ANARCHÉ
Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier
University of California Riverside
I want to start by saying that
I am very happy to participate in this panel for the first time, and thank the
organizers for the great work they have done during these three days. Now I am
going to approach the concept of anarché in a non-exhaustive way, of
course, but rather in an exploratory way, trying to approach the question of
the access to the question in terms of the paradoxical temporality that is at
stake here.[1]
The “vulgar conception of time” –which Martin Heidegger saw predominate from Aristotle to his days, both in philosophy and science as well as in everyday life– consists in imagining time and history as a straight and progressive line, as the movement of a mighty and unitary flow –like the river that the salmon runs through, returning to its source. But I insist: the evocation of the figure of the salmon is not to make a fable to understand human issues with animal analogies, but rather a resource to get rid of a certain temporal schematism that prevents us from thinking about anarché. This schematism operates, for example, when to think about the moment in which we “go back” to a memory, to a past situation, or to our childhood, or towards the foundations of our practical and declarative behaviors, we think of something similar to the image of the salmon going back to its origin. We think of time here through an image, that is, photologically: it is a spatialization of time linked to an economy of presence, determined by a principial articulation in its unity and teleological transcendental meaning –of our biographical temporality, or of the historiographical time, or even of the life of salmon biologically represented. But history is not like a river, with its sources welling like ever-flowing streams (as it is in Saint Agustine’s thought), or with its sedimentation banks located between the mountain source and the sea (as it is in Husserl’s thought). And the anarchaeologist does not do something analogous to what a salmon does. Understanding this is elementary in order not to monumentalize “the History” in general or “the history of metaphysics” in particular.
Husserl spoke of “going back to the origin” of our horizons of meaning: every horizon opens from a ground on which we already walk. Zurück zu den Sachen selbst (to back to the things themselves) is a necessary philosophical operation, Husserl argues, because “European humanity” finds itself in the midst of a crisis in the very foundation of its eidetic activity. Let's put ourselves in the place of that humanity: we don't know where we stand, and the horizon is distressing. We need to harking back, back to the origin, back to the ground on which our recollections, relationships and projects are ordered. In this sense, “professional philosophy” does what the salmon does: it “returns to the origin” and thus ensures the foundation of an economy of presence and the principial articulation of the coherent continuity of human praxis –its meaning. Edward Said has put this issue in relation to the question of the beginning, in the following terms. Considering what he calls the “equivalence between temporality and significance”, this is, that the hermeneutical disposition of life implies a schematicity of time, the grammar of the discursivity that guides practical and declarative behavior implies a “formal notion of beginning”:
Profoundly temporal in its manifestations, language nevertheless provides utopian space and time, the extrachronological and extrapositional functions over which its systematic determinism does not immediately seem to hold firm sway. Thus “the beginning”, belonging as often to myth as to logic, conceived of as a place in time, and treated as a root as well as an objective, remains a kind of gift inside language.[2]
There is a metaphysics of the beginning that places it as a transcendental, as a founding, dynastic and sequential exception. The effects of sovereignty and government over life displayed by this phantasmatics of the modern subject would be expressed both in Descartes’ “imperial ego” and in Husserl's “functionary of humanity ego”. Said, on the sovereign founder subject, points out that “consciousness, whether as pure universality, insurmountable generality, or eternal actuality, has the character of an imperial ego; in this view, the argument cogito ergo sum was for Valéry ‘like a clarion sounded by Descartes to summon up the powers of his ego’. / The starting point is the reflective action of the mind attending to itself, allowing itself to effect (or dream) a construction of a world whose seed totally implicates its offspring”. Remember that the main reason salmon swim upstream is to ensure the survival of their offspring –marine biologists use to say. At the other hand, on the functionary subject and his infinite profession of clarifying the hermeneutical frameworks for the government of life, Said says that “Husserl merits special attention because the nearly excessive purity of his whole philosophical project makes him the epitome of modern mind in search of absolute beginnings; he has rightly been called, in that sense, the perpetual Anfänger (the perpetual beginner)”. Such metaphysics –Said points out– puts into play a productive subject, determined in its intention, but who in turn conjures up the infancy of its animal common becoming. The subjection of the animal, the capture of infancy, would be put into work precisely in the objectification of life itself in time, as subjective imperiality over the event:
This sequence [i.e., the continuum beginning-middle-end], however, seems to be “there”, at a distance from me, whereas my own problematical situation is “here” and “now”. (…). It is my present urgency, the here and now, that will enable me to establish the sequence beginning-middle-end and to transform it from a distant object –located “there”– into the subject of my reasoning. So conceived and fashioned, time and space yield a sequence authorized by a wish for either immanent or surface significance.[3]
Erin Graff Zivin, in a critical approach to the modes of production of the subject, world and history in Latin America, has explored this question around the logical contrast between two genealogies of Latin American political thought. On the one hand she points at the tradition of Hispanic imperial reason, with its “inquisitorial logic”, archaeological, principial and identitarian, close to a conservative philological tendency that is dedicated to dig towards “the originary”. On the other hand, Graff Zivin points out the Marrano register –according to Alberto Moreiras's formula–, which refers to a series of critical anarchaeological practices against the metaphysical principiality and identitarianism, among which subalternism, deconstruction, infrapolitics and post-hegemony could be included, as well as other critical practices, of course, among which I would include, for example, a certain contemporary south American anarchic Averroism.[4] These are practices which, what they do, is open up the potency of ethical and political reflection –and they do so precisely by putting into abyss the ontotheological foundation of our ethical and political facticity, identitarian and productivistly informed.[5]
But, then, what would be the anarché that is at stake in the anarchaeological practice? If anarchaeological or post-foundational thought does not coincide with “professional philosophy”, this is because anarchaeology does not do what the salmon does. If the fetish of the “beginning” is myth and logic at the same time, as Said maintains, that is, if the arché is conceived as a “place in time” provided by language as an “extrachronological and extrapositional” function, the function of “a root as well as an objective” that remains as a kind of gift inside language –despite the heteroclite temporality of its manifestations–, then, anarchaeology would consist in undoing that theological and historicist fetishism by disclosing anarché in thought.
On the one hand –and this is the way of the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics that is at stake in the works of Heidegger, Schürmann, Agamben or Spanos–, disclosing anarché in thought could be, at first, taking a step back from any adaequatio made feasible in its articulation by ontotheological principiality, representational archive and civilizational militancy –of course there are steps back and stumbles forward in this list–; and learning from there to read the “hegemonic phantasms” (Reiner Schürmann would say), or “signatures”, “arcanes” (as Giorgio Agamben’s), to read them in their singularity, the singularity of the case or event. For although it has the appearance of a confrontation with a supposedly original state of “tradition”, the confrontation itself has a paradoxical temporality: by disclosing ontological anarchy into thought, it must confront its constitutive dishomogeneity –the radical alterity, the non-coincidence of any institution with itself–, and the way in which it has been reconstructed as a particular type of negative relation to a pseudo-transmission of the supposedly original state of tradition. But if philosophy itself is to be an anarchic potency, that means that philosophizing would take place in a paradoxical time that can never be identified with a chronological date –I mean, with a chronological date in the conventional historical sense. The anarchaeological reading of texts, events and conjunctures does not seek to constitute an archaeological archive in the sense of “professional philosophy”. Neither an archive of meta-historical structures, nor supreme entities nor transcendental categories. Even less in the hagiographical and canonical sense of the history of philosophy, which sometimes mirrors the history of the Saints and their Works –metaphysics of the subject and presence in its most obscene splendor. What is at stake in this anarchaeological reading would be an arché which –as Nietzsche, Foucault or Agamben insist– is not diachronically displaced into the past, but rather ensures the coherence and the synchronic comprehensibility of the system. The arché is the point of emergence of the present as futural-past, that is, the tension between an “extrachronological and extrapositional” archaeo-teleological injunction–, and the radical and turbulent heterogeneity of the present, a tension that should be perceived not as a datable “origin” in “tradition”, but rather as an immanent historical montage, at once finite and untotalizable.
