INTERREGNUM,
NON INTER REGNA
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier
Our societies need
a destituent and anomic pole to counteract the blind race of the technological
bureaucracy towards the future.
(Giorgio Agamben)
On the walls you could see
written: “it took us so long to find each other, now let’s not let go.” Perhaps
what in the revolt of October 18, 2019 in Chile was called the “finding each
other” corresponded to a potency that in the very act destitute or denature the
oppression of being under a regime of production of the living as work
of death––a bio-necropolitical regime. The capitalist metropolis can be seen as
the monumentalization of one of the last great victorious revolutions in the
form of a “regime”: the bourgeois revolution against the ancien régime––that
is why it is also so important to think about the difference between, on the
one hand, the time of the revolt, neither historiographically datable nor
monumentalizable as a regime, and, on the other hand, the becoming regime of
archaeoteleologically monumentalized revolutions (one of the tragic hallmarks
of the revolutionary becoming of the 20th century). There is no eroticism or
popular imagination without this coinciding with the destitution of the regime
that keeps everyone in their place in a closed world within the functional
order of classification and hierarchy. That regime is, formally and
performatively, fascism. What it does is to close the world in the name
of the father or in the name of the children who kill him and devour his corpse:
it prohibits imagining in common, in exchange for economic solvency, authority
and security. It makes us move from expressive, materialistic and anarchic hylomorphisms
to, once again, dispositive-mimetic, virile and archontic hylomorphisms.
Precisely for this
reason, fascism traditionally argues that what unites us is tradition and all
that ominous constellation that comes together in the aestheticizing signifier Patria
(Homeland, Vaterland, an so on)––“territory” linked to “heritage of
blood and culture”, etc.––, while neo-fascism , its most aggiornata
version, maintains that what unites us projectively is a neoliberal ethos that,
despite having been installed in the avant-garde by blood and fire, is
legitimized by its normalization. So, in order to outwit fascism “in
general”, it would be essential to continue thinking about forms of anarchic
composition of bodies and ideas, compositions that exceed the classic
“organization” of political practice in the movement-party-State sequence and
the political-existential configurations of the Father (ancien régime)
and the Son (liberalism, neoliberalism). Imagining and anarchically composing
bodies and ideas would be a way of resisting creatively, precisely in times
when fascism claims the patriarchal closure of the world, the restitution of
warlike and predatory masculinity, the conservation or the reactionary
reformism of the regime of political domination and economic exploitation (with
the metaphysical, administrative and ideological complicity of progressivism),
as well as the protection of the exceptional right of “free men” (the “Freedom”
with a capital letter of fascism) to drag us to extinction by way of an
eventual nuclear war and the current anthropogenic devastation of living environments.
The Chilean revolt
of 2019 did not end either with the political impotence of the Boric government
or with the 2022 Constitution that was not. The revolt is not only what
happened in 2019 spilling out through the lit streets throughout the country,
and its destituent potency is not reduced to any ritual of institutionalization:
we continue to imagine, we continue to experiment, we preserve the fire of
childhood and they are not going to take the street from us––that is, they are
not going to appropriate the unappropriable outside that makes it possible to
find each other. Despite the grief experienced in the most oppressive moments
of the conservative and progressive reaction, the quiltra
imagination does not cease unworking its machines, since to inhabit a world is
to create it in the unappropriable element of imagination that never turns it
into a home, nor does it appropriate it to reproduce and consecrate it (as
administrators and identitarians do). We could say, as a postulate, that life
is always escaping from dispositives, since what is alive is what is
capable of error, or errancy. And when
we err or wander outside the machine together, the quiltra imagination
makes it possible to find each other: “it took us so long to find each other,
now let’s not let go.”
The political
environment today, the scene, are not particularly cheerful, of course. It
assaults the image of the whole world going like armies and lambs to the
precipice of war and fascism, as in the worst times, but also affected––some
more than others––by an ecological
crisis that is dragging a lot of microbiotic, plant and animal life forms with
us––and before us––into extinction. The functionalist imperative of adaptation
and elementary strategies of evasive psychic defense configure, as context, a
culture of don't look up––invaded, however, by the thud of war, and by
the gray and anxious tedium of metropolitan existence, atomized, exploited and precarious,
politically silenced by the algorithmically channeled mass teledemocracy,
energetically dragged by the optimizing accelerationism of the system or
threatened at work by its automation.
At a molar level, we
are testifying a geopolitical reordering of the techno-economic empire of
capital––as a performance of antagonism of civilizational spaces and government
of disorder––, an ongoing reordering at the point of quasi-nuclear war (the
intra-imperial Ukraine’s proxy war, the threat of its direct unleashing around
Taiwan and the Pacific Ocean) and “cultural wars” (they want to take us before
1968). And what happens at the molecular level? When the order of the system
penetrates capillarly everywhere, fascism arrives, which is the closure of the
imagination: the triumph of right-wing culture in its hegemonical “cultural
battle”. Fascism is what closes the imagination with its drive for order and
its sad passions. In this sense, together with many of my generation and
younger––that is, of the group of generations after the 1973 coup d’état and
who lived “finding each other” the revolt of October 18, 2019––, we felt the
triumph of the “Rejection” in the constitutional exit plebiscite (on September
4, 2022) as, maybe, the worst political defeat of our lives up to that moment.
