Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century 9781032584317, 9781032584195, 9781003450047, 1032584319

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GLOBAL MANIFESTOS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Bringing together forty original short essays, some academic, others more creative in nature, this collection responds to the political, historical, social, and economic situation in which we find ourselves today. The editors argue that we are living in a repetition that must be stopped – if our goal is that the signifier “humanity” remains in the following centuries, the time has come to work in the present. The objective is not to deliver precise or quick answers, but to gather varied voices from different continents, bringing together different languages, ideas, practices, theories, thoughts, and desires. In the words of Yanis Varoufakis, “urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and inspires humanity to realise its potential for authentic free­ dom.” To leave the concept of a manifesto open, the contradictory aspects of the chapters are a subject of the manifesto itself. This is a manifesto of contradictions that reflects our reality as well as our struggles and our aspirations. This unique anthology will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences interested in critical theory and social change. Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo is the author of columns, essays, and academic articles, including Žižek: Cómo Pensar con Claridad en un Mundo al Réves? (2023) and Psychoanalysis Between Philosophy and Politics, co-edited with Slavoj Žižek (2023). Brian Willems is associate professor of literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia. He is most recently the author of Sham Ruins: A User’s Guide (Routledge, 2022). Slavoj Žižek is director of the International Humanities Centre, Birkbeck Col­ lege, University of London, and senior research fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. He is a lecturer at numerous universities in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, and South Korea.

GLOBAL MANIFESTOS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Rethinking Culture, Common Struggles, and Future Change

Edited by Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Brian Willems, and Slavoj Žižek

Designed cover image: JakeOlimb / Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Brian Willems, and Slavoj Žižek; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Brian Willems, and Slavoj Žižek to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-58431-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-58419-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-45004-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements

ix

xvi

1 Introduction: Why Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First

Century? Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo

1

2 Foreword: Urgently Needed: A New Manifesto for Fun and

Freedom Yanis Varoufakis

4

PART I

Towards a Historical View Without Retrospective

Romanticism or Future Idealization 3 Sublimation and Dislocation: A False Choice Slavoj Žižek

7

9

4 Emancipation Through a New Global Perspective Pavin Chachavalpongpun

14

5 Manifesto: Commonism Now! Bara Kolenc

21

vi Contents

6 A Left of the Passage Timo Dorsch, Anna-Maria Imholz, Tomás Imholz, Mia Neuhaus, Mario Neumann, Massimo Perinelli, Michael Ramminger, Thomas Rudhof-Seibert and Anita Starosta

28

7 Universality in the Middle: A Buddhist Post-Global Perspective Hung-chiung Li

35

8 Manifesto in Favor of Freedom of Thought and Tolerance to Dissent José E. García

46

9 The Lessons of Cultural Humility: From a Struggle of Universalities to the Sublation of Existing Systems Ignacio López-Calvo

53

PART II

Philosophical Footprints of the Present to Build a Here-and-Now

57

10 United by Touch and Breath: For a Co-Ontological Revolution Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

59

11 Volcanic Lakes and Hallucinatory Vegetation: A Disaster to Think About the Future Celia Irina González

67

12 Epidemic Refraction: A Critical Outlook Echoing Universal Explications Through Microcosmic Mayhem Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen

74

13 reading | love | writing | art Jeremy Fernando

82

14 Beyond the Permanent Crisis Jordi Riba

88

15 Manifesto for a New Grammar of Liberation Esteban Beltrán Ulate

95

16 The Road to the Scaffold: The Struggle of Nicolas de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges for Gender Equality Olga Vinogradova

