32

Leaving Immanence
and "The Principle of Identity:'

25

This, at least, is suggested in Spanish philosopher Felipe Marzoa's thesis, elaborated in his book Heidegger y su tiempo [Heidegger and His Time 1 (Madrid: Aka!, 1999).

Infra politics and Immaterial Reflection

Alberto Moreiras

26 Andy Warhol, Death and Disasters, The Menil Collection (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1988).
27

Fredric Jameson has lucidly perceived that the thematization of death in these series no longer occurs on the level of content. But he doesn't finally articulate that if this thanatic impulse corresponds to the "deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them" (9), what is revealed is perhaps not death but its absence and the impossibility of its apparition in a reality that reduces exclusively to external sur faces. In the last instance, the photographic negative is also a positive presence to which all is reduced: color is dissipated in the negative, but to reveal the positive of the surface.

28 Lukacs again reminds us that "Kant's starry firmament now shines only in the dark night of pure cognition, it no longer lights the any solitary wanderer's path (for to be a man in the new world is to be solitary)" (36).

Mauricio Lazzarato defines immaterial labor as "the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the com moditY:" Immaterial labor, not understood as labor proper in older modes of production, is today the task of a "mass intellectuality" whose presence defines "the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within societY:'2 Academic intellectual labor, whose sense it is to determine the uses of history for every one of the existing disciplines or fields of knowledge, and thus to help " [define and fix] cultural and ar tistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion;'3 must be understood within a contemporary division of labor which is itself established by the prevailing mode of production. If it is true that, as Lazzarato says, on the one hand, "the concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an en largement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication, and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity;' 4 and if it is simul taneously true, on the other hand, that "what modern man agement techniques are looking for is for 'the worker's soul to become part of the factory;" and thus "the worker's personal ity and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organiza tion and command;'s then we are facing a strong biopolitical cathexis on the very conditions of intellectual labor in the present. We must wonder whether any attempt to elaborate a new disciplinary subjectivity-that is, whether any attempt at revising the conditions of disciplinary knowledge-is not always already overdetermined by the subjection to organiza tion and command which is a consequence of the regulatory techniques of university management. Lazzarato seems to offer two responses: one optimistic, and the other pessimis tic. According to the pessimistic response, given the fact that what is peculiar to immaterial labor is not the production of commodities to be "destroyed in the act of consumption" but
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rather of commodities that can "enlarge, transform, and create the 'ideological' and cultural environment of the consumer;' then immaterial labor produces "a social relationship" that reveals "something that material production had 'hidden; namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation:'6 Within this determination any possibility of intellectual labor, since intellectual labor is today by definition bound by the conditions of production that define mass intellectuality, cannot go beyond promoting the social relation ship as reproduction of the capital relation: every new production of subjectivity would be condemned to be nothing but the acquiescing response to the system of production's principles of organization and command. But Lazzarato also offers an optimistic response, having to do with the pos sibility of linking the production of subjectivity to a new praxis of meaning. For Lazzarato there is a possibility of genuine innovation in the fact that every act of immaterial production proposes "a new relationship between production and con sumption:'7 Such a relationship can only be appropriated and normalized by the system of production, but it can never be pre-determined by it. "The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life pro duce:'s Lazzarato suggests that the struggle against work can promote values that would not be recoverable by the apparatus of organization and command within the system of production. These values could then develop the "social cycle of immate rial production"9 in ways that would outflank the capital relation itself. According to the old historian Henry Charles Lea, the Spanish Inquisition was "a power within the State superior to the State itself'lO That power is biopolitical power, understood as the power of capture and subjection oflife to political control, that is, the power of political animation of life, the subjection of life to the sover eignty principle. The power to subject life to sovereignty is in every case the power within the state superior to the state itself-an excess or supplement to the state without which there would be no state.'l Whence that excess? A properly materialist answer would consist of saying that, to the extent that the power within the state is state power, even when it exceeds itself, any power within the state superior to the state itself would come from another state, following a genealogical structure. A certain confluence between the work of Michel Foucault and that of Martin Heidegger might allow us to arrest the regression ad infinitum implied in that answer. Thus we could posit the ultimate origin of the genealogical structure in the Roman world, and particularly, and perhaps surprisingly, in the hegemonic structure of imperial domination in Rome. In his class lectures from the 1942-43 winter semester, in his seminar on Par menides, Heidegger says: "We think the political as Romans, i.e., imperialli'12 Hei degger's diagnosis, although thoroughly connected with the situation at the time (i.e., with the turning point in World War II represented by the German defeat at Stalin grad) and with a thoroughly ideological vision of German destiny, is not meant only for Nazi Germany.'3 On the contrary, it encompasses the totality of the history of the West, regarding which Heidegger had thought that the Nazi movement offered the possibility of a renewal. If to think the political is to think it as Romans, imperi ally, and if that comes to be, according to a Nietzschean genealogy, the "history of

