lunes, 11 de septiembre de 2023

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier / La revuelta y la fiesta de la primavera

 


LA REVUELTA Y LA FIESTA DE LA PRIMAVERA

Por Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier


Amo y odio el 18 de Septiembre chileno. Me inquieta también la trama ominosa en que se inscribe... 11, 18, 19. Tras las crispaciones y rituales que conmemoran el golpe mortífero del “11” (de septiembre de 1973) –el golpe que sigue pasando hasta hoy en el eco “democrático” de sus bandos– percibía que se venía la reconciliación mítica del “18”, en torno a la parrilla nacional de la fiesta familiar y las “ramadas”, con animales sacrificados y bien regados, en medio de un imaginario de paisaje, aroma y sabor hacendal. Y que, para cerrar el ciclo, sobrevenían el “19” la resaca gloriosa de las liturgias solemnes, aquella puesta en escena para la glorificación capitalina de la maquinaria necropolítica del gallardo y profesional ejército pretoriano –la “parada militar” televisada desde el popular Parque O’Higgins– y, en su pináculo, aquella otra performance televisada desde la “Catedral” de la “Plaza de Armas” de Santiago, que reclamaba la glorificación de todos los nombres del padre en el Tedeum que reúne a los prohombres de la Iglesia con los del Estado y el Capital –con el desfile de altas jerarquías eclesiásticas, autoridades políticas de gobierno, líderes empresariales; regla concentracionaria de la auctoritas.

Hasta antes del golpe de 1973 se celebraba la fiesta de la primevera en las calles de las ciudades y en los campos, como ocasión de encuentro profano que celebra la proliferación heteróclita de las formas. Y aún se sigue celebrando, transfigurada en medio de la metrópolis postcolonial y postdictatorial, en sus intersticios. Por eso me sigue gustando “el 18”. Pienso que quizás sea cosa de arrebatarles la fiesta de la primavera a los milicos, interrumpiendo su artefacto mitológico y espectacular para hacerla singular/plural y, por lo mismo, común. Profanarla, hacerla común en la potencia del uso.

La fiesta de la primavera, su proliferación heteróclita de las formas, ha sido durante doscientos años progresivamente conjurada en la privatura de un “patriotismo” cuyo imaginario no es sino el índice de un patrón de acumulación estético, de organización de la imagen que comunica políticamente la norma. Economía de la presencia reproducida primero en las escuelas de matriz estatal –en su contextura patriarcal más arcaica, centralizada y molar– y, mucho más tarde, en el tráfago telemático y global de los medios masivos de comunicación y espectáculo mercantil que hacen del “patriotismo” una dimensión molecular de identificación con el orden global del nuovo capitale.

De modo que Septiembre es un mes en Chile en el que durante cada vuelta alrededor del sol ocurre una suerte de captura de la fiesta de la primavera, su progresiva sustitución espectacular por un ritual de glorificación de “esta vida” como una obra o trabajo de muerte (work of death) –el 11 de la guerra civil y del genocidio como solución final a la desobediencia, al encuentro y clinamen proliferante de la imaginación popular; el 18 de la reconciliación nacional en la vuelta al imaginario consuetudinario colonial de la hacienda; y el 19 de la glorificación concentracionaria de todos los nombres del padre sacramentada por el clero que administra los residuos vestigiales de la teología política campante. A propósito de la captura de la fiesta profana bajo la égida de la bandera, me acuerdo de Agamben rememorando su encuentro con Heidegger en 1966: “Recuerdo que en 1966, mientras frecuentaba en Thor su seminario sobre Heráclito, le pregunté a Heidegger si había leído a Kafka. Me contestó que, de lo no mucho que había leído, había quedado impresionado sobre todo por el relato La madriguera (Der Bau). El innominado animal (topo, raposo o ser humano) protagonista del relato está obsesivamente preocupado por construir una guarida inexpugnable, que poco a poco resulta ser, por el contrario, una trampa sin salida. Pero, ¿no es precisamente esto lo que ha sucedido en el espacio político de los Estados-nación de Occidente? Las casas ('las patrias') que se han afanado en construir han resultado ser finalmente, para los 'pueblos' que debían habitarlas, no otra cosa que trampas mortales”.[1]

Si esa “trampa mortal” no fue sino la mutación de la forma soberanía, desde su configuración imperial hispana a su traducción “republicana”, la celebración de las “fiestas patrias” como celebración de la “independencia” no es sino la ritualización, mediante el sacrificio (11, 18, 19), de una transición infinita. Quizás aquí descansa el agenciamiento en que consiste la domesticación de la primavera –que es también una doma de la imaginación. Y quizás la revuelta chilena desencadenada el 18 de Octubre de 2019, “el otro 18”, no sea sino un eco de la vieja fiesta de la primavera como celebración de la proliferación heteróclita de las formas.

A propósito de la etapa de transición infinita en la que en Chile no hemos dejado de transitar, resultan sabrosas las notas de Agamben en relación con la derrota de la izquierda en las elecciones de 1994 en Italia: “(...) la derrota no fue el resultado de una batalla librada desde posiciones opuestas, sino que ésta no decidió otra cosa que a quién le tocaba poner en práctica una ideología del espectáculo, del mercado y de la empresa que era idéntica en las dos partes. (...). Lo que aquí nos interesa es sólo la evolución que se ha producido a partir de finales de los años setenta. Porque fue entonces cuando la corrupción completa de las inteligencias asumió la forma hipócrita y biempensante que hoy se llama progresismo”.[2] Quizás así también se pueda comprender el terror que genera en Chile, entre conservadores, izquierdas pedagógicas y liberales progresistas biempensantes,[3] lo que han intentado domesticar categorialmente bajo los motes de “intelectual octubrista” y “partido de la violencia”.

¡Feliz fiesta de la primavera, salud, viva la revuelta!

*   *   *



[1] Agamben, Giorgio, “En este exilio. Diario italiano 1992-94”, en «Medios sin fin. Notas sobre la política», traducción del italiano al español por Antonio Gimeno, Editorial Pre-Textos, Valencia, 12001, p. 101 y ss.

[2] Ibidem.