Not because we had put all the chips in the bet on the constituent process––many
of us advocated from the first minute to maintain the vis imaginativa of
the popular revolt not alien, but eccentric
with respect to that office––, rather because we knew that the “Agreement for
Peace” of November 15, 2019 (among the landlords of the
political-military-financial right wing, the 90s Concertación
mayordomos, and Gabriel Boric and other “responsible” young politicians of the Frente
Amplio) involved a strategy of institutional channeling of the
insurrectionary event and, furthermore, of eventual reactionary reformism
at the time of implementing the “material” Constitution, not having modified in
any way the factual and institutional power structures that were supposed to be
“symbolically” deposed––the Senate, for example. No. Many of us felt that
September 4, 2022 was the worst political defeat of our lives because the
triumph of “Rejection” was the triumph of Chilean fascism (in this turn, of
Pinochetism and its progressivist and populist comparsa), its hegemonic
restitution, along with that of the entire institutional, historical, and
categorial structure of modern politics that, during the revolt, burned to
ashes on the barricades.
1.- THE INTERREGNUM, AGAIN: SACRIFICE OR NOT TO THE KING?
Located
in the interregnum between the headless revolt of October 2019––which involved
the potency of the feminist revolt of 2018––, the exit plebiscite on the new
Constitution of 2022 in which its “Rejection” won, and the continuity of the “constituent
process” without constituent momentum, in a sort of “Comala” moment––a
dead zone––, in the hands of the previously dismissed administrative political
class––which now drew the “edges” of what was possible in regard to the new
Magna Carta––, together with the “experts” and a Boric government fallen in the
economistic and securitarian tongue of fascism, it is interesting to
recalibrate the intensities that weave the field of forces at this conjuncture
and its disjunction.
Is the revolt over? I do not think that is the way to ask. The trace of
the revolt is heterochronic, not historiographically datable, it opens an
anarchic, headless, disjointed time: a time in which the civil war that runs
through us (since the polis is always fractured), we said, becomes
explicit as a violence of the forms that go beyond the very statute of the
fascist war that closes the world, and interrupts it, unworking its categorial,
identitarian and patriarchal-relational machines, destituting its mythologems,
its patronages, its pastorals and its apparatuses of autonomous organization of
domination and exploitation––such as those that historically fall under the
terms evangelization, civilization, or neoliberal democracy.
Just as life is always escaping from the dispositives that make it productive,
the revolt is a potency in act, but it consists precisely in an act that does
not teleologically cancel its potency. The time of the revolt corresponds to
that of a pagan hylomorphism. Non inter regna: the time of the revolt
not as an ungovernable hiatus in transit between two kingdoms––one that falls
and the other that rises and stabilizes––, but as an inception of anarchic
time in the present (interregnum), beyond all regime factually become economy
of presence.
However, the time of power is felt today with “the weight of the night.”
The “Portalian phantasm”––to use the formula that Rodrigo Karmy coined to point
out the authoritarian political logic and imaginary installed by minister Diego
Portales and that runs through the history of Chile since the 19th century––,
instantiated as a party of order that blocks any democratic deepening by
virtue of which peoples can become agents of their own history, deploys
a riot of media, economic and war terror that today operates a kind of immunitary
paradigm against all forms of proliferation of pagan life or democratic
anarchization that have taken place since the end of the sixties, and
particularly against the historical event that an insolent singular-plural
people has put at stake the accomplishment of one of the fundamental ideas of
modern liberal thought––that is, that people give themselves their own Constitution.
That is to say, faced with the event of the disarticulation of the archontic
and oligarchic forms of the institution of modern thought––and of its thought
of the institution in all its registers––, they deludedly want to drag us not
only to a moment prior to the year 1968 (in virtue of a “cultural battle”
wielded as a function of a conservative counterrevolution, today a sort of
simplified and inverted Gramscianism) but, even, to a moment prior to the
French revolution at the end of the 18th century (revoking the mentioned
democratic promise that the people give themselves their own Constitution). But
the problem, beyond these mentioned “historical setbacks”, is that the same
political “culture”, both right and left, is entirely articulated by the
naturalized ontotheological and archaeoteleological scheme of modern politics––historicist,
sovereignist and hegemonical, if not also imperialist and colonialist, a scheme
that today is also in the process of axiomatic nihilation given the
unconditional nature of the deployment of the principle of sufficient reason
(calculation, instrumental reason, administrative culture, cybernetics).
In any case, the trace of the revolt cannot be reduced to the constituent
process to which it was tried to be reduced, nor does the failure of the latter
lead to the failure of the former. Of course, the revolt could be expressed in
the constituent assembly, opening the horizon of new languages from the
questioning of the very metaphysical constitution of the dictatorial
Constitution. But the effectiveness of the revolt could not be measured in
terms of becoming a new regime alongside the constituent process––if it had
enjoyed better luck––, because the time and eccentric potency of the revolt subtracts
itself from modern dialectic between constituent power and constituted power.
Today we do not know what will happen to the constituent process, because
within its dialectic the constituent power was recaptured by the constituted
power––by the Senate and by the factual financial and police-military powers––,
turning the writing of the new sovereign text into a farce of its own
“democratic” discourse.