an error;'l4 then we must find a non-Roman determination of the political: perhaps counterimperial, or non-imperial. The possibility of thinking a non-Roman, non imperial determination of the political goes through an understanding of the nature of that power within the state superior to the state itself that Lea associates with the Spanish Inquisition. This is not an arbitrary hypothesis: Heidegger himself says it, in passing, almost unintentionally. But I will dwell on it briefly. This issue is not so remote from Lazzarato's interest in finding out whether it is possible to suspend the very mechanisms of organization and command through an attempt at a non-predetermined mode of intellectual production-unpredeter mined by history, and insurgent against determined history. Heidegger's own notion of "originary thinking;' as developed in Parmenides, seeks an interruption of deter mined history, which he associates with the dominance of the Roman West.'5 All of it would have to do with a decisive event. Heidegger does not hesitate to call it "the genuine event ofhistorY;',6 in the sense that there is no other, more important single event, but also in the sense that it constitutes history as we know it: the event of his tory. The event is the Latinization of the Greek notion of truth. "What is decisive is that the Latinization occurs as a transformation of the essence of truth and Being within the essence of the Greco-Roman domain of history. This transformation is distinctive in that it remains concealed but nevertheless determines everything in advance:" 7 It is only a few pages later, in direct connection with this transformation of the essence of truth, that Heidegger mentions the Spanish Inquisition-only once in his Parmenides seminar, and perhaps in the totality of his work: Such change is ever the most dangerous, but also the most enduring, form of domination. Since then, the Occident has known of pseudos only in the form of falsum. For us, the opposite of the truth is the false. But the Romans did not only lay the foundation of the priority of the false as the standard meaning of the essence of untruth in the Occident. In addition, the con solidation of this priority of the false over pseudos and the stabilizing of this consolidation is a Roman accomplishment. The operating force in this accomplishment is no longer the imperium of the state but the imperium of the Church, the sacerdotium. The "imperial" here emerges in the form of the curial of the curia of the Roman pope. His domination is likewise grounded in command. The character of c;ommand here resides in the essence of eccle siastical dogma. Therefore this dogma takes into account equally the "true" of the "orthodox believers" as well as the "false" of the "heretics" and the "unfaithful:' The Spanish Inquisition is a form of the Roman curial imperi um. By way of Roman civilization, both the imperial! civil and the imperial! ecclesiastical, the Greek pseudos became for us in the Occident the "false:' Correspondingly, the true assumed the character of the not-false. The es sential realm of the imperial fallere determines the not-false as well as the falsum. The not-false, said in Roman fashion, is the verum.'8 To speak critically of the Spanish Inquisition during the Winter Semester of 1942-43 in Freiburg is not particularly banal, above all when such a reference to the Inquisi tion, which was the direct antecedent of the National Socialist administrative ap-

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paratus for the "final solution" concerning the elimination of an enemy social body, the "Jews;' presents the Inquisition as a symptom of the great error in the history of the West: literally, thefalsi-fication of the essence of truth, which is also thefalsi-fica tion of the political. Heidegger is attempting to think of a counter-falsification of the political following a non-imperial and counter-Roman path. If it is true, then, that the Roman imperial, as a power within the state superior to the state itself, is the falsi-fication of truth, that is, the understanding of truth on the basis of the notion of the false, and if it is true that such falsi-fication is essen tially related to the capture and subjection of life to political control; if it is true that falsi-fication is in this realm the essence of biopolitics as a strategy of domination, then it is necessary first to understand falsi-fication better, and therefore its relation with the hegemonic structure of imperial domination. I will sum up Heidegger's analysis. Falsum comes from fallere, "to bring about a downfall;' "to cut" or "to hack" in the sense of bringing to a fall. Heidegger asks: "What is the basis for the priority of fallere in the Latin formation of the counter-essence of truth?" And he responds: "It lies in this, that the basic comportment of the Romans towards beings in general is governed by the rule of the imperium. Imperium says im-parare, to establish, to make arrangements: prae-cipere, to occupy something in advance, and by this oc cupation to hold command over it, and so to have the occupied as territori" 9 In the juxtaposition of imperare and hacking or felling we understand both the essence of the political as the power to command and the falsi -fication of truth (that is, once again, the understanding of truth as the mere negation of the false, the brought to a fall, what has been felled) as the very principle of hegemonic power. Heidegger does not use the word "hegemony;' but one can hear nothing else in his definition of imperial power. Because what is false is what has been felled, brought to a fall, what is false has been eliminated from the principle of territori alization. It is, in a paradoxical sense, not subjected to command-no longer sub jected to command. Eliminated from the reach of command, it is also eliminated from life. In life, subjected to the imperial circumscription, one can only have the not-false, and it is this non-falseness that will be administered according to hege mony's principle of organization and command. "To be superior is part and parcel of domination. And to be superior is only possible through constantly remaining in the higher position by way of a constant surmounting of others. Here we have the genuine actus of imperial action . . . . The great and most inner core of the essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, nor simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination:'20 Roman hegemony, the imperial principle of the political under which we still think the political, is, for Heidegger, the apparatus for the territorialization of command according to which what is not susceptible of hacking, of felling, of being brought to a fall, of simple elimination from life can still collaborate in its own domination: this is the biopolitical passion, the principle of subjection of life to sovereign cap ture, the animation of life under criteria of subjection to command in the name of the essential falsi-fication of the true, which is precisely the power within the state