[3] Brunner, José Joaquín, “Violencia: el desquiciamiento de la sociedad”, en El Líbero, 27 de noviembre de 2019.


martes, 22 de agosto de 2023

Jovana Isevski / Un lenguaje más allá de las palabras: la desescritura del anthropos en 'El libro del cisne' de Alexis Wright

 



UN LENGUAJE MÁS ALLÁ DE LAS PALABRAS:
LA DESESCRITURA DEL ANTHROPOS EN EL LIBRO DEL CISNE DE ALEXIS WRIGHT
 
Jovana Isevski
University of California Riverside
IIPSS Chile
 

En su libro «Seguir con el problema. Generar parentesco en el Chthuluceno» (2016),[1] Donna Haraway argumenta que “la narrativización ya no puede ser situada en el dominio del excepcionalismo humano” y propone un tipo de narración no antropocéntrica que abre el espacio para éticas multiespecie. Pero, ¿cómo sería tal modo de narrar? ¿Las necesidades de lo no humano necesitarían ser mediadas por lenguajes humanos y estructuras jurídicas? ¿O existe algún tipo de comunicación que no puede mapearse en las formaciones semióticas familiares, una que trasciende las definiciones fijas y los cálculos numéricos, un lenguaje más allá de los símbolos verbales y numéricos?

Quisiera examinar aquí las potencialidades de lo que llamo una “resistencia asemiótica” a la hegemonía del anthropos en «El libro del cisne»,[2] pieza especulativa de la escritora aborigen australiana Alexis Wright. La contraintuitiva visión que ofrece Wright de la agencia no humana no sólo se resiste a la antropomorfización de los animales, sino que también priva a la protagonista Oblivia de su capacidad de hablar, indicando hacia un radical abandono de la necesidad de proyectar estándares normativos y taxonómicos humanos en el mundo más allá de los humanos. «El libro del cisne» muestra que la demanda de lo común requiere la suspensión de la lógica del humano u Hombre con mayúscula y un aquietamiento de la insistencia colonial en la hiperracionalidad, de tal modo de estar en condiciones para descubrir el lenguaje de la reciprocidad profunda y la escucha atenta de la alteridad no humana, a lo que me referiré como “un lenguaje más allá de las palabras”. El lenguaje no humano resistiría asimismo a la construcción de un futuro —como continuidad de la ruina del presente, asumiendo la incertidumbre y la desorientación como las condiciones fundamentales del Antropoceno, al tiempo que nos recordaría a los humanos una característica compartida entre nosotros y nuestros “otros” que no se puede soslayar: la inherente precariedad y finitud de la vida.

«El libro del cisne» se centra en las cuestiones de la pérdida y la violencia, en el contexto de un futuro climáticamente devastado. Está ambientado a cien años del presente en un mundo devastado por el cambio climático y la estela de guerras que éste desató, en un humedal del norte de Australia, un “vertedero apropiado para personas no deseadas” (50) poblado por una comunidad aborigen y un pequeño número de refugiados climáticos de distintos lugares del planeta. Es la historia de una niña aborigen, Oblivia, quien, tras una despiadada agresión sexual por parte de un joven local que inhala bencina un “adicto a los humos tóxicos y con daño cerebral” (27), vive recluida durante años “dentro” de un eucalipto sagrado. Aunque ha habitado en los misterios del antiguo conocimiento aborigen, es encontrada por Bella Donna, una refugiada climática europea una “nueva gitana del mundo”, quien al verla sin palabras le enseña “el lenguaje de los cisnes”. Después de la muerte de Bella Donna, el primer presidente aborigen de Australia, Warren Finch, secuestra a Oblivia, se casa con ella en contra de su voluntad y la mantiene encerrada en una torre de apartamentos retirada en una ciudad sureña. Su deshumanización y una aparente falta de agencia y autodeterminación acercan su mundo al de los cisnes negros, quienes la asisten en su huida tras la muerte de Finch. Junto con un grupo de inmigrantes climáticos indocumentados, Oblivia regresa a su pantano familiar, sólo para encontrar un páramo de tierra seca y plantas rodadoras un lugar donde los cisnes, todos menos uno, se dirigen a morir en silencio.

La estructuración formal y estilística de «El libro del cisne» lo hace particularmente propicio para trastocar los modos narrativos lógico-lineales característicos de la mayor parte de la ficción del Antropoceno, al mismo tiempo que desdibuja el límite entre ontología y epistemología. Su tono poético, el predominio del lenguaje fragmentario y figurativo, y el entrelazamiento surreal de mitos y leyendas con la realidad material de la degradación ambiental desafían las nociones de lo que pensamos como ontológicamente “real”. Para Wright, “en la no-ficción a menudo se trata de que el escritor diga lo que es seguro decir”, mientras que la experiencia de la libertad poética en la ficción podría ofrecer verosímiles más allá de lo que las narrativas científicas dominantes sostienen sobre lo que el futuro del cambio climático podría implicar. Más que a través de largas cadenas de razones, Oblivia experimenta el mundo a través de un “diálogo contrafáctico” con lo no humano tomando prestada la expresión de Kyle White.[3] Ella puede escuchar “música fantasmal” («El libro del cisne», 40) y comunicarse con sabios doctores, monos testarudos y cisnes fugitivos. Como Oblivia es la narradora principal, el lector se sumerge en su inquietante y tembloroso mundo de confusión, una consciencia metafórica cuya corriente no es la de una redacción racional y positivista de los hechos, sino la fluidez de las imágenes naturales. Habiendo estado física e intelectualmente desconectada de su comunidad, ha aprendido a pensar en el medio de la naturaleza no humana. Pero, para los residentes del pantano que parecen haber olvidado el lenguaje de lo no-humano, ella es el Otro invisible, trastornado y sin voz.

