Alberto Moreiras moreiras@buffalo.edu alberto.moreiras@abdn.ac.

uk

Draft: Not To Be Quoted Without Authors Permission What counts is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives. (Levinas 28) The villains and heroes get all mixed up. (Fleming 159) Homely/Unhomely: The In/Domestication of Being Political(ly) Conference Paper My intention is to move towards the elaboration of categories that might be used to think about the political from a perspective that is based on the premise of the necessary end of the sacrificial structuration of history; the premise of the necessary end of the principial epochs in the history of metaphysical thought, which I correlate to the former; and the premise, which seems to me a corollary, of the necessary abandonment of the thought of freedom as a negative relation to political sovereignty. I am sorry I dont have the time to go further into an explanation of what I mean by these notions, I simply want to state them as such. I will draw on literature as the repository of a certain number of treasures for this endeavor. The following reflections are in debt with the thought of Martin Heidegger, Maria Zambrano, and Reiner Schurmann among others. They are preliminary and only meant to start a way.

2 I am also cutting my paper down in order to stay within the time limits. Apologies, therefore, for the excessive brevityI will leave aside entire sections on Cormac McCarthy and Javier Marias and concentrate on a discussion of the Preface to Emmanuel Levinass Totality and Infinity and on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled The Maker. Let me start with a brief definition of what I call infrapolitics. Infrapolitics is the kind of politics that refuses to totalize the political as its own sphere of action. It affirms, and even enacts, a break away from the political, not in the name of politics, rather in the name of an essential affirmation that involves ethics but that is not itself limited to ethics. An enigmatic sentence towards the last pages of Immanuel Kants Metaphysics of Morals might point us towards that essential affirmation: The human being is a being meant for society (though he is also an unsociable one), and in cultivating the social state he feels strongly the need to reveal himself to others (even with no ulterior purpose) (216). The need for anti-moralist revelation, for a selfexposure without calculationit is not yet ethical, and it certainly has nothing to do with politics. It is something else and points to a realm of practical reason that can hardly be captured by the division of the latter into ethics and politics. Is it a rhetorical need? It conditions all rhetoric. It is perhaps from the incalculable abyss of this need that there can be something like an infrapolitical position, which is in itself neither properly ethical nor properly political, but which nevertheless abhors moralist betrayal. We should wonder whether this is not the reason why there should be literature. My question is about literature and the possibility of democracy. I am not too concerned with the idea of a democratic literature, however. The need that Kant registers for self-exposure without ulterior purpose seems to exceed the very

3 mandates of unsocial sociability. It would seem to send us towards an alternative realm of inquiry: an excess, or a beyond. Within the totality of the social, there is this need that is not justified by the social, although it needs the social. What is this

revelation of oneself to others without purpose? This excess beyond justification, beyond justice even, does not seem the locus of a democratic right. It points towards the unfamiliar, towards the radicality of an outside that will not be domesticated within democracy itself. It reminds me of the verses pronounced by the Chorus in Sophocless Antigone, where the human is described as pantoporos aporos, where the site of politics is described as hipsipolis apolis, and of course of the Heideggerian interpretation of those verses in Holderlins Hymn The Ister. This is the same book in which Heidegger claims that Holderlins poetry stands outside metaphysics (this poetry must stand entirely outside metaphysics and thus outside of the essential realm of Western art [18]) to the extent to which, in it, an essential thought of historicality as homecoming is enacted. Coming to be at home is thus a passage through the foreign. And if the becoming homely of a particular humankind sustains the historicality of its history, then the law of the encounter [Auseinandersetzung] between the foreign and ones own is the fundamental truth of history, a truth from out of which the essence of history must unveil itself (49). I want to associate Kants self-exposure without calculation to this passage through the foreign, through the Auseinandersetzung with the other and with every other as fundamental truth of history. My question is whether this excess from subjectivity out of subjectivityan excess that literature, beyond Holderlin, can express--first opens the possibility of democracy or sends us elsewhere. Immanuel Levinas Preface to his first major work opens with the question of war and morality. War and morality are incompatible. If war, then perhaps no