superior to the state itself. As to Foucault, I am concerned with his project to establish a "history of truth;' or rather a history of the "politics of truth;' whose Heideggerian trace is not always sufficiently noted.21 In the five-lecture series delivered at the Pontifical Catholic Uni versity of Rio de Janeiro in May 1973, which was published under the title "Truth and Juridical Norm;' Foucault, talking about fields of knowledge, refers to the types of inquiry that " [b1 eginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries . . . sought to establish truth on the basis of a certain number of carefully collected items of tes timony in fields such as geography, astronomy, and the study of climates:'22 In par ticular, Foucault says, it is on the basis of these inquisitorial procedures that "there appeared a technique of voyage-as a political, power-exercising venture and a cu riosity-driven, knowledge-acquiring venture-that ultimately led to the discovery of America:'23 The relation to Heidegger makes itself obvious here. For Foucault the Inquisition, developed in the Middle Ages through administrative procedures directly inspired in the Carolingian revival of imperial Roman structures and in po litico-spiritual procedures already existing in the Church, in the Roman curia, is not only the principle ofbiopolitical action proper but also a grave historical event: "The inquiry that arose in the Middle Ages would acquire extraordinary dimensions. Its destiny would be practically coextensive with the particular destiny of so-called 'European' or 'Western' culture"24 The juridical forms that were derived from the inquisitorial model became "absolutely essential for the history of Europe and for the history of the whole world, inasmuch as Europe violently imposed its dominion on the entire surface of the earth:'25 Inquisitorial practices were imperial in the Heideggerian sense also inasmuch as they operated a complete inversion regarding the other juridical tradition that was active at the heart of medieval Europe: the Germanic tradition, which followed the principle of the test, and which constitutes the foundation of feudal law. For Fou cault, "in feudal law, disputes between two individuals were settled by the system of the test. When an individual came forward with a claim, a contestation, accus ing another of having killed or robbed, the dispute between the two would be re solved through a series of tests accepted by both individuals and by which both were bound. This system was a way of proving not the truth, but the strength, the weight, the importance of the one who spoke";26 "a procedure of inquiry, a search for the truth, never intervened in this type of system:'27 Through the inquisitorial system the representative of power would abandon the feudal system of tests and proceed to adjudicate justice, not just in terms of criminal acts but also for every dispute related to property, rent, taxes, and economic administration, on the basis of the absolute subjection of the involved parties to a rule of sovereignty. Hence, Foucault says, political power in this system becomes "the essential personage:'28 "On arriving at an appointed place, the bishop would first initiate the inquisitio generalis . . by questioning all those who should know-the notable, the elders, the most learned, the most virtuous-about what had happened in his absence, espe cially if there had been transgressions, crimes, and so on. If this inquiry met with an affirmative response, the bishop would pass to a second stage, the inquisitio specialis, the special inquisition, which consisted in trying to find out who had done what,
.