El medium entre la comunidad de Oblivia y el conocimiento de sus ancestros es un eucalipto sagrado que es en sí mismo un ancestro, “un pariente vivo y antiquísimo que cuida los recuerdos” (69). Sin embargo, consciente de la inmensa relevancia del árbol para la preservación de “conocimientos profundos del espacio”, en términos de White, el Ejército australiano decide eliminar el árbol y con él “el nexo con peligrosas creencias que tenía que ser roto”: cortar “el vínculo recíproco de responsabilidad” (61) y sofocar la resistencia aborigen contra la asimilación total. Dolientes los aborígenes, no sólo por el pariente perdido (su eucalipto), sino en consecuencia también por la pérdida de una parte de su identidad, se sienten “desgajados de sus propios cuerpos, sin lazos, vulnerables, separados de la eternidad” (69). Para aliviar el dolor insoportable de tal autodisolución traumática, los miembros de la comunidad abrazan el olvido colectivo y condenan al ostracismo a Oblivia quien, luego de ser “salvada” por Bella Donna, continúa buscando su árbol, su verdadero salvador, despertando así los fantasmas del trauma y trayendo de vuelta las memorias inquietantes del fin de su mundo que la comunidad preferiría suprimir definitivamente. Obstinados en olvidar, siguen diciéndole a Oblivia que su árbol nunca existió, con la esperanza de que ella deje que su ser aborigen herido se marchite en silencio. El acto del olvido de sí mismos de los aborígenes resulta en una desorientación general y dudas sobre en quién confiar, si es que hay alguien. Sus ansiedades en torno a la fuerza opresiva del Ejército se desplazan no sólo hacia Oblivia, sino también hacia los cisnes a los que consideran aterradores. “Acusaron a los cisnes de mirar directamente a sus almas y robar la cultura tradicional” (61), sin reconocer que los cisnes apuntan directamente a la fractura afectiva que asola sus almas, una grieta que indica que han olvidado el lenguaje de lo no-humano, un lenguaje más allá de las palabras.

Por otro lado, Oblivia y los cisnes se unen por un trauma compartido: el del exilio. Debido a las sequías que han diezmado al continente australiano, los cisnes se han visto obligados a llevar una vida nómada con la esperanza de llegar a un santuario acogedor, un destino agonizante que eventualmente se convierte en una no-vida. Oblivia y los cisnes se colocan en el mismo intersticio categorial que resiste a la taxonomización: no son ni completamente animales ni completamente humanos. Los cisnes son retratados como “gitanos” errantes y “refugiados climáticos”, mientras que Oblivia, debido a su mutismo, comparece incluso como menos-que-humana. Y, sin embargo, ¿no la hace más que humana su capacidad para entender tanto el lenguaje de los cisnes como el de los humanos? De cualquier manera, Oblivia cuestiona la precisión de las habilidades de representación del lenguaje humano y decide que “ella encontrará estas respuestas [sobre cómo habría de vivir la gente] arrojándose a sí misma en la locura de la anciana de cantarle a los cisnes” (62). Tal acto sugiere que es a partir del mismo “silenciamiento” del lenguaje humano que puede florecer otro modo de comprender el mundo.

Pero, ¿por qué es Bella Donna, una mujer blanca de ascendencia irlandesa, la que media en el aprendizaje de Oblivia del lenguaje de los cisnes y no su comunidad aborigen? Al contrario de los aborígenes que, a pesar de su aislamiento del resto de la sociedad australiana, todavía se ven obligados al confinamiento o reducción en el modus operandi colonial, Bella Donna y los “nuevos gitanos del mundo” están atrapados entre la tensión entre los aspectos positivos y negativos de no pertenecer a ningún lugar. Al no tener un lugar al que llamar hogar, los gitanos son capaces de deshacer algunos de los condicionamientos culturales que han traído de sus destruidos lugares de procedencia, activando un giro ontológico hacia lo que Vanessa Watts[4] llama una “mente precolonial”, encontrando nuevos socios no-humanos, esta vez en el sistema de coordenadas del desorden climático. Bella Donna se llama a sí misma “la patrona de los rechazados del mundo” (28), y afirma que “realmente no se halla ni aquí ni allá” (20). Hace mucho tiempo, en una situación de absoluta incertidumbre y desesperación, Bella Donna y un grupo de refugiados cantaban canciones a los cisnes, a quienes veían como “una guía que se extiende desde nuestro pasado” (26), con la esperanza de ser sus dignos discípulos y aprender el lenguaje necesario para enmendar la descoordinación entre las diferentes entidades del planeta. El lenguaje más allá de las palabras estaría ahí, pues, audible para cualquiera que quiera escuchar, independientemente de restricciones culturales y reclamos de propiedad.

Encajando la figura de Bella Donna en el estereotipo de cuento de hadas de una anciana sabia y romantizada que posee el poder místico del conocimiento intuitivo, sigue siendo un producto de una mente colonial occidental. Bella Donna ha intentado en una actitud que recuerda al Próspero de Shakespeare que Oblivia le esté eternamente agradecida por haberla salvado de la oscuridad del eucalipto sagrado, cuando lo que más desea Oblivia es restablecer el vínculo afectivo con su custodio verde. Bella Dona se ve a sí misma como una salvadora cuya “finalidad en la vida era lograr que la chica actuara normal: que se comportara y se sentara derecha en la mesa… que hablara bien… que se vistiera como una persona normal” (18). De manera similar, su esposo no solicitado, Warren Finch, trata de normalizar a Oblivia, de humanizarla y convertirla en una primera dama presentable. No dispuesta a sucumbir a las presiones de Bella Donna o Warren Finch para que se “normalizara”, Oblivia decide escuchar el habla del cisne: es a través del silencio abierto al lenguaje an-humano que ella se propone “recuperar la soberanía” (3) sobre su “cerebro enfermo” (4). Y al convertirse en guardiana de los cisnes, que a su vez la cobijan, ella reclama su sentido de agencia y autodeterminación.