99

Contents vii

17 The Political Challenges of Our Century in Education J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja

107

PART III

Struggle of Universalities, Towards a Global Movement

115

18 Crisis-Impasse, Centrality of Periphery, and the Necessity of

International Organization Fernando A.T. Ximenes

117

19 Europe’s Malignant Supplements, I Know. But

Nevertheless… Imanol Galfarsoro

125

20 Is Latin American a Reflection of the European Avant-Garde

Model? Jorge Torres Vinueza and Veronica León-Ron

134

21 “Brexit for All!”: Why the Left Should (Urgently) Rediscover

the Concept of Sovereignty Timothy Appleton

141

22 Decolonial Feminism: A Political Proposal from the Global

South Isabela Boada Guglielmi

148

23 Universalities: The Power of Lack . Evren Inançog˘lu

158

24 Austerity, Brexit, Covid: Short Circuits and a New Identity

for Wales Alex Mangold

164

25 No More Manifestos!… Žižek said “Europe”? Ricardo Espinoza Lolas

178

26 From Balkanized Universal(s) to Archipelagic Multiverse Andrea Perunovic´

184

27 War in the State and the State in War Carlos-Adolfo Rengifo-Castañeda,

Alexander Muriel Restrepo, Diana-Carolina Cañaveral-

Londoño, Francisco Yusty and Conrado Giraldo Zuluaga

193

28 Can Europe Be a Manifesto? The Role of Europe in Korean

American Literature Brian Willems

200

viii Contents

29 Lapulapu’s Kris and Panglima Awang’s First Circumnavigation of the World Ramon Guillermo

207

PART IV

Distinction or Difference: Letting Go of Confrontation and Starting Co-Construction

219

30 Where the Individual Was, the Self Must Come! Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano

221

31 The Patipolitical Body Isabel Millar

228

32 “This Is a Shitty Government, but It Is My Government”: Love, Power, War, in Times of “Collapsed Horizons” and History’s Limitation “Willka” Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta 33 The Cosmopolitan Left Against Neoliberalism, Liberfascism, and Cyberalism in the Twenty-First Century: A Latin American Approach to the Current Global Political Situation Since Post-Communism Jesús Ayala-Colqui

237

243

34 Reflections from the Theory of the Encryption of Power: Energeia and the Manifestation of the Non-Being Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo

254

35 The Formation of a Necro-State: The Biopolitical Effects of Neoliberal Capitalism in Contemporary Ecuador Martín Aulestia Calero

261

36 Real Subsumption, a Problem Rendered Bradley Kaye

273

37 Interiority and Exteriority in the Space of Capital Arturo Romero Contreras

279

38 Epilogue: Contradictions Between Irreconcilable Manifestos David Pavón-Cuéllar

284

Index

292

CONTRIBUTORS

Jairo Gallo Acosta is a psychologist and holds a Master in Psychoanalysis and PhD in Social and Human Sciences. Postdoctoral stay at the Michoacan University of San Nicolás of Hidalgo. Professor at the Cooperative University of Colombia, and The National University of Colombia. Jairo is the author of several books including For a Mottled Psychoanalysis (2021) and Psychoanalysis and Subalternity: Popular Culture Art and Subversion (2020), among others. Practitioner of psychoanalysis. Member of the Caribbean Psychoanalytic Circle. J. Félix Angulo Rasco is Professor of Education at University of Cádiz. Member of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship, and Transformative Education. Ex-senior researcher in the Center for Research in Inclusive Education CIE 160009. Timothy Appleton is Professor at Camilo José Cela University, Madrid. Coordinator of Contemporary Thought at CRUCE ARTE Y PENSAMIENTO, Madrid. Author of Escupir en la Iglesia and La Política que Viene. Martín Aulestia Calero is a philosopher and sociologist, and Professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidad Central del Ecuador. Jesús Ayala-Colqui is Professor at the Universidad Científica del Sur, Lima, Perú and at the Universidad Tecnológica del Perú in Lima. Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo is the author of columns, essays and academic articles, including Žižek: Cómo Pensar con Claridad en un Mundo al Réves? (2023) and Psychoanalysis Between Philosophy and Politics, co-edited with Slavoj Žižek (2023).