So, again, sacrifice
or not to the king? The revolt in the streets has passed, for the moment, to
its esoteric dimension––as Karmy used to call moments of retreat. On the other
hand, the constituent process has become a farce to restore the oligarchic pact
with which it is intended to project the new cybernetic hacienda of
Chilean neoliberalism. The Boric government (Frente Amplio, Communist Party),
despite its internal differences, seems to be fallen in the aesthetics and
language of fascism, taking refuge in the economic and security governance
agenda of capital. In the midst of the debacle of the left that has become
progressivism and reactionary reformism––when they do not directly mimic
fascism––, in the midst of the mediatic and algorithmic management of the
“crisis” (economic, security, health, political-institutional, geopolitical,
war-humanitarian, environmental, climatic crisis) and the fear that it
arouses, the popular sectors lend more and more ears to the authoritarian
voices that offer order, paradoxically, in the anomic and sacrificial world of
capital. Not sacrifice to the king, resisting, is persevering in
reflexive intractability and guarding the fire of childhood, keeping it alive.
And that's what we do. But we have to be patient and courageous, take care of
ourselves, and wait for the moment, because life always escapes from any
closure, from any cage. And, by the way, in these circumstances of restauration
of the order of the conservative and modernizing ensemble, keeping art, music,
and writing alive is not just a refuge: it is keeping the world open. To
play out, of course, and so that our children and the generations to come can
inhabit a world, which is at the same time opening it up, creating it together.
2.- SINISTRA, NON INTER
REGNA.
But, then, what does the left notion mean here?
We could, perhaps, think of a radical left of disobedience and destitution,
think of it as another mode of politics and of the potency of thought––neither
sovereign nor humanistically productivist, and therefore beyond the simple
bipolar opposition between liberal-capitalist hegemony and socialist or
populist hegemony, since all of this is part of the sovereign-biopolitical
scheme and its usages of history. The left (sinistra) as siniestro
or catastrophe: the sinister as a barricade, politics of Heraclitan fire––idealismo
en permanente siniestro, “idealism in everlasting
fire”, according Willy Thayer’s formula––, placing into abyss of
politics, not in an extreme left position in the map, but outside the
map to the left from any position, beyond any naturalized regime and closer
than any revolutionary program that has become a regime––because neither life
nor the territory coincides with the map. To calibrate what the incendiary
nature of the postulates about the sinister politics that I have just
risked means, there is a key but little-frequented text by Jean Luc Nancy from
which we have here a passage:
The right, whatever its species, does not tend
primarily to power and order. It does it because its own thought is structured
by an imposing order (natural, religious, it doesn't matter) that imposes by itself.
The right is not only one that wants order, security and respect for both laws
and customs. She wants it only because it responds to the fundamental,
cosmological, ontological, or theological truth according to which this
territory is there, these people are there, these animals, these plants, and a
whole immemorial knowledge of their provenance or necessity. / One could say:
the right implies a metaphysics––or whatever, a mythology, an ideology––of something
given, absolutely and primarily given with respect to which nothing or very
little can be essentially changed. The left implies the reverse: that this can
and should be changed.
Metaphysically considered––regarding the
relationship between life, form and time––, the right is entrenched in a given
order (facticity), tending towards the sacralization of the very order, while
for the left, transformation (possibility) is an essential requirement.
However, since the economic-industrial and political-bourgeois revolutions,
modern productivism––producing the new instead of reproducing the given––is
a common denominator of both the right and the left: to the “right” the progressive
production of man, society and things as God commands or as capital commands
(where progress is the providential deployment of tradition or reason, more or
less secularized); to the “left” the progressive self-production of man,
society and things without reference to a god, but to human reasoning that
transforms nature through work and utopia (where progress is the transformation
and transition from production regime to production regime).
In this scheme of modern politics,
theo-onto-anthropology is shown, as a common metaphysical denominator,
precisely in the humanist productivism of both right and left. In the case of
the left, their enlightened secular anthropocentrism puts Man in the place of
God––when man kills God he will multiply the gods, warned an old French
conservative thinker––and its humanist productivism is expressed in this way as
man’s self-production––man produced by the man.
Nothing given on the left; on the right, on the contrary,
the essential is given, the foundation, the principle. The left, however,
remained in a double way also tributary on a fact: on the one hand, the old
order had to be suppressed; on the other hand, the production or invention of man
(that is, of the world itself) implied at least a sketch, a scheme of
what was going to be made to appear. / (…). / If it is not only a question of
“emancipating” a “man” whose form we think we can discern, and if it is not
only a question of identifying this “man” with the product of self-production,
what can it be about? Perhaps to think otherwise than according to “man.”
(...) It is precisely in this way that man restores
himself: it finally appears to him, in a very clear way, that neither an adieu
in the afterlife, nor the production of a final totality, can represent the
meaning of an existence that precisely makes sense insofar as it exists, and
that the existences of all the entities in the world, coexist: in their very
coexistence resides the meaning of the world. Nowhere else. / Man is the one
through whom, from now on, with all the other possibilities of meaning abolished
or condemned to be archaic gesticulations (whether they are “spiritual”, or of “asceticism”,
or of “heroism”), its meaning integrally becomes its existence and the meaning
of the entire world becomes its existence––animal, vegetable, mineral, sidereal.