Tras la muerte de Warren Finch, Oblivia escapa de su torre de Rapunzel y se une a un grupo de refugiados climáticos no aborígenes, mientras que los cisnes se unen a ella en un acto coordinado de regreso a casa, sólo para descubrir que su hogar, su pantano, había sido destruido por el Ejército. Exasperada, Oblivia se pregunta por qué la tierra silenciada “no le responde” (298). Pero la tierra no tiene más vida que ofrecerle ni a ella ni a los cisnes que ahora se han convertido en fantasmas. No obstante, queda una pizca de esperanza en Oblivia, quien piensa que los cisnes “podrían volver. ¿Quién sabe qué locura podría estar llamándolos al final?” (302). Yuxtaponiendo narrativas antropocéntricas del fin del mundo y epistemologías indígenas de lo interminable, Melanie Benson Taylor[5] sostiene que, en las visiones indígenas del futuro, “no hay escotillas de escape ocultas, ni intervenciones chamánicas en la tectónica del cambio climático o del capitalismo racializado. Pero a la larga hay una negativa permanente a rendirse a los límites o a la lógica de este mundo en ruinas, y hay un ambiente conceptual donde la dialéctica de la indigeneidad proporciona un mapa de rutas no transitadas en lugar de destinos en barbecho” (15).

«El libro del cisne» no es un cuento de hadas para el futuro. No es una visión bien definida de un mundo nuevo, sino más bien la apertura a partir de un rechazo del viejo. Su final abierto desafía el deseo de controlar el resultado del futuro del cambio climático característico de las epistemologías coloniales de la crisis y, en cambio, abre la posibilidad desafiante de un no-saber desistente sin saber si los cisnes se extinguirán o si podrá haber nueva vida surgiendo del polvo estéril del pantano fantasmal. ¿Comenzará la tierra a hablarle otra vez a Oblivia? ¿La gente volverá a aprender a hablarle a la tierra? ¿Puede una acción coordinada entre el mundo de los espíritus, fantasmas, ancestros y sus descendientes humanos y no humanos vivos componer una canción en un lenguaje más allá de las palabras, saliendo del atolladero estéril de la muerte y la decadencia, dando vida a un nuevo inicio que ya siempre está ahí, anclado en una profunda reciprocidad y respeto? Negándose a dar respuestas a estas preguntas, la novela de Wright invita al lector a aceptar la incertidumbre radical y la precariedad como las condiciones fundamentales de la época. Fomenta una especie de resistencia asemiótica, pintando nuevos paisajes con un lenguaje olvidado, el de lo an-humano. Como sugiere Vanessa Watts, “no es que el mundo no-humano ya no hable, sino que los humanos comenzamos a comprender cada vez menos” (32). ¿Podemos acallar las voces agresivas que quieren tener todas las respuestas y guardar silencio en el a veces tan incómodo espacio de lo que se deja afectar? ¿Auto-hetero-afectividad? ¿Podemos abrir espacio para un nuevo modo de estar en común? Intentémoslo tenemos un par de minutos más.


*  *  *

Traducción del inglés al español por Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier. El texto que aquí traducimos fue presentado bajo el título “A Language Beyond Words: The Unwriting of Anthropos in Alexis Wright’s ‘The Swan Book’” en el contexto de la conferencia Reclaiming the Commons (9 al 12 de julio de 2023) organizada por The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) en University of Oregon, Estados Unidos.



[1] Donna Haraway, «Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene», Duke University Press, Durham y Londres, 12016; «Seguir con el problema. Generar parentesco en el Chthuluceno», traducción del inglés al español por Helen Torres, Consonni Editores, Bilbao, 12019.

[2] Alexis Wright, «The Swan Book», Giramondo Publishing, Sidney, 12013. Esa es la primera edición australiana. En esta ocasión considero la siguiente edición: «The Swan Book», Atria Books, New York, 12016.

[3] Kyle White, “Weaving Indigenous Science, Protocols and Sustainability Science”, en Sustainability Science, vol. 11, nº 1, 2015, pp. 25-32.

[4] Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European Tour!)”, en Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 2, nº 1, 2013, pp. 20-34.

[5] Melanie Benson Taylor, “Indigenous Interruptions in the Anthropocene”, en Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA), vol. 136, nº 1, 2021, pp. 9-16. 

lunes, 14 de agosto de 2023

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton / The Expropriation of the Language. Right-wing Culture and Progressivist Morass

 



THE EXPROPRIATION OF THE LANGUAGE.
RIGHT-WING CULTURE AND PROGRESSIVIST MORASS

Rodrigo Karmy Bolton

  

For some time now we have been witnessing an advance of right-wing culture. Systematically accelerated by the triumph of the “Rechazo” (Rejection) of the proposed new Chilean Constitution in the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, it is expressed in the transformation of all emancipatory concepts into properly reactionary concepts. “Democracy”, “freedom”, “rights” have become oppressive terms rather than emancipatory ones, as if a secret internal logic revealed an ominous possibility in their new use. Nothing new, if we follow the United States’ imperialist trajectory where humanitarian wars that advocate democracy, freedom and the defense of Human Rights have been more than frequent.

I remember an Iraqi journalist in 2003 ironizing the United States bombing Baghdad saying: here comes “democracy.” That the emancipatory terms have become reactionary cannot limit the analysis to the simple question of the disputeas if it were something “simple”, but must enter the genealogical field through which the same terms and forces that give rise to them are forged. The terms are not neutral, they never arise from the transparency of a brilliant mind, no matter how brilliant these terms are. It is always the silent work of large or small, intense or moderate struggles that weave the forces of a term and the horizon of its possibilities.

In this light, the advance of right-wing culture has not been a natural phenomenon, but rather a historical and political one. Nor has it been simply because the big media oligopolies dominate, or because they invest huge sums of money in algorithms and bots. First of all, this advance is due to the weakness of the left-wing culture that has ended up experiencing a singular process of expropriation of the language: the leftsI include progressivism here as their most emblematic symptomhave begun to speak the language of another and, even, to speak their own signifiers, but under the terminologyand temporalityimposed by the other. The lefts have given up political disputes too long ago. The advance of right-wing culture expresses precisely that resignation.

Several decades ago, the Italian intellectual Furio Jesi offered an interview in which he was asked what “right-wing culture” wasit was the title of his book first published in 1979—,[1] and Jesi responded:

It is the culture in which the past is a kind of homogenized mush that can be shaped and kept in shape in the most useful way. The culture in which the culture of death prevails or also a religion of the exemplary dead. The culture in which it is declared that there are indisputable values, indicated in words with capital letters, above all Tradition and Culture, but also Justice, Freedom, Revolution. A culture, in short, made of authority, of mythological sureness regarding the norms of knowing, teaching, commanding and obeying.