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in determining who was really the author and what was the nature of the act";29 "this model-spiritual and administrative, religious and political-this method for managing, overseeing, and controlling souls was found in the Church: the inquiry understood as a gaze focused as much on possessions and riches as on hearts, acts, and intentions. It was this model that was taken up and adapted in judicial proce , dure [by royal authority] : 30 This juridical form constitutes a decisive intervention in political history and in the history of the political at the level of what Foucault will term toward the end of his lecture series "infrapower:' Infrapower, a power in the state superior to the state itself, names "not . . . the state apparatus, or . . . the class in power, but . . . the whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest leve!:'31 The inquisition as biopolitical procedure initiates the vast process of the subjec tion oflife to imperial command that would become characteristic of modernity. At stake is to ensure that individuals cooperate in their own domination, following the structure of hegemonic command: "bare life;' to use Giorgio Agamben's expression in Homo Sacer, that is, the life that can be killed without murder or sacrifice, is false life in the Heideggerian sense, and it is ambivalently excluded from the biopolitical operation.32 Everything else dwells in non-falseness, that is, subjected to administra tive imperial command. It dwells in self-subjection as the mode of service to a rea son that becomes co-extensive with political calculation. As Heidegger puts it, "the imperial springs forth from the essence of truth as correctness in the sense of the directive self-adjusting guarantee of the security of domination. The 'taking as true' of ratio, of rear, becomes a far-reaching and anticipatory security. Ratio becomes counting, calculating, calculus. Ratio is a self-adjustment to what is correct:'33 Foucault's infrapower is the political apparatus composed of the institutions whose mission is to "take charge of the whole temporal dimension of individuals' lives:'34 Genealogically conditioned by the Heideggerian history of "imperial falsi fication;' within late capitalism, infrapower rules over "the conversion ofliving time into labor power and labor power into productive force:'35 Infrapower institutions are, "in a schematic and global sense, . . . institutions of sequestration."36 To reduce or destroy the reach of the sequestering institutions and their hegemonic command is to attack infrapower, that is, to move toward a non-imperial practice of the po litical, an infrapolitics, one could call them, in the sense that they place themselves or find their appropriate site not at the level of hegemonic struggle but beneath it, below their (imperial) ground.
"

"proper" nihilism except from the perspective of "fulfilled" or accomplished nihil ism.37 At the same time, however, there can be no accomplished nihilism unless we posit an imperfect form of it. In an essay titled "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin;' Agamben deploys the Heideggerian motif on the basis of an intriguing exchange between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem on Kafka. For Agamben the difference between the two nihilisms has to do very pre cisely with a dilucidation of "the hidden structure of historical time itself'38 Agamben introduces an additional complication when, following both Benja min and Scholem, he mentions that nihilism and messianism are or come to the same thing: If we accept the equivalence between messianism and nihilism of which both Benjamin and Scholem were firmly convinced, . . . then we will have to distinguish two forms of messianism or nihilism: a first form (which we may call imperfect nihilism) that nullifies the law but maintains the Nothing in a perpetual and infinitely deferred state of validity, and a second form, a perfect nihilism that does not even let validity survive beyond its meaning but instead, as Benjamin writes of Kafka, "succeeds in finding redemption in the overturning of the Nothing:'39 The difference between both perspectives on nihilism, between the two nihilisms or the two messianisms, is small: a matter of a "small adjustment;'4o a slight displace ment. Understanding the hidden structure of historical time would have to do with being able to operate that small adjustment, which would mean: the small adjust ment launches us into a form of accomplished nihilism/messianism. This is, in our context, to take a decisive position concerning the status of "the power within the state superior to the state itself;' that is, of infrapower, and hence also concerning the very conditions of immaterial labor. Does immaterial labor in our times, in other words, mark the final subsumption ofliving time into labor power? There are two fundamental uses of history that might adequately reference Lazzaratds two positions, or even the difference between the two faces or two deployments of nihilism or messianism. According to the first use, the most obvious one, the most dominant, the sovereign use, the use that allows us to understand, for instance, the Inquisition under the figure of sovereignty, or sover eignty under the figure of the state, history is always biopolitical history, and hence always immersion and capture by the sovereign relation. We could call this first use "relational surrender;' to adapt Eric Santner's expression.41 In relational surrender, the subject of immaterial reflection surrenders into relational life, surrenders into sovereignty. This is both a form of imperfect nihilism/messianism, and also a form of Lazzarato's first hypothesis, and it understands and deploys an understanding of history as the temporalization of the capture of life by the political. But there is a second use, a literally useless use that might not quite match Laz zarato's second hypothesis. The latter's progressivism is excessively caught up in the notion of the production of new values, that is, in a notion of productive subjectiv ity that is structurally unable to overflow the system of production precisely be cause all it can do is to establish a relation with it. Productive subjectivity, defined in

Given the undecidability between Lazzarato's two positions, namely, either that it is possible to produce social values that are not pre-determined by the system of production or that it is not possible to overcome the biopolitical conditions accord ing to which every production of subjectivity is always already normalized by the system, any reflection on the uses of history is contained within a nihilistic perspec tive. In the Heideggerian interpretation, nihilism is not one: it always comes as two, the first one being imperfect nihilism, and the second accomplished nihilism. For Heidegger, in his interpretation of Nietzsche's Nachlass, there can be no imperfect or