/ Pascal has known this thanks to the intense sensitivity that he had for the
mutation already in progress. He said: “Man infinitely surpasses man.” This
means: man is neither God’s creature nor his own creation (if I may gloss
Pascal in this way). Man is infinite in act, or if you prefer, it is the
expression or the witness of this infinite in act that we call “the world”,
even “the worlds”, that is to say, the elementary and vertiginous fact that
there is what there is, and that we are there.
(...) the fact that the world exists and the man in it
is not a necessity. It is a chance, a risk, the game of dice thrown by a child,
as the Greeks said. Even––and perhaps above all––for theologies, the existence
(the creation) of the world is not and cannot be a necessity, under pain of
being denied as theology. (…). It is then on condition of not acknowledging any
given thing or any need, and at the same time on condition of renouncing a
Production of Man and the World, that the left can assume its sense of origin:
the side of what provides neither security nor foundation. The side of the
world that comes to be discovered simply as its own meaning, neither producible
nor appropriable, but “infinitely surpassing” everything that we represent to ourselves
as “meaning.”
So, beyond the cleavage between the “real”
right and left, following Nancy we could think of the sinistered left––“idealism
in everlasting fire”––as being "the side of what provides neither security
nor foundation", in unworking tension with the facticity of powers and
knowledges of the case, and desisting in turn from the sovereign-managerial
productivism of the human, of history and of the world in general. The left,
today, would thus coincide with the event of the exhaustion––at the
moment of its consummation––of the theo-onto-anthropology
that characterizes––as a productivist metaphysical scheme of the relationship
between being and time, author and work, image and movement of the living,
humanity and animality––Western rationality since ancient times, and which
today intensifies towards its modern, nihilistic and calculating, secular and
flexible, even cybernetic tendency to totalize.
Ontological
anarchy is the disclosure of anarché as an existential condition
and, therefore, of the unfoundedness of being in common. Hence it questions
theo-onto-anthropological and archaeo-teleological, productivist and
historicist domination, that is: articulated in an archontic and essentialist
rationality (principial and attributive, substantial and identitarian) and a
vulgar understanding of time (spatialized and linear, evolutive and monochronic,
hegemonical). And it opens the question: What kind of ethical and political
anarchy could be put into play in a posthegemonic sense?
As has been the case
since the third of the 20th century, ethical anarchy has been
interrogating the relation to alterity, and particularly the relations of
domination––as subordination of alterity––from the archontic function of the
revealing subject or prosopopeic inventor of the other (Derrida, for example). Political
anarchy, for its part, would disclose the ontological unfoundedness of
being in common––the absence of arché in the social––, destituting from
there all transcendentalized teleology, exposing, deposing and unworking the
historical and contingent contexture of sovereign-governmental dispositives,
the putting at work of its foundations and practical-discursive and
institutional naturalizations as assemblies of knowledge-power based on the
production of obedient subjectivity––biopolitics as technology of breeding, domestication
and productivization.
The ontologically
anarchic interregnum in which we find ourselves today makes possible the
post-foundational and post-hegemonic radicalization of ethical and political
reflection, precisely by putting into abyss any theo-onto-anthropological
foundation of our facticity in a sacrificial, identitarian and productivist informed
framework. Thus, in the manner of a “mutant international”, we are foreignizing
and transfeminizing, not obeying or commanding, in the erotic tumult––openness not-without-relation,
encounter, clinamen––of a “true state of exception” (Walter Benjamin, exception
of exception) as a revolt of the common potency to imagine.
3.- REDUNDACY MACHINE: PASSIVE REVOLUTION, REACTIONARY REFORMISM.
This fragment, in a certain sense, deals
with a species of autopoiesis guided by a tendency towards closure. The
coherence of its figure––of its monument––is recognizable, but it is part of its
performance: it is not a substance or an essence, but a material assemblage. We
make mention of its sense of consistency and identity, but not a use
of it. Associated with the notions of “reactionary reformism” and “gattopardism”,
that of passive revolution (Antonio Gramsci), coined in the first half
of the 20th century in the context of the expansion of fascism and the
emergence of Fordism, points to the flexibility of the capitalist (legal and
economic) political order to adapt to the various historical situations and “capitalize
their crises” in order to intensify their processes of exploitation,
accumulation and devastation. Instead of structural transformations, what is
processed in them is a strategic readjustment (reactionary reformism) of
the ruling classes in the midst of critical scenarios: instead of decisive
changes, deferred continuity (gattopardism) of the same legal-political and
economic institutionality that was intended to transform. So, in a society with
a liberal-capitalist regime, a passive revolution with the appearance of
structural transformation is, rather, a revolution of capital––that is, a
revolution that does not obey the horizons opened up by popular imagination,
but rather the capital imperatives that articulate a flexible redundancy
machine. The “iron cage” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), to use Max Weber’s
formula, or, if you like: once the symbolic efficacy of modern reason (with its
structure of cultural foundations––Catholic and Protestant more or less
“secularized” ethics, Enlightenment––and its teleology––the universal history
of Progress) is nihilated, what remains is a pure mechanical and functionally
optimizable operation ordered to a utopian and nihilistic teleology (pax
perpetua, endless development) that makes humans less free (because
there is nothing left but the imperative of adaptability to the machine)
and devoid of existential meaning (because there is nothing left but to be functional
to the machine). Metamorphosis of the same sovereign and biopolitical relations
of control and domination. As has happened before in Chile, the last time
during the transition from the dictatorship to the post-dictatorship: once the
dictatorship ended in its military distribution of the sensible, and the dictator
died years ago, what does not stop falling––until today––is the spiritual and
institutional body of Pinochet––I mean the famous formula of the two bodies
of the king (Ernst Kantorowicz):
the physical, corruptible and mortal body; and the spiritual-institutional
body, supposedly exceptional in the stability of its institutional validity.