Precisely, a culture founded on indisputable values, a culture that “makes itself of authority.” Right-wing culture is the culture which fetishizes the past, turns it into a place of authenticity and sets it up as invariant. Only in this way, this culture can sustain all its practices and discourses based on authority, leadership and obedience.

Parallel to Jesi’s work, since 1978 with the publication of «Orientalism», Edward Said offered a critique of the notion of culture, since it is structurally tied to the different forms of power. Not only the saga inaugurated by «Orientalism» accounts for this («The Question of Palestine», «Covering Islam») but also «Culture and Imperialism» (1993),[2] in which he stated:

What I want is to examine how the processes of imperialism occur beyond economic laws and political decisions. And how they manifest themselves—as a predisposition by the authority emanating from recognizable cultural formations and by their continuous consolidation within education, literature and the visual and musical arts—on another very significant plane, that of national culture, which we have tended to purify by considering it a stronghold of immutable intellectual monuments exempt from mundane conspiracies.

Going beyond the “economicist” notion of imperialism means “mundaneizing” the cultural monumentality that is perceived as invariant and, ultimately, sacred. Because what interests Said here is precisely how a structural link between culture and power persists conditioning the “idea” that defines imperialism and unfolds itself in a “national culture” that, from Jesi’s point of view, is a “right-wing culture”.

It is interesting to see how the triumph of the Rechazo” (Rejection) accelerated the advance of right-wing culture in Chile, not only identifying itself with the national culture but also monumentalizing the “people”, anthropologizing the “Chilean” man and woman, sacralizing “order” and naturalizing the “tradition”. Everything returns to its place. The place it should never have left. Along with this, the stagnation of the left to dispute this advance is evident. Precisely, progressivism is the very expression of this morass, the moment in which the left speaks the lexicon of the right as if it were obvious and natural.[3]

The discourses begin to proliferate: supposedly, the defeat of September 4, 2022, should be interpreted on the base of how left-wing cosmopolitanism put traditions aside and would not have attended to the country’s anthropological reality. The mythological construction produces the “anthropological” as an “invariant” that politics could never modify and that tells us that Chilean people would be “conservative”, that it would have an identity more oriented towards “order” and that the transformative cosmopolitanism proposed in the New Constitution would have been alien to it. It would be, then, a fight between right-wing nationalism and left-wing internationalism, between the defense of the homeland and its enemies who would come to desecrate it. It would be, then, a culture war. First of all, a “war”.

This was the way in which the right-wing deployed the “Rejection” campaign and it has been the way in which the right-wing has historically faced the political dispute with the left-wing: denouncing the latter as anti-nationalist, an enemy of the homeland. If you like, the right-wing was built as structurally anti-Semitic, whose secularized form is expressed in anti-communism and its reference to the “national culture.”[4] Chilean right-wing culture has always worked like this. It is not a matter of doing it with or without fake news, with or without algorithms, but rather, in what way are we capable of dismantling the mythological machine that it sets in motion.

Because the key point lies with the left-wing: can it dispute that culture? Or, more radically: to what extent would it be possible to dismantle the very notion of “culture” as an effect of the mythological machine and so making visible the framework of the class struggle? Has the left-wing disputed the naturalized premises that make up the field called “cultural”? Feminism has been a decisive discourse in this dispute. But, like all good discourse, this one was also engulfed by neoliberal progressivism, extracting from it its commitment to “forms-of-life” and reducing it to an “identity”. In this sense, neoliberal progressivism continues to be a Christianity and, even worse, a faction in which its converts inhabit. In fact, as early as 1990, regarding the fast conversion of the “left” to neoliberal “progressivism” (Anthony Giddens)the new recomposition of the “Portalian party” during the transition, there was a renunciation of the dispute and an acceptance sine qua non of the invariant, a-historical and a-political character of right-wing culture—today, that of neoliberalism.

But this right-wing culture has changed. Neoliberalism is no longer its exclusive language. So is the reactionary imprintolder than the neoliberal lexicon itself, but which operates as its effect, sidekick and most decisive complement. What was neoliberalism if not the classist violence of the great financial oligarchies that came to power towards the end of the 1970s, that is, fascism that became an economic-managerial technique and no longer a state-national dispositive? The triumph of the Rejection made possible an advance of that right-wing culture of a fascist nature, but which expresses nothing more and nothing less than the truth of neoliberal capitalism and its violence.

Nationalism, the return of anthropological values and the continuity of that culture “made of authority” (according to Jesi) is maintained both in the neoliberal and in the fascist right-wing. Both are a complement to the other, the petty bourgeoisie always allied with the global financial oligarchy (although the former detests the latter) and the latter instigating the former to do the necessary “dirty work”.

In this sense, if we accept the thesis that “traditions were violated by the new constitutional project”, that the Chilean identity would be “conservative”, as is commonly said, that Chile would be a country attached to order unlike other countries, we will be naturalizing the mythological machine, deepening the phenomenon of the expropriation of the language, making impossible a transformation project able to dispute for a different country. In our province, let’s say, right-wing culture has a precise name: Portalian phantasm.[5] Order, authority, virtue, tradition and national unity are part of their jargon. Renouncing the dispute and dissent regarding these matters means surrendering to the victors: accepting them as such and completely surrendering at their feet. Perhaps it is a matter, as Nelly Richard has commented, of preserving a “minor democracy”—in turn, this may mean creating a field of resistance based on friendship and camaraderie. The commitment to a critical concept of culture and the possibility of radically disputing the mythologized terms in use constitute the premises of our survival. Dissent, criticism and the ability to deactivate right-wing culture is, today, more relevant and necessary than ever. We cannot join the technologies of reconciliation.