On the other hand, disclosing anarché as an existential condition of thought means deactivating the ontotheology of principial injunction (a possible way of carry out the classical phenomenological gesture of “making mention without making use”) and –to use Erin Graff Zivin’s term– carrying out misreadings of its “traces” or “specters”, in a disjointed time –since precisely the three ontotheological principles of “Western tradition”, the principles of sufficient reason, identity and non-contradiction, in their archontic dimension as mandate or injunction (arché)–, claim to make possible the seamless temporal conjunction of words and things. This is the way of the déconstruction of metaphysics that is at stake in the works of Derrida. Reader of Nietzsche, early Derrida pointed to a structure of the metaphysics of subject and presence that, through different “masks”, has operated the very history of the West as “a successive chain of determinations of the center”, and, in line with Heidegger, characterized it as a succession of Sätze vom Grund or “supreme entities” (in each case the arché, origin and command as articulating injunction of what comes to presence in its conjunction) that, as an ontotheological reason, unfolded the ordering of “the being in total” –these are expressions of Heidegger. Derrida maintains that the centralizing and totalizing metaphysical gesture aims to ensure the comprehensibility of entities in the form of a structural coherence of representability –that is, the order of words and things. Now –following Derrida–, the philosophical language of this metaphysics articulates an architecture of binary oppositions: “one of the terms always imposes itself on the other (axiologically, logically, and so on)”, generating the founding split of philosophy between the intelligible and the sensible, leaving the sensible subordinate to the intelligible. Derrida maintains that the way out of this structuring of thought does not pass through the mere “inversion” of the hierarchy of the binomial, nor through the negative work of speculative dialectics, but rather through a “textual work strategy” that consists of a gesture of “writing with two hands”: with one hand one pretends to respect the structure of binary oppositions, and with the other it is “displaced” until its extinction and closure as such. “Deconstructing –said Derrida in an interview in 1989– is both a structuralist and anti-structuralist gesture: a building, an artifact, is dismantled to outline its structures, its ribs or skeleton (...), but also, simultaneously, the ruinous precariousness of a formal structure that explained nothing, since it was neither a center, nor a principle, nor a force, nor even the general law of events” –so far, the quote of Derrida. The radicalization of the deconstructive gesture of indefinite deferral and displacement leads to the question of the différance. It does not have to do with a new “fundamental concept”, in the sense of a new metaphysical ground, transcendental meaning, or the cause of all possible differential effects –such as “something” or “someone” that produces the differences, which would be equivalent to a reinsemination of the principle of reason in its binomial “proto-cause and effect”. The différance has to do, rather, with an immanent and affirmative movement of disarticulation through the proliferation of differential “traces” and “traces of traces”.
No institution coincides with itself. Neither the subject nor the community, neither humanity nor the other, neither language nor history. Such materiality of things –argues Kate Jenckes– marks “the radically historical nature of present life, inevitably exposed to what is coming and is always coming, both from the past and from the future, (...) opening up to an otherness that exceeds certainty and representation”.[6] In this sense, following Jenckes, it is interesting to think about what Derrida, on the one hand, points out as “two primary models of thinking about life”: the paradigms of immunity and autoimmunity, and, on the other hand, the law of iterability of excess, of an alterity that is both internal and external, singular and infinitely plural. The immune technology of the living is configured as a defense against an enemy, as protection from all alterity that threatens the organic and self-present integrity of life (“other beings, time, death, the unconscious or our own animality”). As a “universal structure of religiosity” (the expression is Derrida's), it is a technology of individuation and relationship of the living, of which expressions are found in biological life (immunity, health, defense and preservation, protection against diseases), but also appear in the economic life (property as protection from poverty and the unfamiliar, “protection from debt to others”), and also in politics (legality and legitimacy, authority and security, governability, reason of state, police and army) and, finally, in religious life (personal integrity, virtue and temptation, evil such as fault and guilt, salvation) –including, of course, the secular drifts of humanism, whose immune reverses are necropolitical racism, necroeconomic imperial geopolitics and the sacrificial cybernetics of human capital. It is about the production and safe keeping of a self, incorporated and perceived as integral, through the sacrifice or ingestion of that which threatens the economy of the same. However, Derrida simultaneously points to an autoimmune dimension of the living, which places itself in the abyss, uncovering the “membrane” or the “shield” that makes the distinction between the same and the other an essential or capitalizable definition of identity as original accumulation. In