What should be
questioned, then, and not only for the Chilean case, is why both the
political-military-financial right and “progressivism” (from the Latin American
Pink Tide to the Spanish Podemos and the Chilean Frente Amplio)––classes active
in the exercise of the decisive exception and in the administration,
respectively––they swim in favor of the current (teleology) of the same
political metaphysics of capital (axiomatized theo-onto-anthropology).
Brandishing rhetorics of social justice and democratization––or at times of
“crisis” like the current one, economicist and securitary rhetorics––, their
performance is the deactivation of social movements and a procedural
neutralization of their demands. This accounts, in practice, of the structural
complicity of progressivism with the neoliberal order––fallen in its language
and institutionality. Progressivist reactionary reformism or gattopardism
is, thus, functional to the new rhetorical and institutional technologies of
flexible governmentality of neoliberalism––contemporary mutation of power, as
is the case of governmental technical rationality (political technology) that
today seeks to close mediations between the State and civil society (total
mobilization) from a conception of positive order and its current cybernetic
optimization––in
order to control events and make the forms of subjectivation/subjection as
flexible as possible within the framework; and along with it, redirecting
popular energies to the managed turbulence of war, both in its modern classical
and cybernetic forms. The variety of technologies to close the world’s horizon
is, as we know, multiform––shock doctrine (Naomi Klein), legislative
operationalization (Grégoire Chamayou), university police, media terror,
ideological campaigns through think thanks, armies of bots and algorithmic
production of “public opinion”, etc.
Last year, we already saw the capital
redundancy machine rolling in Chile very clearly: the alternative between
Rejection and Approval that was at stake in the exit plebiscite on September 4,
2022 was already being configured as a bipolar alternative whose extremes were yes
to Pinochet (Rejection) and approving to “cook” (Approval)––in
Chilean Spanish, “cooking” can mean the fact of making political agreements
that affect citizens, but that are made without considering the interests or
demands of citizens, but rather the interests of “factual powers”. Two ways to sacrifice
to the king. Repeating the Portalian phantasm
while preserving Pinochet’s well-made-up institutional mummy, or restoring the
oligarchic pact through strategic adjustments with the complicity of a
progressivism that bets on maintaining the functionality of the system and,
thus, on avoiding an “authoritarian regression”. These two ways of giving
themselves to the king were prefigured from the configuration that the party
of order showed at that time. Key in this drift, from the progressivist
university discourse, was the Durkheimian sociologism that sees in “Octubrismo”––a
criminological category
to refer to an alleged subjectivity
of the revolt––just a phenomenon of criminal anomie and blind
disruption, and not of popular imagination without subject or regiment. Not
only was the offer of a new line of transitological management configured from
there, but also a new dialectical device was invented, “Noviembrismo”, to
install the idea that the revolt was neutralized by its drift of
institutionalization in the Constituent Assembly, and that now, it seems, the
conjunctural opportunity––the kairós––would correspond to the moment of
the Aufhebung led by the technocrats of the 1990s left and/or other new
entrants with similar expertise, added to the faces of “rejectionist”
Pinochetism.
Thus, we arrive at this moment where
the new “transition” would correspond to a new oligarchic pact as
a mark of restoration and deferred continuity of the Chilean exceptionalist
tradition (as Rodrigo Karmy has argued), or, to an axiomatic metamorphosis
of sovereignty (as Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott has pointed out) that tries
to neutralize the outbreaks of rebellion and popular imagination from the times
of the Spanish monarchy to those of the neoliberal republic. In this scenario
it will be necessary, of course, to continue promoting the popular revolt of
the imagination against the closure of the neoliberal order, in addition to
promoting public policies aimed at legally containing or deterritorializing the
appropriating and devastating dynamics of current capitalism. But, above all,
it is a moment that compels us to radicalize the analysis of the
metaphysical-political commitments that supply the party of order that surveil,
protects and oils the functionality of the capital machine.
4.- THE HEADLESS REVOLT AS PLACING INTO ABYSS HISTORICITY.
This fragment deals with error or errancy
as a sense of openness. The headless or acephalous revolt challenges the
mimetic drive of representation that makes the people, history, humanity or
politics an archontic and identitarian institution, an originary positivity
that coincides with itself. Metaphysics of the subject and the presence that,
in the name of the preservation of order or of the archaeo-teleologically
founded revolution, cancels the experience of the genuinely revolutionary momentum.
In this direction, of course, the problem of political representation is
pointed out in a singular way. The problem is not that, for example, representation
in the republican or revolutionary sense is not exhaustive (that it does not
represent all the people, let's say). If the problem is that this or that
regime “does not represent everyone”, what is criticized is the non-exhaustive
nature of the representation. But the problem would rather be the totalizing
claim of the representation itself, its claim to exhaustiveness, given the
essential incompleteness of the concept of the people (its non-identity with
itself) and the abyss of the popular imagination beyond any image of the world
and of the community, beyond any transcendentalized sense of the human and of
history.