Excursus

Interviewed by La Tercera newspaper on October 16, 2022, the scholar Carlos Peña, referring to the “dramatic” situation of Chilean public education, stated: “The teacher is not an animator for young people, is not there to contain them, is there to educate them. And to educate authority is required. But today people are afraid to exercise authority”.[6] This is not the place to analyze sentence by sentence what Peña said in this interview, but it is to underline this sentence that is tied into the strictly political operation of sacrificing revolt and reimposing order. It is here that Peña seems to take what authority is for granted. As if it could be understood by itself, as if it were very clear what would be what a certain philosophical and political tradition has called “authority” and which today would seem to be experiencing its decline. I am interested precisely in that “taking for granted”: in it we notice how Peña does not invite us to think about the question of authority, but precisely to claim it without further ado. His gesture cannot be philosophical, but openly theological. He does not raise a problem, but the need for an operation. Here is why Peña has become who he has become: the intellectual who says what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false. Almost like a Creole Hegel, he tries to place himself in the position of a “knowledge” that already knew everything even before events could unfold. For him there are no “events”, but “facts”, his thought claims to fit entirely with reality, and his demand to academics and intellectuals—but also to the general public—is that they see “reality” as it is, that they judge by virtue of the facts and not by their own “drives”. Under this logic, right-wing culture sees in Peña the consummation of its progress by erecting the notion of “authority” without further ado, without problems, as if it were a “fact” that, as Durkheim would say, could be approached as one more “thing” of those that are part of the so-called “reality.” The identity between thought and reality appears in Peña without cracks or discontinuities, in the immediacy of a positivism in which there are only “facts” that are there for the eye of the philosopher. There is no principle of negativity, there is no fissure, everything responds to the continuum between observer and observed, philosopher and reality. For this reason, the relationship of Peña’s thought with that of contemporary neo-fascism is intrinsic, despite what he might claim. For both positivism and neo-fascism, “authority” seems to be a fact, a historical invariant that can be appealed to without further ado.

Beyond the expropriation of the language.
For a materialism of the imaginal.

The criticism on the expropriation of the language experienced by the left-wing that has become progressivism does not imply assuming a supposed “authentic left-wing”. It is not a question of a “false left”, but of a mythological machine, of the same current right-wing culture whose most decisive effect is precisely to produce the idea that there is authenticity, originality, a clear and distinct foundation with all its violence.

It is not a matter of an “authentic left” waiting for its militants to draw the ideological veil to appear in the clear, but of a left that is always to come and, because it is so, must necessarily be invented in each instance by virtue of strategic analyzes in which it predominates an imaginal materialism that does not allow itself to be humiliated by economicism or culturalism. Therefore, there will not be an “authentic” left to which to appeal, but rather a set of fragments to use, parts to imagine with. In this way, the antidote to prevent the expropriation of the language is not to take refuge in a rigid and walled identity like the doctrine, but to invent, each time, that language in light of the strategic situation. Indeed, it would no longer be a question of languages as of dialects that claim their impurity and infinite translatability.

In this light, a materialism of the imaginal supposes embracing what is frequently called “necessities” and the field of desire, underlining their historicity and the machines that have produced them in order to elaborate strategies that de-operate them by offering other uses to our relationship with the world. Precisely, a materialism of the imaginal starts from the premise that Marx’s analyzes of Capital are decisive to the extent that he manages to highlight the historicity of “exchange value” and its forms of accumulation, but that, perhaps, they should be complemented problematically with a set of genealogies of the “use” and its unworking bet. In this sense, a genealogy of use can offer communism as a society where use (life) is indistinguishable from change (law) or, if you like, where change is seen without the accumulation machine and its regime of general equivalence. Communism will not be a regime here, but a strategy; it would not be a party, but a practice; it would not be a doctrine, but a field of analysis. As such, we could even bet that the existence of such a society does not involve erasing the “market”, but rather making forms of exchange proliferate without accumulation, forms of exchange that thus dispute the centrality, univocity and totalization of the properly “capitalist” market that, since the 16th century, it ended up conquering all the markets that existed and dominating the entire planet with its optimization logic.[7]

Promoting the proliferation of markets means inventing unique market forms whose rules of exchange prevent the logic of accumulation. Perhaps this means defending the true markets, not the “false” ones: those in which a use-exchange (pure medium) is at stake and not an abstract regime of value. Precisely, a society in which use and exchange become one and the same immanence constitutes the future opened by this strange materialism that, in an absolutely provisional way, we can call here the materialism of the imaginal.

November, 2022

 

Translated from Spanish into English by Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier.

 


[1] Furio Jesi, «Cultura di destra», Edizioni Garzanti, Milano, 1979; new and augmented edition, «Cultura di destra. Con tre inediti e un'intervista», curated by Andrea Cavalletti, Edizioni Nottetempo, Rome, 2011.

[2] Edward Said, «Culture and Imperialism», Vintage Books, New York, 1993.

[3] See the recent column by Noam Titelman as a symptom of said stagnation and monumentalization of the Tradition: “Solo un progresismo que valore las tradiciones populares podrá ser mayoritario”, en Ex-Ante, September 24, 2022, link: https://www.ex-ante.cl/solo-un-progresismo-que-valore-las-tradiciones-populares-podra-ser-mayoritario-por-noam-titelman/

[4] I understand “anti-Semitism” as a Christian construction that was forged in the 18th century when the term “Semite” was invented to designate Jews, Arabs and Muslims. Although this term was reduced to racial violence against Jews, its genealogy and articulation in present days show that “anti-Semitism” can assume the Jew, Arab or Muslim as the object of “evil”. For that reason, Said could say, towards the end of his introduction to «Culture and Imperialism», that: “In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have ended up writing a history linked in a secret and mysterious way to Western anti-Semitism. This anti-Semitism and orientalism in its Islamic branch are very similar (...)” (p. 53). In this sense, the “link” that Said identifies allows us to think about how contemporary “Islamophobia” is nothing more than an anti-Semitism displaced from the “Jew” to the “Muslim”, an evident issue in the conformation of the discourse of the European ultra-rightsand, by the way, by the Zionist mythological machine.

