks the Bucket” and “Katechon, Post-katechon, Decontainment”) examine the contemporary as the topographical reconfiguration of political space, as the hollowing out and expiration of the political-theological imagination of Paulist restraint, and as the collapse of the subjectivist Promethean forms of historical and political understanding that have bolstered and perpetuated modern notions of nomos and that have now, perhaps conclusively, run their course. The third section of this opening passage (“From Hegemony to Posthegemony”) analyzes the consequences of Promethean expiration for the concept of hegemony, which throughout the twentieth century has sat at the core of Marxist political thinking from Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and beyond. In this reading it comes to light that our times are no longer marked by the historical cycle of the bourgeois revolutions that made hegemony and hegemony thinking hegemonic in the twentieth century. In the era not of the governmental separation of state and market but in the post-sovereign rule of the market-state duopoly on a global scale, there is an overabundance of consent to domination, and the Right is increasingly capturing spaces and conceptual genealogies previously developed by the Left (hegemony being a case in point), thereby leaving the Left increasingly little room to think or to imagine alternatives to the given.26
But our times—the times of endemic turmoil, narco-accumulation, and the post-sovereign market-state duopoly—are in fact posthegemonic. For this reason, posthegemony is not interested in propagating representative fables of closure and containment designed to suture subjectivity once again to the political. Rather, it is interested in opening up both—subjectivity and the political—to a sustained questioning of their ontological ground, material conditions, and political potentialities for both past and present. In a work devoid of a specific political agenda, program, or solution, the final section of this passage (“Why Bother with the Infrapolitical?”) can be read, ironically, as an a-principial manifesto for the dismantling of the ontology of subjectivity via the thinking of the most distant and the most intimate (that is, ek-sistence as being toward death). It is an a-principial proposal in the name of freedom, and in the wake of the teleology of progress and development, for a thinking that remains at a distance from subjectivity and its representations via state and market thinking, received notions of the political, and every homeland we are told to strive to belong to or to reject.
The second passage on narco-accumulation, titled “Of Contemporary Force and Facticity,” passes through eight closely connected conceptual, historical, cultural, and sociological configurations related to the problem of the meaningfulness of post–Cold War globalization—or the market-state duopoly of the post-sovereign state—as a fully decontained and endemic world of war. The first four sections of this passage (“Toward Narco-Accumulation,” “Toward Facticity,” “Facticity, or the Question of the Right Name for War,” and “Decontainment and Stasis”) examine narco-accumulation as a name for the transnational illicit movement and turmoil of the commodity form—drugs, guns, bodies—now unconfined by the legal restrictions of the modern state form. It is the active decontainment of the constitutional form itself: the turmoil in movement of the post-sovereign market-state duopoly. This is the case in large part because it is the market-state duopoly itself that depolices its own legal restrictions on unlawful economic activity while simultaneously performing the militarization of the depolicing in order to maintain the enactment of a law and order that is extremely profitable and, indeed, politically and socially necessary (for domination) because without it the entire national and global economy would collapse.
Building on and moving beyond Giorgio Agamben’s notion of globalization as global civil war, these sections address the question of endemic force in the context of the narco-wars of the last decades in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, in such a way as to highlight the fact that “meaning-making—our very way of staying alive—is possible only because we are mortal; and our mortality is the groundless ground for why we have to make sense” (Sheehan, “Facticity and Ereignis,” 47). The following two sections (“Theater of Conflict I: ‘Here There Is No Choosing’” and “Theater of Conflict II: 2666, or the Novel of Force”) explore questions of mortality, rape, murder, meaning-making, and the socialized death sentence in the specific context of the writings of Cormac McCarthy (The Counselor) and Roberto Bolaño (2666).
Finally, this passage on narco-accumulation shifts, via the section titled “Toward the Void,” in the direction of the militarized deterritorialization of Mexican sovereignty (nomos) and the transformation of Mexican territory into the post-sovereign place of execution of US homeland security by essentially converting national territory into a buffer zone, a military architectural network for mass arrest and deportation.
It is in this context that Infrapolitical Passages can turn in its final section (titled “The Migrant’s Hand, or the Infrapolitical Turn to Existence”) toward the question and possibility of a decision of existence—at an infrapolitical distance from turmoil, narco-accumulation, and the post-sovereign state—in specific reference to Diego Quemada Díez’s film addressing Central American migration to the United States, La jaula de oro (The golden cage [2013], which was distributed in the United States as The Golden Dream).
As the book’s closing sentence indicates, the aspiration upon writing this work is quite simply that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it might not be too late to clear a way through contemporary turmoil, narco-accumulation, and the post-sovereign market-state duopoly, in the name of the infrapolitical decision of existence, of the ontological difference as the trace of a possible inception in thinking and acting.
This is, like a border, the formalization of very little, and it could very well lead to absolutely or virtually nothing. However, the question of the infrapolitical register in thinking just might be worth contemplating further, for there might be absolutely everything at stake therein.