It is from this pointing out the problem
that, in the heat of the revolt of 2019, I replied
to Manfred Svensson, who at the time diagnosed that we were in the middle of a
Gnostic revolt, and to counteract this sickness he prescribed a Platonic-Christian
therapy of adaptation to order: rectitude (ojrqovth~) of seeing and speaking, acting and
producing. A straightness (ojrqovth~) without event (fuvsi~, cwvra).
Given Svensson’s Platonic-Christian prescription, I went back to Plato to
recover his notion of cwvra in a very precise sense: a third kind of entity always-being (ajeiv o]n), that is, not “eternal” in the strong
sense of presence (aeternitas), but rather
happening (fuvsi~) as infinite
potency in the midst of facticity. The cwvra names the medium that, giving place to
the ideal stabilization of the sensible, remains subtracted from any
regime of photological capture or representational capitalization, making its
dissemination possible. As an eventual medium of “the ideal” and “the sensible”––and
not reducing itself to any of their eventual mimetic or participatory
relations––, there “is” the cwvra: the non-place that gives place, which “does not admit
corruption and gives occasion to everything that is born”.
So my formula, a Platonism without khorâ, referred to a certain
relationship between life and power, between life and text, between life and
form-law, between life and time: a relationship encrypted in a metaphysics of
the subject (author, person) and of presence (ontological stability of the order
of words and things, and of the idea of the human in particular, in its
successive crises and rearticulations). Metaphysics of the subject and presence
articulated by a progressive-transcendental and exceptionalist-sacrificial
pre-understanding of historical time. If we think of the thing/idea relation
without that subtracted third party (the cwvra), then thought acquires the contexture of
the metaphysics of presence at the level of the conception of “truth”
(translating from the Greek ajlhvqeia to the Roman veritas: truth as adaequatio intellectus ad rem),
with its political (Latin imperiality, imperium, dispositio)
and anthropological effects (persona, communitas-immunitas) and,
even more, conjuring up the conflictive historicity (the political) that
constitutes the space of povli~ beyond any factually established order (politics and its police), in
the name of the ominous rest of an essentially police “peace” (pax)––here
is Heidegger’s hypothesis on the non-political essence of the political.
But if we introduce the cwvra into the question, an imaginal space beyond all ojrqovth~ or rectitudo opens up and, by
virtue of such a disarticulation between the imagining flesh of the living
being and a theological-metaphysically inseminated order, the cosmetic-police
text that is born out of fear of a savage democracy to come is disarmed. Plato’s
cwvra can function, then, as a cipher to think
about the differential potency that gives place to and disseminates any factual
order, and can express the potency of the popular imagination that is capable
of living beyond the law (Baruch Spinoza),
that is, to relate to the form-law in common use and not in obedience
to an order prior to life, classifying and hierarchizing it.
So, if we can think of a Platonism
without khorâ to attend to the phenomenon of the “party of order”––whatever
it may be––, for the same reason we can think of a revolution without khorâ
to attend to the phenomenon of the archaeoteleological institutionalization of
insurrectional moments. Also in the heat of the Chilean headless revolt of
2019, Rodrigo Karmy wrote:
A revolt leads the peoples to their
original materiality: in it there is no separation between people and potency
(...). Its untimeliness opens a place that had no place, a voice that was not
heard, a new place of enunciation in which the ungovernability of the people
resounds, raw, sweaty and eternal: because if neoliberal reason is the force
that tries to transform the people in population and the world in a globe, the
revolt or the various forms of resistance bet on restoring the incandescence of
the people and the world, where everything seems to be signed with the wind of
catastrophe. Because neither the people nor the world are simply there. They
are instances that occur when the popular imagination bursts in and its
redemptive violence removes the rotten masks of power to show that “behind it”
there is nothing and nobody.
The subtractive character of the cwvra (place without place, non res, lh`qh, etc.) does not refer to a mere
negativity, much less to an abstract, logical-formal and empty nothing, but to
the virtuality (Deleuze) of the vis imaginativa and its
discordant movement. Karmy developed this issue in his most recent book, «Intifada.
Una topología de la imaginación popular», which, although it was published
in 2020, was written in the run-up to the Chilean October, thinking––in light
of the Arab revolts that have occurred since the end of 2010––in the “open
processes in the place without place that exceeds the structures of any
cartographic framework”.
I understood that there was something
“less” than “power” in the affirmation of “potency”, that from the left we had
sophisticated theories of media alienation (all of them very important),
but we completely lacked a topology of the popular imagination; that we
offered profound insights into the workings of power in contemporary
capitalism, but largely lacked a theory of revolt. (…). What does it
mean to rise up in the end times of every revolutionary narrative? (…). / We
are not witnessing here the attempt to “seize power” by a movement, party or
vanguard, but rather the restitution of potencies by anyone: all “political
professionalism” collapses, and the Republic of Tahrir dismisses the fear
transfiguring it into a dramatic and multiform party of insurrection. (...) / Its
event does not claim local identities, but rather becomes a type of being-with
which we will qualify under the term wild cosmopolitanism. It is a “cosmopolitanism”
because it occurs in the mixture of bodies, at the intersection of worlds, but
it obeys neither the State-national cosmopolitanism championed by classical
modernity, nor the neoliberal cosmopolitanism defended by the rhetoric of the “end
of history” and its globalization: “savage” underlines the dirty, mundane and
radically historical character of a being-with that has not succumbed to the
“purifying” dispositive of sacrificial violence. “Wild” because it does not
allow itself to be tamed neither by the State-national form nor by the
economic-managerial articulation, but rather, irreducible, topologically
survives “this side” to the cartographic layout promoted by the
representational paradigm, encamping the world as a mode to inhabit it.