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Lazzarato on the basis of "forms of life:' is always already biopolitical, and perhaps more so than ever at the moment it attempts to change the dominant conditions of biopolitics. This use without use has to do with un-working the determinations of the first use. If the characteristic procedure of the first use of history is the capture of life by the political, the capture of life by the sovereign relation, the characteris tic procedure of the second use is the interruption of the principle of sovereignty, the unworking of the biopolitical, the de-production of the use of history. This is still a messianic nihilism or a nihilistic messianism. This "overturning" of the first use, the "redemption" that Benjamin promises as precisely a redemption regarding the infinite biopoliticization of life, is still a use, even if a useless use, and it is still therefore under the gaze of the political-but in a very especial form, that is, in an infrapolitical form.42 Agamben solves the Benjamin/Scholem exchange into a diagnosis of the history of the present that is a prelude to the embrace of accomplished nihilism as a refusal of the structures of institutional sequestering: Today, everywhere, in Europe as in Asia, in industrialized countries as in those of the "Third World:' we live in the ban of a tradition that is perma nently in a state of exception. And all power, whether democratic or to talitarian, traditional or revolutionary, has entered into a legitimation crisis in which the state of exception, which was the hidden foundation of the system, has fully come to light. If the paradox of sovereignty once had the form of the proposition "There is nothing outside the law:' it takes on a per fectly symmetrical form in our time, when the exception has become the rule: "There is nothing inside the law"; everything-every law-is outside law. The entire planet has now become the exception that law must contain in its ban. Today we live in this messianic paradox, and every aspect of our existence bears its marks.43 Agamben has in mind Benjamin's eighth thesis on the philosophy of history: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task:'44 In the Eighth Thesis Benjamin in turn refers to Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, which defines sovereignty as the power to decide on the state of exception.45 From Lea's sentence on the Inquisition, the Inquisition appears as a sovereign body insofar as it is a power within the state superior to the state itself-the sovereign body has the power to suspend the law from within the site of the law, hence it lives simultane ously within and outside law. Like the Messiah: also He reveals the hidden structure of the law, and suspends the law indefinitely or infinitely. The Inquisition is the ni hilistic-messianic truth of our time, allegory or literality of a state of exception more legal than the law, that is, a sovereign relation that absolutely requires relational surrender. For Agamben, "we can compare the situation of our time to that of a pet rified or paralyzed messianism that, like all messianism, nullifies the law, but then maintains it as the Nothing of Revelation in a perpetual and interminable state of exception, 'the state of exception in which we live."'46

But Benjamin says that when we reach a concept of history that understands and accounts for the paradox of sovereignty (simultaneously hiding and revealing the exception in the law), what Jacques Derrida quoting Montaigne calls "the mystical foundation of authority;'47 then we will be able to produce "a real state of exception:' Again, two states: the state of exception "in which we live;' that corresponds to the biopolitical use of history, and that other useless and enigmatic "state of real excep tion:' on which any possible redemption depends. Between both the need for an infrapolitical "small adjustment:' only possible after reaching a concept of history that gives us its subterranean or hidden foundation. Agamben quotes Scholem's letter to Benjamin where Scholem comments on Benjamin's essay on Kafka. "Scholem defines the relation to the law described in Kafka's novels as 'the Nothing of Revelation; intending this expression to name 'a stage in which revelation does not signify, yet still affirms itself by the fact that it is in force. Where the wealth of significance is gone and what appears, reduced, so to speak, to the zero point of its own content, still does not disappear (and Revelation is something that appears), there the Nothing appears:"48 Validity without significa tion: the zero point of the sense of the law, but thus also appearance of the law in its messianic and sovereign force. The Inquisition is also validity without signification: imperfect nihilism. Eric Santner comments on this passage at length in On the Psycho theology of Everyday Life. If there are two uses of history, and if the first use is a petrified use through which the validity without signification of the law weighs in as imperfect nihilism, weighs in like the Inquisition does in the history of Spain and of the West; if the second use is infrapolitical and it moves in the direction of a new and "real" state of exception, an accomplished nihilism that unworks history by dwelling in the excess that is not just the condition of possibility of the sovereign relation but also the condition of possibility of its destabilization, Santner seeks the second. The first is for him "relational surrender:' He calls the second "unbinding the fantasy:' using Lacanian categories that have been foregrounded in the work of Slavoj Zizek. To traverse the fantasy is to undo the relational fantasy that captures us for and into subjective surrender. Santner calls "exodus" the redemptive possibility of undoing the relational fan tasy that keeps "life captured by the question of its legitimacY:'49 In dialogue with Agamben's interpretation of Scholem's phrase "validity without signification:' Sant ner thinks that "the dilemma of the Kafkan subject-exposure to a surplus of va lidity over meaning-points . . . to the fundamental place of fantasy in human life. Fantasy organizes or 'binds' this surplus into a schema, a distinctive 'torsion' or spin that colors/distorts the shape of our universe, how the world is disclosed to US:'50 Exodus is then "the possibility of recovering, of 'unbinding: the disruptive core of fantasy and converting it into 'more life: the hope and possibility of new possibili ties:'51 In other words, it is the possibility of an openness to "the surplus of the real within reality:'52 an openness to the awareness of infrapower within power. Exodus is infrapolitical consciousness, which means: it is only from within sequestration by the infrapower apparatus, as it determines the individual site of experience of the sovereign relation in every case, that it becomes possible to dislodge from it.

