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.

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[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. 

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 dispute—as 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 lefts—I include progressivism here as their most emblematic symptom—have begun to speak the language of another and, even, to speak their own signifiers, but under the terminology—and temporality—imposed 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” was—it 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 imprint—older 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.

 

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[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-rights—and, 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.