4 morality. War is not only one of the ordealsthe greatestof which morality lives; it renders morality derisory. The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every meanspoliticsis henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naivet (21). Politics and war are the same, or rather, politics is the art of winning wars. And of course, Levinas says, we do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but as the very patency, or the truth, of the real (21). So, for philosophical thought, Levinas says, being reveals itself as war, that is, as politics. War is the pure experience of pure being (21). In Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian we see it in Judge Holdens words: In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of ones will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god (249). But Levinas does not leave it thereneither does McCarthy, but that is another story--, because something haunts war. Levinas calls it the eschatology of messianic peace (22). I will not follow Levinas all the way to his conclusions, but, like him, I do not believe that war is the unity of existence. There is an exception to war, an exception to politics. Heideggers essay on Holderlins The Ister says that the sense of the political is not itself political. It is this structure that calls, or has always already received in itself, an exception to war and to the thought of war. I want to

5 know whether this exception to war that not just Levinasian philosophy but literature may express is also the very possibility of democracya thought that may have been remote from Heidegger, as everybody says, or not quite so remote from the late Heideggers, as parts of Schurmanns work seem to indicate. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present (22). The point is that eschatology does not refer to the past or the present or the future, that is, that it does not refer to temporality or to the supratemporal understood as what sustains the temporal. It refers, rather, to what is beyond the totality. Eschatology is, therefore, not a teleology. It is not a teleology because it does not have a temporal structure. It is, simply, the announcement of something beyond the totality, which means, beyond the totality of time, and thus outside time, outside finitude (but then again not simply as what is beyond time but still within ontology). If it is outside war, and outside politics, it is not because it comes at the end of war or at the end of politics. What is that something named in the expression messianic peace? And how do we have access to it? He says: Infinity (23). And he says: It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience (23). Although it is outside totality and outside history, that is, outside the purveyors of experience, it is nevertheless reflected within them, and thus reflected in experience. Indeed, Levinas will say, it constitutes experience, because [t]he idea of being overflowing history makes possible existents . . . that can speak rather than lending their lips to an anonymous utterance of history. Peace is produced as this aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak (23). Experience is linked by Levinas to this capacity for speaking, for speech or language, for saying. A vision of experience makes speech possible, and speech is

6 only possible out of this vision. Without it there would be no language. This would be a vision without image, and a signification without a context (23). In Blood Meridian the kid speaks not just when he tells Sproule I know your kind . . . Whats wrong with you is wrong all the way through you (66), but also when he tells the Mexican mummy, in halting Spanish, ?No puedes escucharme? (315). Kants notion of a need for exposure without ulterior purpose is matched by Javier Maras understanding of the basis of the need for writing in the phenomenon of haunting that Manana en la batalla piensa en mi explores and by McCarthys thematization of an inner fold in the practice of war. Those are glimpses of Levinass experience of an overflow in objectifying thought: a signification without a context, immemorial as such, beyond history, atemporal, without which, I add, any narrative, provided it could happen, would be just another narrative of effective war. That something is infinity, in the Levinasian language, as precisely the presence that overflows the thought that thinks it (25). It is an excess or a beyond, and it is reflected within experience to the extent that experience comes into itself in that haunting: if experience precisely means a relation with . . . what always overflows thought, the relation with infinity accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word (25). Haunting is first and foremost the trace of infinity in the thought that is overflown. And it is beyond war, beyond history, beyond totality, beyond politics. Because it is beyond politics, it can found a politics. But it is not that there is a haunting, and therefore infinity. It is not that there is infinity, and therefore a haunting. No: both haunting and infinity are simply the consequences of an essential non-adequation (27). It is factic, essential facticity: thought contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive by virtue of its own identity (27). Whatever arises is absolutely other, yet thought must welcome it.

7 Haunting is the condition of all hospitality, or hospitality is the condition of haunting. To contain more than ones capacity is to shatter at every moment the framework of a content that is thought, to cross the barriers of immanence (27). This is the essential violence: What . . . breaks forth as essential violence is the surplus of being over the thought that claims to contain it (27). It is the call of redress within war, outside revenge, that guides every infrapolitical narrative, perhaps all literature. Essential violence may even be the precondition for any anti-teleological understanding of the political as the possibility of a space beyond sacrifice, beyond principles, beyond sovereignty. It may therefore be the very possibility of the political as democracy. Experience is therefore the essential non-adequation to the reality of war, to the reality of politics. Experience is always the experience of an essential violence. Essential violence is the condition of infrapolitical narrative. For Levinas it is also the condition of ethics. Indeed, Levinas says, to that essential violence, understood as the experience of metaphysical exteriority, as the relation with the absolutely other, ethics is the royal road (29). But what if, before ethics, there were another practice that makes of the double suspension of the ethical by the political and of the political by the ethical its very possibility? This practice, which finds its expression in literature, but is not limited to literature, is infrapolitical practice. It exposes us without ulterior purpose, and therefore remains, itself, beyond the double suspension. It remains haunted, and lives in the haunting. So haunting, like literature, may not be beyond war, and it is not outside war, it is no exception to the war. Just a fold within it: infrapolitical. It does not pretend to sanctity since, as infrapolitics, it is also a suspension of ethics, and not just of war, even just war. This practice of the