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Perhaps we are not too far from Lazzarato's second hypothesis. For Santner, "the very dynamic that attaches us to an ideological formation is . . , the site where the possibility of genuinely new possibilities can emerge:'53 Sant ner repeats an old postulate of Marxism, according to which only capitalism can produce the weapons for its own overcoming. He does not mention the Derridean "hauntological" reading of Marx, but he nevertheless appeals to it in order to estab lish that, for both Franz Rosenzweig (the thinker that, along with Freud, is the main object of interpretation in Santner's book) and Marx, "relations of exchange-and that means all socio-symbolic systems through which what is individual acquires a general and generic value/identity-always leave a remainder, an insistent and troubling surplus for which no equivalent value can be posited. And for both think ers, this troubling surplus that for the most part functions as the driving force of the symbolic system can become the locus of a break with it, a site where the possibility of unplugging from the dominance of the sovereign/general equivalent can open:'54 But in Santner, and in Benjamin, and in Marx according to Derrida, that redemptive and revelatory possibility is a messianic possibility. The interruption of fantasy, the unbinding of the traumatic nucleus that sustains us as distorted and captured life in subjection to infrapower, is messianic intervention. Fantasy, the traumatic nucleus, Benjamin says in a passage quoted by both Santner and Agamben, will vanish "with the coming of the Messiah, of whom a great rabbi once said that he did not wish to change the world by force, but would only make a slight adjustment in it:'55 The passage from imperfect to accomplished nihilism is a matter of infrapoliti cal orientation towards the small adjustment. The text of deconstruction insists on this small adjustment as fundamental to its own strategy. The difference between any messianism and the messianic is in Derrida the minimal difference that insti tutes the messianic as the very possibility, which then becomes the necessity, of a po litical orientation for deconstruction, and over and over again the minimal basis for decision. In deconstruction's idiom, granted that the very conditions of possibility for justice are also the conditions of its impossibility, granted that "the impossibility of justice for all is the possibility of any justice at all;'56 and the impossibility of hos pitality the only opening for hospitality, of friendship for friendship, and so forth, an orientation to the infrapolitical opening is an orientation towards the conditionless condition that rules over the fact that the aporetic structure obtains. Aporia, that is, nihilism obtains. The difference between an imperfect and an accomplished experi ence of aporia is the difference between understanding aporia as an end of thinking or understanding it as an opening for reflective thinking, which is also an opening for infrapolitical practice there where the suppression of aporia (for instance, in all imperfect messianisms) reinforces the inordinate or exorbitant violence of biopo litical, imperial hegemony. How, then, does the messianic relation, as orientation towards the small adjust ment, affect the decidability of Lazzarato's two hypotheses on politico-intellectual practice, on immaterial reflection? The messianic relation is only the promise that accomplished messianism, the passage from imperfect to accomplished messian ism, can bring about a small adjustment. It is only a promise. The perfect Nothing of the promise is the other face of the Nothing of revelation that constitutes the

imperfect nihilism of Kafka's parable according to Benjamin. Can the mass intel lectuality of the present move toward the unworking of imperfect nihilism? Can it move toward an infrapolitical or non-imperial understanding of the political? Heidegger says: "We think the political as Romans, i.e., imperially:' Inquisitorial infrapower, the power within the state stronger than the state itself, the power of the fantasy that binds the traumatic nucleus of domination with our own invest ment in self-domination (the marrano problem par excellence)-those are sites for the Benjaminian overturning, and accordingly the sites where an infrapolitics can develop that would already think politics against imperial politics, in a non -Roman way, against the falsi -fication of world. Through falsi- fication worlding is no longer the terror or the joy of unconcealment but rather relational surrender. In relational surrender the political relation is nothing but a relation of power. Foucault says that one of the tests or ordeals of the old Germanic tribal order was the ordeal by water, "which consisted in tying a person's right hand to his left foot and throwing him into the water. If he didn't drown he would lose the case, because the water didn't accept him as it should; and ifhe drowned he had won the case, seeing that the wa ter had not rejected him:'57 But there must be a way to win this ordeal beyond the chiasmatic alternative: if you lose the case, you lose your life. If you win the case, you lose your life. Why have it at all? Infrapolitics is nothing but the (search for a) non-inquisitorial exodus from such a conjuncture.