[5] [Translator’s note. Cf. Rodrigo Karmy, «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de gobierno y república de los cuerpos», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, 2022; and «Nuestra confianza en nosotros. La Unidad Popular y la herencia de lo por venir. El fantasma portaliano 2», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, 2023. The “Portalian phantasm” (where the word phantasm refers to the psychoanalytic concept, Phantom in German for Sigmund Freud, fantasme in French for Jacques Lacan), far from installing a factual transcendental, refers to the delayed continuity of a principial and axiomatic logics that has sustained the political imaginary and the habitus of the oligarchic ruling classes since the time of the transition from the Spanish colony to the Chilean republic. It is part of its performance, precisely, to assert itself as a transcendental apparatus of legitimacy and legality. In his prologue to «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de gobierno y república de los cuerpos», Diamela Eltit writes: “The notion of phantasm, as that which remains and guarantees, will become one of the central concepts that Rodrigo Karmy puts into circulation to analyze the interior of a republic thought, according to the Portalian imaginary, as devoid of citizens or desiring bodies and made up of a mass of inert population, because that population, for the minister, lacked attributes and, in his program, the concept of citizenship only operated as a horizon to be built in an indeterminate future”].

[6] Carlos Peña, “Chile está convertido en un desastre. Yo no sé cómo no lo advierten”, in La Tercera, October 16, 2022.

[7] Ellen Meiksins Wood, «El origen del capitalismo. Una mirada a largo plazo», translated from English into Spanish by Olga Abasolo, Ediciones Siglo XXI, Madrid, 2021.


lunes, 12 de junio de 2023

Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier / Interregnum non inter regna

 


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)[1]

 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[2] 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.[3] 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,[4] 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”[5] 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––,[6] instantiated as a party of order that blocks any democratic deepening by virtue of which peoples can become agents of their own history,[7] 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,[8] 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.[9]     

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.”[10]     

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[11] 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):[12] 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[13]––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[14] 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[15] 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).[16] 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”.[17] 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)[18] 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.[19] 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),[20] 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.[21]

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”.[22]

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.[23]

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[24] 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 (...).[25]

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.[26]

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[27] 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;[28] and on the other hand welcoming Henri Corbin’s[29] reception of the notion of mundus imaginalis from the thought of the twelfth century Persian philosopher Shahabaldin Yahya Sohrawardi.[30] 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.[31]

“Implosion of the philosophy of history.”[32] 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[33] 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):[34] breaking through the revolution as an interruption of historical time,[35] 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~,[36] 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,[37] 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,[38] 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”,[39] 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)[40] 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)[41] 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.[42]

Down with the regime, long live the revolt!



[1] Agamben, Giorgio, “Los modos están en Dios”, interview with Gerardo Muñoz, in Revista Papel Máquina, nº 12 (December, 2018), Santiago de Chile, p. 113.

[2] Amar, Mauricio, “El Negro Matapacos y los símbolos de la revuelta”, in «Los estados generales de emergencia. Dossier en movimiento sobre revueltas y crisis neoliberal», Ficción de la Razón, October, 2019, pp. 61-65, link: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2019/10/29/vvaa-los-estados-generales-de-emergencia-dossier-en-movimiento-sobre-revueltas-y-crisis-neoliberal/ This dossier was published in October 2019 as a collective critical-reflexive intervention during the days of the street revolt; written by Michalis Lianos, Gerardo Muñoz, Matías Bascuñán, Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier, Rodrigo Karmy Bolton, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Federico Galende, Mauricio Amar Díaz and Rudy Pradenas. There is an English translation of Mauricio Amar’s text, “The Negro Matapacos and the Symbols of the Revolt”, translated from Spanish into English by Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier and Jovana Isevski, in Machina et Subversio Machinae, April 1, 2023, link:

https://contemporaneafilosofia.blogspot.com/2023/04/mauricio-amar-negro-matapacos-and.html?fbclid=IwAR2B_sAz2I30IPjCHlFZxZ-SrDM-xJhyok9Ulxpdl11KAiknZhL8fkcJbI8

[3] Foucault, Michel, “La vida: la experiencia y la ciencia”, in Gabriel Giorgi & Fermín Rodríguez (comps.), «Ensayos sobre biopolítica. Excesos de vida», Editorial Paidós, Buenos Aires, 12007, pp. 41-58.

[4] In conversation with Rodrigo Karmy, once we arrived at the formula that there are two ways to sacralize the institutional form: from “within”, immunizing it against all profanation; and from “outside”, demonizing it as something that is better not to touch.

[5] Rulfo, Juan, «Pedro Páramo», Editorial F.C.E., México D.F., 11955.

[6] Karmy, Rodrigo, «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de gobierno y república de los cuerpos», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, 12022. In my reading, the “Portalian phantasm”, far from installing a factual transcendental, refers to the deferred continuity of a principial and axiomatic logic that has sustained the political imaginary and the habitus of the oligarchic ruling classes since the times of the transition of the colony to the Chilean republic. It is part of its performance, precisely, to assert itself as a transcendental apparatus of legitimacy and legality.

[7] Marx, Karl, «El 18 Brumario de Luis Bonaparte», Ediciones Fundación Federico Engels, Madrid, 12003.

[8] There is an intervention of which this is an insistence in light of the events after the triumph of the “Rejection” option in the constitutional exit plebiscite (September 4, 2022) and the triumph of the extreme right in the election of counselors for the new constituent process (May 7, 2023); see Díaz-Letelier, Gonzalo, “Fuenteovejuna chilensis. Guerra civil, transición y puesta en abismo”, in Disenso Revista de Pensamiento Político (https://revistadisenso.com/), nº 3 (July, 2021), dossier “Stasis: política, guerra y contemporaneidad”, edited by Rodrigo Karmy, Santiago de Chile, pp. 28-43.

[9] Nancy, Jean Luc, “Izquierda/Derecha”, unpublished translation from French into Spanish by Felipe Kong; text originally published in French under the title “Gauche/Droite” on the Strass de la Philosophie website:

http://strassdelaphilosophie.blogspot.com/2013/05/gauchedroite-texte-de-jean-luc-nancy.html

[10] Ibidem.

[11] Heidegger, Martin, «Die Onto-Theo-Logische Verfassung der Metaphysik – La constitución onto-teo-lógica de la metafísica», in Heidegger, “Identität und Differenz – Identidad y diferencia”, German-Spanish bilingual edition, translated from German into Spanish by Helena Cortés and Arturo Leyte, Editorial Anthropos, Barcelona, 11988, p. 98 ff.