8 infrapolitical fold is the experience of essential violence in the political. No more. But it makes a difference. Let me now turn to Jorge Luis Borges, and concretely to his story called The Maker, because it begins with a warrior and ends with a poet. It is blindness that mediates between the two, in such a way that the experience of literature comes, in Borges text, to be associated with blindness as such, or with a certain blindness. The warrior is he who had never lingered among the pleasures of memory, as everything was for him satisfaction and immediate indifference (292). Even stories are for him sheer immediacy, which he takes in as he takes in realitywithout asking whether they were true or false (292). But blindness set in, and the splendid universe began drawing away from him (292). This withdrawal of the world, which at first causes despair, is also however the return of the world, as the man [descends] into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain (293). His memories, memories of love and adventure, Ares and Aphrodite, war and encounter, come to him without bitterness, like some mere foreshadowing of the present (293). It is then that he understands that he is Homer, as he hears the rumor of glory and hexameters . . . , of the Odysseys and Iliads that it was his fate to sing. The story tells us little else. It recounts simply the experience of literary memory upon the withdrawal of the world in blindness, and it is an experience of (the memory of) war and love, of war or love. These are the elements of a haunting only encountered in visions withdrawal from the world, only encountered through memory like, the text says, a coin in the rain. Literary haunting remains, however, in Borgess story, absolutely circumscribed by either war or encounter, by war and encounter. Perhaps we can understand this notion of encounter as the Heideggerian

9 Auseinandersetzung that links the homely and the homely, that makes of historical homecoming a necessary passage through the foreign, through the other. And the other emerges first of all as the strange haunting of the blindness. Borgess notion of blindness refers in this text to essential violence. If essential violence, in the Levinasian definition, is the surplus of being over the thought that claims to contain it, then literature is an opening to the facticity of such an overflow. Literature is an opening to eschatological vision, that is, to that vision without an image that nevertheless, as literature, necessitates the image to express itself. Hence the haunting, which is the expression of the non-adequation between image and essential violence. Literature is the haunting of the image. Literature is idolatrous dwelling. Blindness is the haunting of the image. Blindness is the cult of images. Isnt literary blindness, then, understood in this precise Borgesian sense, the possibility of a new understanding of political desire? Even of the political as such? Of the two memories that haunt without bitterness, like some mere foreshadowing of the present, the first memory is, for Borges, a deeply autobiographical one: Another boy had insulted him, and he had run to his father and told him the story. As though he werent paying attention, or didnt understand, his father let him talk, but then he took a bronze knife down from the walla beautiful knife, charged with power, that the boy had furtively coveted. Now he held it in his hands, and the surprise of possession wiped away the insult that he had suffered, but his fathers voice was speaking: Let it be known that you are a man, and there was a command in his voice (293). We know how deeply disturbing such memories can be, indeed how disturbing this particular memory was for Borges himself. But this text recovers it, and it says: It was the precise flavor of that moment that he sought for now; the rest didnt matter (293). The rest didnt matter: only the memory of an

10 experience that can now be recovered in its difference with itself, in a flavor whose trace is a witness to the fact that we contain more than our capacity, because there is language. The young warrior follow the paternal order. If the young warrior could once think or unthink of himself as wandering the cities of men with no law but satisfaction and immediate indifference (292), the blind poet is now subject to an entirely other law. Is it the moral law? Would the poet who dreams of the child in Borges story be calling, in his attempt at recovering the imageless vision, at finding an image for his vision and thus recover it, the flavor of the encounter with a despotic father, for a moral reenactment that could provide an abstract foreshadowing of the present? No. In this night of his mortal eyes (293) the poet lives through the haunting of his images, experiences the haunting as that which, in the image, stands beyond the image. This is poetic dwelling. The literary, like the political, is not content with recovering the experience of violence done and sufferedit points, beyond it, to the essential violence where war and encounters first arise. And it remembers it. In the section of the Critique of Judgment entitled General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments, Kant says: Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or earth, or under the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people in its civilized era felt for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or can explain the pride that Islam inspires. The same holds true for our presentation of the moral law, and for the predisposition within us for morality. It is indeed a mistake to worry that depriving this presentation of whatever could commend it to the