consideration of this cleavage that traverses the living –immune closure and setting in abyss–, Derrida calibrates, to think the facticity of living time, what he calls the law of iterability, according to which the self is always one and again divided by otherness,[7] that every sense of self is always traversed by an alterity that is both internal and external, singular and infinitely plural, remaining essentially “non-reappropriable, non-subjectivable, and in some way unidentifiable”. “It is in this sense –Jenckes points out– that the other is fundamentally to come (avenir) –not as a distant future or a possibility, but as that which maintains its alterity with respect to itself and presence. / Derrida's description of autoimmunity as a “sacrificial self-destruction principle that ruins the self-protection principle” means that autoimmunity sacrifices the internalizing-externalizing structure of sacrifice, performing what he calls (...) a “sacrifice of the sacrifice”.[8] Following Derrida's formulation distilled by Jenckes of self-alter-immunity, we could say that the law of iteration entails alterity as an internal and external principle of opening, interruption, deviation, transformation or collapse, and therefore implies difference as putting into abyss of all facticity of the social bond that can be archived representationally and hegemonically operationalized as a sacred and immunized form of relational life. The principle of ruin that dwells within the principle of iteration allows us, it seems to me, to explain the double movement (natura naturata et natura naturans, to put it in the Spinozian formula), undecidable movement that opens from the “lack of foundation” or anarché: not only the hegemonic principiality that propose itself as the foundation of authority to avert ontological anarchy and build its own institutions –from an empty throne, obviously–, but also the difference as undoing, revolt and putting into abyss of the popular imagination –not interpreting anarché as an ontological “lack” and a condition of debt and mimetic docility, but rather as an abysmal condition of the common potency of imagining and relationship.
Destruktion and déconstruction, two now “classic” strategies, among others contemporary drifts, that have disclosed anarché in thought. There are not only encounters between these two strategies: there are also radical disagreements, some of them until today seem unsolvable. Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, reading Schürmann, maintains that being anarchically concerned with being, in the paradoxical sense of the temporality of anarchical thought, implies confronting with the articulating principial structures of the philosophy of history and the philosophical determination of “the real”. Metaphysics of the subject and presence, as a hegemonic phantasmatics, what it operates is a “permanent attempt to reduce the radical historicity of being from a normative injunction emanating from the principles that organize the epochs of its history”, articulating a “spatialization of temporality” –in the sense of archaeo-teleological and sovereign-sacrificial temporality. Regarding Schürmann and his strategic difference with deconstruction, Villalobos-Ruminott argues that the so-called destruction is “a particular reading economy, that is, a certain reading of the tradition and its texts, a reading that emphasizes in them the principial articulation of the sense, and not what we could call the heterogeneous game of meaning that dwells in the absent center of each text –given that this heterogeneity complexifies the main organization of meaning, awakening the counterforces and resistances that are always at work through the text and its different interpretations. These resistances, certainly, derail the conventional identification of the text with the epochal principles, perverting the philosophical “donation” of meaning, while opening the text to another donation, to another aneconomic economy, which does not occur in the continuous temporality of the tradition, nor within the margins of professional philosophy”.[9] So far, the Villalobos-Ruminott’s quote. Obviously, it is a strategy that can arouse the suspicion that the emphasis on phantasmatic hegemony obliterates heterogeneous counterforces, reinseminating metaphysical cleavage through monumentalizing. But if there is a point of convergence between Schürmann's anarchic disjunction and Derrida's différance, it is, perhaps, the post-hegemonic horizon that opens with the disclosing of anarché in thought: subtracting and displacing the common plural-singularity with respect to the principial and nomic domination, epochal-hermeneutical violence that in each case captures the practical and declarative “intentionality” in the state of a historically given metaphysical language, organized in principle. Anarchaeology would “mark” the trace, would make the arché appear through a possible montage –without reducing it representationally in vulgar time–, but at the same time “un-marking” them, as in Borges’s thought that “invents its precursors” to mark traces in the labyrinth reflected in the Spinozian lens.
I would like to bring three brief quotes made by William Spanos, in the context of a question about “the ontological origins of Occidental imperialism”,[10] to show a trace that can be seen before diffracting in each of the texts. They are quotes from Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Edward Said.
This is Heidegger's quote, from «The Age of the World Image»: “In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme (its zenith), from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, id est, technological, rule over the earth”.