I wish to thank Marta Hernandez and Juan Carlos Rodriguezfor their comments on the original Spanish version of this essay, which have guided many o f the revisions.

, itics Pol al enti Pot A y: Ital in t ugh Tho ical Rad in or;' Lab l eria mat "Im to, zara Laz io Mauriz ss, 199 6), ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Mi nneapolis: University of Minnesota Pre 133
Ibid., 133, 134 Ibid., 133. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 134 Ibid., 138. Ibid., 146. Ibid. Ibid., 147

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

w York: McMillan, (Ne ies enc end Dep nish Spa the in tion uisi Inq The , Lea rles Cha ry Hen 10 19 22 ), 35 7. 7) is still 6-0 190 , lan Mil Mc k: Yor w (Ne s. vol 4 in, Spa in tion uisi Inq the f o tory 11 Lea's A His been made out has ip rsh ola sch its , but tion uisi Inq the on ce ren refe le uab val ely rem ext an rell and Esc me tolo Bar and a uev lan Vil ez Per n qui Joa See ch. ear res g nin rve dated by inte drid: Biblioteca (Ma s. 3 vol a, eric Am y ana Esp en ci6n uisi Inq la de a tori His ., eds et, Bon tem con d dar stan the for 3) 199 s, iale tor uisi Inq os udi Est de o ntr /Ce nos stia de Autores Cri Foucault, The hel Mic see s, itic pol bio and er pow bio of s term In rk. wo ce ren refe ary por tage, Vm k: Yor w (Ne rley Hu ert Rob s. tran n, ctio odu Intr An 1 e um Vol ity. ual f o . History Sex

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Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection fended. Lectures at the College de France 1975-76, ed. 1990), 135-41, and Society Must Be De Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 253-63, among other texts in his later work. Giorgio Agamben takes up those Foucaultian concepts in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
and Power' Revisited:' 30-54.

Alberto Moreiras

45

22 Foucault, "Truth:' 49 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 34 25 Ibid., 40 . 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 45 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 47. 31 Ibid., 86-87.
kill without to d tte mi per is it ich wh in ere sph the is ere sph ign ere sov e 32 For Agamben "th -that is, life that life red sac d an , ice rif a sac ng ati ebr cel ut tho wi d an e cid mi committing ho mo Ho :' ere sph s thi in ed tur cap en be has t tha life the is dice may be killed but no t sacrif

12 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Blooming ton: Indiana University Press, 1992), 43. 13 For the connection between Heidegger's Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad see Ag nes Heller, "Parmenides and the Battle of Stalingrad:' Graduate Faculty Philosophy Jour naI 19.2/20.1 (1997): "The winter semester ended in January or February. The Soviet army had closed the circle around the German army in Stalingrad at Christmas 1942. Germany
had lost the war. Few knew this; Heidegger was one of those who did. This is easy to decipher from the text of the Parmenides lectures" (248). Heidegger's overwhelming pre occupation with Germany is turned into a preoccupation with modernity as such in the establishment of an equivalency between Germany and the West, particularly after the failure of the National Socialist regime-for Heidegger already clear in the mid-1930s. For the politico-philosophical context, see Frank H. W. Edler's "Heidegger's Interpretation of the German 'Revolution:" Research in Phenomenology 23 (1993): 153-71, and "Philosophy, Language, and Politics: Heidegger's Attempt to Steal the Language of the Revolution in 1933-34:' Social Research 57.1 (1990): 197-239. See also Theodore Kisiel, "Situating Rhe torical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical (1923-1925: The French Occupy the Ruhr:' Existentia 9 (1999): 11-30, for the political background to Heidegger's commitment to reactionary practice. But the crucial book on Heidegger's notion of a second Revolu tion within Nazism in favor of an originary philosophy of autochthony and rootedness and Heidegger's subsequent, post-Germany's defeat developments is Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots. Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell Univer sity Press, 2003). See also Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's "Being and Time" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). For an excellent use of Heidegger's Parmenides regarding geopo litical thinking today, see William S. Spanos, America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 53-63 passim.