/ In this sense, a revolt becomes a mixture “before” any identity confiscation
(...). Like a wave devoid of will and, nevertheless, full of desire, a revolt
returns to us the place without a place of an experience––childhood––in
which imagining, acting and thinking are just different names to designate medial
intensity of one and the same active life.
A revolt is the event, according to Karmy,
in which “the possibilities of an acephalous politics open up or, if you
like, of communism not understood as a regime or party, but as a
politics of the anybody in which world bursts in common.” Thinking about the
anarchic, destituent and prefigurative
character of the revolt in the figure of the intifada, Karmy evokes the
Arab motto that, since the end of 2010, ran through the squares and irrigated
the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and everywhere in the Middle East: الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام (ashab yurid isqat an nizam, “people want the
fall of the regime”).
[The revolt or intifada] does not
appeal to the future as the revolution does, nor to an aestheticized past like
the reaction; it does not intend to approach the future in stages like
progressivism, but neither does it intend to maintain the current order of
things like excessive conservative prudence. (...). The philosophy of history is
abyssed [by revolt or intifada], showing its emptiness, the
groundlessness of its power, the injustice that constitutes it, where it
reveals the acephalia of a kind of politics in which nothing and no one is
there to lead us––there are no longer shepherds (...).
Acephalous politics––anarchic, destituent or prefigurative––would
be, then, a mode of politics that maintains potency in the act (put into play),
instead of subordinating it teleologically to facticity and its philosophy of
the history of the case (put into work). It consists of opening the future in
common, in the life of relation here and now, without the teleology or the
pastorate of a representational vanguard. This is a key question that is posed
to the communist tradition and its forms of organization and strategy: how to
put into play the anarchic assumption of equality without restoring hierarchies
and leaderships that transform communism itself into a more subtle argument for
domination.
Karmy problematizes the question of
representation by opposing the medial force of the imaginal to the
“psychologizing capture of said force in the form of a subject.” He does so, on
the one hand, thinking with Martin Heidegger
of the degradation of Plato's ijdeva that goes from the ideality of Christian Platonism without khorâ––if
I may gloss it that way––to the spectacle theorized by Guy Debord;
and on the other hand welcoming Henri Corbin’s
reception of the notion of mundus imaginalis from the thought of the
twelfth century Persian philosopher Shahabaldin Yahya Sohrawardi.
The imaginal world (Sohrawardi, Corbin) thus designates the common potency
of imagination not captured representationally in any imaginary––image
of the world or world picture (Heidegger), or spectacle (Debord).
A place of intersection, mixture or
field of multiple tensions, its potency implies that things are not located in
a geometrically objective or psychologically subjective space, but in a
relation of free and common use that is identified with the imaginal
world. Use may not mean anything other than experiencing the imaginal
world. Because using defines, in this sense, a way of inventing forms:
in the face of modern political economy that makes of the use a
unilateral relation of means and ends devoid of imagination (or, at least, with
an imagination confiscated by the ends to be fulfilled), the imaginal world, as
an aneconomic place irreducible to any possible economy, shows everything––and
every relation––as a pure medium that we can inhabit.
“Implosion of the philosophy of history.”
To think of time as a catastrophe (time of oppression and revolt),
against the grain of historicism that eclipses it (time of power).
Thinking anarchically of the event that does not stop befall: an experience of
time that does not normalize this “History”, but rather understands
historicity from the point of view of possible insurrection. Thinking of time
as a catastrophe implies thinking of history as a scene of oppression
(facticity of the arché), but also as a horizon of insurrection (common
potency, anarché).
Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott has been
thinking, also in light of the Chilean headless revolt of 2019, the question of
the revolt and the problem of the modern concept of “revolution”. From the
elaboration of his hypothesis on the disarticulation
of the archaeo-teleological metaphysical scheme and a reflection on ontological
anarchy and the contemporary interregnum, Villalobos-Ruminott problematizes the
process of “monumentalization” of revolution that is operated by virtue of a
vulgar conception of time (Heidegger, vulgärer Zeitbegriff):
breaking through the revolution as an interruption of historical time,
it is monumentalized and ends up becoming a confirmation of the very logic of
historical time that it intended to interrupt. The monumentalizing operation
would consist of the ex post factum capture of the revolution as a
representation of an original moment of a new society. The gesture thus places
the revolution as the mythical origin of a new order, by virtue of a
linear and reconstructive temporality typical of the philosophy of history. It
is precisely a derivative scheme of an archaeoteleological nature: everything
proceeds from an origin-command (ajrchv) and is ordered to an end (tevlo~), which is the “Work” ––which links the scheme of
archaeoteleological domination with historicism and productivism. The capture
of the revolution in this metaphysical scheme makes possible the distinction
between revolution and revolt: while the revolt is the insurrectionary
impulse itself––the revolution with a small letter, let us say––, the
“Revolution” ends up being its monumental, normative and sacrificial institution.