And this is Derrida’s quote, from «Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences»: “The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere (…). The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And, on the basis of this certitude, anxiety can be mastered”.
And this is Said’s quote, from «Culture and Imperialism»: “In the expansion of the great Western empires, profit and hope of further profit were obviously tremendously important (…). But is more than that to imperialism and colonialism. There was a commitment to them over and above profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation, which, on the one hand, allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, and, on the other, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples”.
The trace that
can be seen, maybe, before diffracting in each of the texts, is the trace of arché
and anarché at the same paradoxical time. And it is still urgent, and today
maybe more, to think about the metaphysical foundation or arché as a
technology of production of ontological debt. The “necessity” of its
sacrificial cleavage rests, in any of its archaeo-teleological configurations, on
the anarché or abyss of revealability of being-in-common. The anarché
of the social is not a fetishization of negativity, but rather the infinite
revealability of its metamorphoses and revolts, of the social non-bond and of terror
(in the sense of Jacques Lezra): an occasion for the infinite testification of
what does not stop arriving. Such radical un-founding in the immanence of relational
life is what is conjured up by the ontologies that operate in and on it a
certain type of mediation: the debt relation as a device for the control of
life’s movement, and the conception of evil as “lack” (in the Platonic and
Christian theology sense of dēfectus) or coefficient of deviation from
what is due (this is, from perfectio in the archaeo-teleological sense).
Maelström of defectiveness, expressive not-without-bound, and pure
mediality, where evil is not deviation, but “what limits the potency” of
each one and of all (in the expressive sense of the potentia communis
elaborated by Baruch Spinoza and retraced by Gilles Deleuze). These and
infinite more can be names for that abyss of revealability and relationship or
anarchic potency of composition that is anarché; the ontologies of debt
–be they principial and/or axiomatic, all of them sacrificial– conjure it
indexically, through some kind of “revelation” or prosopopeic invention of the
alterity of the other as an affirmation or negation of “the social” –religare,
religio; sequitur, socius, are other names for debt, based
on identity imaginaries of inclusive/exclusive unity, that is, that do not
recognize that no institution coincides with itself, that otherness populates
the self in many ways.
[1] This text was read at the closing panel of Political
Concepts Graduate Student Conference 2022 (The New School for Social Research,
New York University, University of California Riverside, Harvard University,
and Duke University), organized by The New School for Research Dean's Office,
NSSR Philosophy Department, NSSR Politics Department, Philosophy Student Forum
& University Student Senate, held at NSSR, New York, on March 27, 2022.
[2] Said, Edward, «Beginnings. Intention and method», Basic Books Publishers, New
York, 11975, p. 43.
[3]
Ibidem, p. 42.
[4] Karmy,
Rodrigo, «Intifada. Una topología de la
imaginación popular», Ediciones Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, 12020.
[5] Graff Zivin,
«Beyond Inquisitional Logic, or, Toward
an An-archaeological Latin Americanism», in The New Centennial Review, vol.
14-1 (2014), Michigan State University Press, pp. 195-212; and «El pensar-marrano; o hacia un
latinoamericanismo anarqueológico», in Castro, Rodrigo (ed.), «Poshegemonía: el final de un paradigma de
la filosofía política en América Latina», Editorial Biblioteca Nueva,
Madrid, 12015, p. 207 and ff.
[6] Jenckes, Kate, «Witnessing beyond
the Human. Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-coup Chile and Argentina»,
State University of New York Press, New York, 12017, p. xiii.
[7] Derrida, “’Eating Well’, or the Calculation of the Subject”, translation
French-English by Peter Connor and Avital Ronnell, en: «Points…», Standford University Press, Stanford California, 11995,
p. 261; quoted by Kate Jenckes in opus cit., p. xvii.
[8] Jenckes,
opus cit., p. xviii / nota 11, p. 162.
[9]
Villalobos-Ruminott, Sergio, «La anarquía
como fin de la metafísica. Notas sobre Reiner Schürmann (A modo de introducción
- Soberanías en suspenso 2)», 2016, inédito.
[10] Spanos, William, «America’s
Shadow. An Anatomy of Empire», University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis /
London, 12000.