Sacer, 83. 33 Heidegger, Parmenides, 50. 34 Foucault, "Truth:' 80. 35 Ibid., 84. 36 Ibid. 37 See volume 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche, 4 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991) for his major dilucidation of Nietzsche's concept of nihilism. On
the difference between nihilisms see, for instance: "Nietzsche's metaphysics is nihilism proper . . . Nietzsche's metaphysics is not an overcoming of nihilism. It is the ultimate entanglement in nihilism . . . . By means of the entanglement of nihilism in itself, nihilism first becomes thoroughly complete in what it is. Such utterly completed, perfect nihilism is the fulfillment of nihilism proper" (203)

14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Lon don: Penguin, 1990), 5l. 15 For originary or primordial thinking see Parmenides, 6-10. See also Heller, op. cit., 249
passim. And, generally, Bambach, op. cit.

38 GiorgiO Agamben, "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benja min:' in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stan ford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 168. 39 Ibid., 171. 40 Ibid., 174
Chicago of ty rsi ive Un o: ag hic (C e, Lif y da ery Ev of gy olo the cho 4 1 Eric L. Santner, On the Psy Press, 2001), 90.

16 Heidegger, Parmenides, 42. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 46. 19 Ibid., 44. 20 Ibid., 45. 21 Michel Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms:' in Power: Essential Works ofFoucault 19541984, vol. 3, ed. and trans. James D. Faubion, series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 2000), 13. On the relations between Heideggerian thinking and Foucault, see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Min neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), in particular Milchman/Rosenberg, "To ward a Foucault/Heidegger Auseinandersetzung;' 1-29, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, "'Being

rrowed from (bo se sen nt ere diff y htl slig a in " ing ork nw "u of n tio no 42 Agamben refers to the 61. Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot) in Ho mo Sacer,

43 Agamben, "Messiah;' 170. 44 Quoted ibid., 160. 45 See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 1-15. Agamben had already referred to Schmitt's state of exception in Homo Sacer (8-19; 26-42), but he develops its implications in Stato di eccezione. Homo Sacer 2.1 (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003). 46 Agamben, "Messiah;' 17] .

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Infrapolitics and Immaterial Reflection

work of Paolo Virno' although h' IS use of th word "exodus'" IS necessarily indebted to Vi rno's "Virtuosity and Revolution. The PohtlCal Theory of Exo dus;' in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in . . Italy.. A Potential PoiztlCS (Mm neapolis: University of Minnesota Press 19 96 ) , 189 210. S antne rs ' and V" ' lrnos ' uses 0f the term are for the most part hetero geneous. 50 Santner, op. cit., 39.
.

47 Jacques Derrida, Acts ofReligion , ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 20 01 ), 22 9. 48 Agamben, "Messiah;' 16 9. 49 Santner, op. cit., 30 . Santner does not mention the

Post-Political Citizenship
Kenneth Surin

5 1 Ibid., 40. 52 Ib id ., 74. 53 Ibid., 8l. 54 Ibid., 96 -97. 55 Quoted in Santner, 12 2 and Agamben, 174. 57 Foucault, "Truth;' 38 . 56 I am indebted to Martin Hagglun d for this form ul
ation in a personal communication.

There is a conventional wisdom in the history of philosophy regarding the more or less intrinsic connection between the metaphysical-epistemological project that seeks an absolute ground for thought or reason, and the philosophico-political project of finding a ground in reason for the modus operandi of a moral and political subject. According to the lineaments of this well-seasoned narrative, the essential congruence be tween the rational subject of thought and the complemen tary subject of morality and politics was posited by Plato and Aristotle, and this unity between the two kinds of subject then found its suitably differentiated way into the thought of Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel (among many others). The core of this narrative is expressed by the somewhat Kantian proposition, characteristic of the Enlightenment in general, that reason provides the vital and indispensable criterion by which all judgments concerning belief, morality, politics, and art are to be appraised; so that reason is the faculty that defines and regulates the thinking being's activity, while this activity is in turn the essential means for reason's deployment in any thinking about the world, for the thinking being's capacity to describe and explain the world in ways that accord fundamentally with reason's precepts, and this precisely because reason is the irreducibly prior and en abling condition of any use of this capacity. Reason, in oth er words, constitutes the thinking being, and the activity of this being in turn enables reason to unfold dynamically (to provide a somewhat Hegelian gloss on this initially Kantian proposition). In the topography of this unfolding of reason, both thought and politics find their foundation. The philosophical tradition provides another way of de lineating this connection between the subject of thought and the political subject, one that also derives its focal point from Kant. Using the distinction between a subjectum (i.e., the thing that serves as the bearer of something, be it consciousness or some other property of the individual) and a subjectus (i.e., the thing that is subjected to something else), the tradition
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