[12] Kantorowicz, Ernst, «Los dos cuerpos del rey. Un estudio de teología política medieval», translated from English into Spanish by Susana Aikin and Rafael Blázquez, Ediciones Akal, Madrid, 12012, p. 31 ff.

[13] Muñoz, Gerardo, “La jurisprudencia postliberal norteamericana: orden y gobierno del bien-común”, in: Revista Pensamiento al Margen, nº 16 (2022), “La guerra cultural de las derechas identitarias contemporáneas”, a dossier coordinated by Pedro Fernández-Riquelme and David Soto Carrasco, Universidad de Murcia, pp. 8-19.

[14] Karmy, Rodrigo, «El fantasma portaliano. Arte de gobierno y república de los cuerpos», Ediciones UFRO, Temuco, 12022.

[15] Díaz-Letelier, Gonzalo, «Un platonismo sin khorâ», in Ficción de la Razón (December 4, 2019).

[16] Svensson, Manfred, «Una revolución gnóstica», in The Clinic, November 25, 2019.

[17] Platón, «Timaeus», in Platonis Opera, vol. IV, Greek text established by John Burnet, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 11903, 52b.

[18] Cf. Heidegger, Martin, «Parmenides. Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1942/43», in Gesamtausgabe 54, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 21992.

[19] Ibidem, p. 130 ff.

[20] Spinoza, Baruch & Van Blijenbergh, Willem, «Las cartas del mal. Correspondencia Spinoza-Blijenbergh / Comentario de Gilles Deleuze», translated from Dutch into Spanish by Natascha Dolkens, translated from French into Spanish by Florencio Noceti, Editorial Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 22020, p. 19 ff.

[21] Karmy, Rodrigo, “El triunfo popular (20-10-2019)”, in Revista Carcaj, special issue October 2020, p. 14.

[22] Karmy, Rodrigo, «Intifada. Una topología de la imaginación popular», Ediciones Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, 12020, p. 12.

[23] Ibidem, pp. 12, 14-15.

[24] Regarding the notion of a prefigurative politics linked to insurrectionary moments, see: Boggs, Carl, “Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy, and the Dilemma of Power”, in Theory and Society Review, vol. 4, nº 3 (1977), pp. 359-393; Williams, Gareth, “The Mexican Exception and the ‘Other Campaign’”, in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, nº 1 (2007), pp. 130-151; and Schiwy, Freya, «The Open Invitation. Activist video, México, and the Politics of Affect», University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 12019, pp. 8-9.

[25] Karmy, «Intifada. Una topología de la imaginación popular», p. 17.

[26] Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio, “Infrapolítica - Comunismo sucio”, in Ficción de la Razón, February 19, 2018, link: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2018/02/19/sergio-villalobos-ruminott-infrapolitica-comunismo-sucio/  

[27] Cf. Heidegger, Martin, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938)”, in «Holzwege», Gesamtausgabe 5, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 21977, pp. 75-113.

[28] Cf. Debord, Guy, «La sociedad del espectáculo», translated from French into Spanish by José Luis Pardo, Editorial Pre-Textos, Valencia, 12002, p. 43.

[29] Cf. Corbin, Henry, «Cuerpo espiritual, Tierra celeste. Del Irán mazdeísta al Irán chiíta», translated from French into Spanish by Ana Cristina Crespo, Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 11996, p. 101.

[30] Cf. Sohrawardi, Shahabaldin Yahya, «The Philosophy of Illumination. A New Critical Edition of the Text of Hikmat Al-Ishraq», edited by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai, Brigham Young University Press, Brigham, 11999, p. 176.

[31] Karmy, «Intifada. Una topología de la imaginación popular», p. 27.

[32] Ibidem, p. 22.

[33] Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio, «La desarticulación. Epocalidad, hegemonía e historicidad», Ediciones Macul, Santiago de Chile, 12019.

[34] Heidegger, Martin, «Ser y tiempo», translated from German into Spanish by Jorge Eduardo Rivera, Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile, 42005, p. 441 ff.

[35] Benjamin, Walter, «La dialéctica en suspenso. Fragmentos sobre historia», translated from German into Spanish by Pablo Oyarzún, Editorial Lom / Universidad ARCIS, Santiago de Chile, 22009, fragment XV, p. 62.

[36] Heidegger, «Parmenides. Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1942/43», p. 130 ff.; and Agamben, Giorgio, «Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma político. Homo Sacer II, 2», Bollati Boringhieri Editore, Torino, 12015., p. 9 ff.

[37] Benjamin, Walter, «Para una crítica de la violencia», translated from German into Spanish by Pablo Oyarzún, in Pablo Oyarzún, Carlos Pérez López & Federico Rodríguez (eds.), “Letal e incruenta. Walter Benjamin y la crítica de la violencia”, Editorial Lom, Santiago de Chile, 12017, pp. 19-48.

[38] Cf. Sorel, Georges, «Reflexiones sobre la violencia», translated from French into Spanish by Luis Alberto Ruiz, Editorial La Pléyade, Buenos Aires, 11973.

[39] In a similar way, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, when adopting the notion proposed by Antonin Artaud of a “body without organs” to think about the anarchic unworking of organized bodies (organisms) that classify, functionalize and hierarchize life, propose that we are a body without organs as potency, but we cannot reach it on pain of death (absolute disorganization) or neurotic or schizophrenic misfit with respect to the normative social order of facticity: the notion works as a postulate that avoids overadaptation to the hegemonic order and categorial closure of identity, keeping open the horizon of the political as encounter and dissent, composition and recomposition of affections and ideas, disagreement and conflict, criticism and dissidence or common vanishing point. Cf. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, «Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia», translated from French into Spanish by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 11983, p. 9 ff.

[40] Cf. Rancière, Jacques, «La noche de los proletarios. Archivos del sueño obrero», translated fron French into Spanish by Emilio Bernini and Enrique Biondini, Ediciones Tinta Limón, Buenos Aires, 12010.

[41] Thayer, Willy, “Imagen estilema”, in Revista OtroSiglo, vol. 1, nº 2 (2017), pp. 3-46.

[42] Deleuze, Gilles, «Conversaciones», translated from French into Spanish by José Luis Pardo, Editorial Pre-Textos, Valencia, 12006, p. 144.