11 senses will result in its carrying with it no more than a cold and lifeless approval without any moving force or emotion. It is exactly the other way around. For once the senses no longer see anything beyond them, while yet the unmistakable and indelible idea of morality remains, one would sooner need to temper the momentum of an unbounded imagination so as to keep it from rising to the level of enthusiasm than to seek to support these ideas with images and childish devices for fear that they would otherwise be powerless. (#274; 135) Levinas echoes this Kantian thought, where a blindness to images is praised as essential to morality, in Difficult Freedom when he says: Judaism has decharmed the world, contesting the notion that religions apparently evolved out of enthusiasm and the Sacred. Judaism remains foreign to any offensive return of these forms of human elevation. It denounces them as the essence of idolatry (14). But if both Kant and Levinas condemn the very notion of idolatrous dwelling in the name of a strict respect for morality, it is because they are talking about morality, not about literature, not even about politics. The haunting of the image remains primary for literature. It is a haunting because literature knows that there is no image vision, that the vision can only search for an image, and that the search overflows the image. And it is what makes literature infrapolitical in the sense of the double suspension. It suspends the political in the name of the ethical, but it also suspends the ethical from the political. Literature, as such, makes no ethical judgment. It is a double suspension of judgment, or the haunting of judgment. Borges The Maker could be taken to be an illustration of the Levinasian position according to which consciousness is the impossibility of invading reality like a wild vegetation that absorbs or breaks or pushes back everything around it. The

12 turning back on oneself of consciousness is the equivalent not of self-contemplation but of the fact of not existing violently and naturally, of speaking to the Other (Difficult 9). Things, for the young warrior, sensual things could flood the entire circuit of his soul (292). Blindness is consciousness for him, and it is experienced first of all as a deprivation of images: Now (he felt) I will not be able to see the sky filled with mythological dread or this face that the years will transfigure (292). The return of the images is the encounter with infinity or messianic peace precisely insofar as it is experienced as a return, as the creation of a dimension of inwardness: Days and nights passed over this despair of his flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity (292-93). What he understands is then, with grave wonder, that his work was destined for others: that it would remain echoing in the cupped hands of human memory (293). This is homecoming, in the encounter with history as such, even with the history of the future. The renunciation of war and politics is not therefore the immediate shelter in morality. This is what seems important to emphasize, perhaps against Levinas, but certainly also with Levinas: that literature, and hence also politics, points beyond war, as the unity of being, and remains in the space of an overflow where a dwelling that is not yet ethical, except in a rather elementary or trivial sense, absolutely refuses a political definition. To the poet a second image comes: A woman, the first woman the gods had given him, had awaited him in the darkness of a subterranean crypt, and he searched for her through galleries that were like labyrinths of stone and down slopes that descended into darkness (293). The overflow: the infinite displacement

13 between awaiting and encounter, the void of a haunting where only images dwell or vanish (un-dwell). A new foundation of the political, in the non-teleological, non-sovereign, nonsacrificial, non-principial way, can only point to the releasement of those images, to letting-them-be. To my mind, no democracy otherwise. Alberto Moreiras University of Aberdeen/University at Buffalo

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Works Cited Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. London: Penguin, 2003. Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Mary Gregor trans. and ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. Holderlins Hymn The Ister. William McNeill and Julia David transl. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority. XXX. Maras, Javier. Maana en la batalla piensa en m. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000. Masters, Joshua J. Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World: Judge Holdens Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian. Critique 40.1 (1998): 25-37. McCarth, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1992. Moreiras, Alberto. Infrapolitics and the Thriller. A Prolegomenon to Every Possible Form of Anti-Moralist Literary Criticism. On Hctor Aguilar Camns La guerra de Galio and Morir en el golfo. Fortcoming in Erin Graff Irvin ed., The Ethics of Reading. New York: Palgrave [2007]. Rothfork, John. Language and the Dance of Time in Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian. Southwestern American Literature XXX 23-36. Shakespeare, William. Richard III. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine eds. New York: Washington Square Press, 1996.

15 Schurmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting. From Principles to Anarchy. Christine Marie Gros and Reiner Schurmann transl. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Woodward, Richard B. Cormac McCarthys Venomous Fiction. The New York Times Magazine, 19 April 1992, 28-31, 36, 40.