It is not a question of a dichotomy
between revolt and revolution, but of questioning precisely the monumental
unfolding of its institution by virtue of a historicist (archaeoteleological) and, therefore,
strategic (political calculation of means according to ends, capture of pure
mediality by some transcendentalized ends) narrative. The monumentalization of
the revolt captures it representationally as a historiographically datable
milestone, as the mythical origin of a present––the “Revolution”––that subjects
popular imagination to its institution, canceling its potency in a facticity
that demands fidelity and obedience. But the revolt is, precisely, an untimely momentum
outside the continuum of history, irreducible to its historiographical
dating in vulgar time: a moment of radical interruption, disarticulation or
suspension of such a metaphysical scheme of historical time.
Villalobos-Ruminott thus points to the
link between historicism and sacrificial violence that articulates the modern
concept of revolution. The promise of Western law locates an “outside” of
natural violence, namely, the “rule of law” as a transcendental artifact. But
the legal violence of law is nothing other than “the violent cancellation of
other violence” (“legal” violence against “natural” violence). In this sense,
the law would be a violence constituted in function of denying the constitutive
violence of povli~,
and for doing this its discourse projects towards the night of time (in illo
tempore) a prehistoric moment of “state of nature” prior to the rule of
law. Following Benjamin,
Villalobos-Ruminott points out the difference between mythical violence
(strategic, justified in its sacrificiality by its ends established as
archontic normativity) and pure violence (interruptive, what it does is
deactivate the link between violence and finality that supplies the sacrifice),
so that the revolutionary violence of the revolt would be a pure violence
against the sacrifice imposed by power (that is, an exception of the
exception), while the violence of the archaeoteleologically founded Revolution
would repeat the disciplinary and sacrificial logic of power (state of
exception). This argument makes it possible to clearly distinguish the thought
of Walter Benjamin on the pure or interruptive revolutionary violence of the
revolt with respect to the thought of Georges Sorel,
who restores––in line with the sacrificial political thought of Hobbes or
Robespierre––the mythical character of revolutionary violence as a violence
whose social function is the foundation of an order, along with the
characterization of the violence of the revolt as mere “spontaneity”––which is
nothing but the categorial reverse of “necessity” from the perspective of a
historicist metaphysics .
The “historicism trap”, as
Villalobos-Ruminott calls it, is what has made possible the betrayal of the
insurrectionary moment by the institutional moment of modern revolutions––French,
Russian, Mexican, Cuban revolutions––, to the extent that modern revolution has
been transitological, as long as they preserve the formal structure of
domination and institution, despite changing the ruling classes and their
institutions. Of course, it would not be a question here of advocating
something like a permanent insurrection without institutionalization: it is not
possible to live––Villalobos-Ruminott maintains––in “a permanent demotic
irruption or psychotic outburst”,
and every revolt is instituting. Therefore, together with a materialist
theory of revolt, a materialist theory of institution would have to
be thought of. Regarding the latter, the problem with the institutionalization
of the revolution has been, regularly, the avant-garde restitution of the division
between emancipators and emancipated, as occurs for example when Lenin, after
the triumph of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, delegated the
administration of the factories to expert councils and not to workers
themselves, abrogating intelligence communism (Rancière)
in the name of a revolutionary vanguard. It is a logic that does not occur only
in the administration, but is repeated in the political, aesthetic,
intellectual, moral dimensions, etc. It has to do with a hegemonic-sacrificial
principle whose logic is to seize power––in the name of the people––to lead a
social transformation from there.
How to think, asks Villalobos-Ruminott, of
history in its eventuality or material historicity, and not in its
representation as an archaeoteleological metaphysical structure? The problem of
the event is, then, the same problem of the revolt. Outside the
historiographical continuum and its dating, the revolt is always
happening, but eclipsed by the “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha),
that is, by the diegesis (Willy Thayer)
of a historicist understanding whose grid of visibility makes it
invisible––vulgar understanding of time shared by modern left and right wings.
The revolt is not a one-off episode, but rather a permanent process in which
people historically break free from the master narratives that hegemonic and
sacrificially articulate “History”. Such is its untimely condition.
Villalobos-Ruminott, in this sense, warns something essential: if we continue
to think of the revolt, by virtue of a vulgar conception of time, as an
exceptionality of history (i.e., that the revolutionary attempt breaks history
and reorganizes it), we will continue producing “an inverted version of the
modern philosophy of history of capital”.
In a passage from an interview, Deleuze
pointed out in plain words the cleavage between the event of the revolt and its
“historical future”, on the basis of the untimely nature of the former:
Today it is fashionable to denounce the
horrors of revolution. And this is not new: all English romanticism is full of
reflections on Cromwell very similar to those made today on Stalin. It is said
that revolutions have no future. But two different things are always mixed: the
historical future of revolutions and the revolutionary becoming of people. It's
not even the same people in both cases. The only chance for men is in becoming
revolutionary, it is the only thing that can exorcise shame or respond to the
intolerable.
Down with the regime,
long live the revolt!
Karmy, Rodrigo, «Intifada. Una topología de la imaginación
popular», Ediciones Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, 12020,
p. 12.
Deleuze, Gilles, «Conversaciones»,
translated from French into Spanish by José Luis Pardo, Editorial Pre-Textos,
Valencia, 12006, p. 144.