x List of contributors

Esteban Beltrán Ulate is a university professor and political activist. He is a member of the Costa Rican Association of Philosophy, and his area of interest is messianic political thought and the philosophy of Latin American Liberation. Isabela Boada Guglielmi is a feminist who thinks from the South. Licensed in International Studies (Universidad Central de Venezuela), master’s in public policy and gender (FLACSO), specialist in international migration (Colegio de la Frontera Norte-México). Diana-Carolina Cañaveral-Londoño holds a Master in Public Law and is a lawyer at the Universidad La Gran Colombia, Armenia. Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Inciso. Research professor and leader of the State and Citi­ zenship Law Research Group of the Faculty of Law and Political and Social Sciences of the Universidad La Gran Colombia Armenia. Pavin Chachavalpongpun is Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. Bidisha Chakraborty is a pedagogic research student currently pursuing her degree in Methodology of Teaching from the School of Education, Adamas University. She completed her graduation and majored in English Language and Literature from the University of Calcutta. She worked as a research assistant in YES Intercultural, Michigan and under Dr. Akrur Sardar of Presidency Uni­ versity. Apart from being an academic, Bidisha’s areas of interest are classical literature verses, Italian language, and literature and epistemology. Timo Dorsch is something and somewhere between politics, academia, and journalism with a special focus on global violence. He co-edited the book Geographie der Gewalt: Macht und Gegenmacht in Lateinamerika. Jeremy Fernando reads, writes, and makes things. He works in the intersec­ tions of literature, philosophy, and art; has written more than 30 books; curates the thematic magazine One Imperative; is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School; and the writer-in-residence at Appetite, the sensorial-laboratory exploring food, music, and art. Imanol Galfarsoro is based in Liverpool, UK. He obtained his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from the University of Leeds, UK. He teaches Social Aes­ thetics and Research Methods in the School of Design – University of Leeds. He is the author of Multiculturalist Controversies: Political Struggles, Cultural Consumerism, and State Management and editor of International Journal of Zizek Studies.

List of contributors xi

José E. García is a psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of Asunción (Paraguay). His main area of research is the history of psychology in Paraguay and Latin America. Celia Irina González (lives and works in Mexico City) is a visual artist and an anthropologist. She is a PhD student at the Department of Social Anthropology at Iberoamericana University, Mexico City. She holds a master’s degree in visual anthropology from FLACSO, Quito. She has exhibited at “Sin Author­ ización: Contemporary Cuban Art”; Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, NY, 2022 “Esok” Jakarta Biennale, Indonesia, 2021; Kochi-Muziris Biennale,” Kerala, India, 2018. She has been participating in the Botín Foundation Grant for Visual Arts, Spain, 2017–2019, Grants and Commissions Program of The Cisnero Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, 2017. Ramon “Bomen” Guillermo is the director of the Center of International Studies (CIS), University of the Philippines Diliman. His current research is on the dissemination, reception, and translation of radical ideas and texts in Southeast Asia using methods in translation studies and digital humanities. He is the author of several books, including Translation and Revolution (2009) and the novel Ang Makina ni Mang Turing (Mister Turing’s Machine) (2013). Anna-Maria Imholz works as a jurist. Active in the anti-militarist movement. Tomás Imholz is a student of History and Latin America Studies and Philosophy. He is a child of the anti-globalization movement and as a leftist radical on the search for the (new) radical left. . Evren Inançog˘ lu has a master’s degree in Behavioral Sciences from Marmara University, İstanbul. He currently lives in Nicosia, Cyprus. He writes essays and reviews. He is interested in cinema, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Bradley Kaye is a Lecturer in the Sociocultural and Justice Sciences Department at SUNY Fredonia. His recent publications include Marx after the Kyoto School: Utopia and the Pure Land, published in 2022. He has authored numerous articles in scholarly journals, and he is currently working on a book entitled Zizek and Freedom: Utopia and the Parallax View. Bara Kolenc is a Slovenian philosopher and artist. She is a researcher at the Philosophy Department at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a member of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. She is a current president of the International Hegelian Association Aufhebung: barakolenc.com. Veronica León-Ron is a child psychologist and psychotherapist, and professor at Universidad Técnica del Norte, Ecuador.

xii List of contributors

Hung-chiung Li is Associate Professor at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. He specializes in critical theory and East Asian cultures and thoughts. He is also Co-Coordinator of the Asia Theories Network and founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories. Ricardo Espinoza Lolas is a Chilean academic, writer, critical theorist, and philosopher. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the UAM and is Professor of History of Contemporary Philosophy at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. He is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including Sade Reloaded (London: Routledge, 2023). Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture and Presidential Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of nine books, including The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, Performance (2022) and Saudades of Japan and Brazil: Contested Modernities in Lusophone Nikkei Cultural Production (2019). Alex Mangold is a scholar, translator, and activist based in Wales, UK. He currently lectures in the Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is co-editor (with Broderick Chow) of Žižek and Performance and has published on Sarah Kane, the New Tragic, and on Howard Barker. His most recent research project is a British Academy funded open access online hub titled “Creative Modern Languages” (www.creativemodernlanguages.uk). Isabel Millar is a philosopher and cultural critic. Her work focuses on AI, sex, culture, film, and the future. Her first book, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, was published in 2021. As well as extensive international academic speaking and publishing, Isabel has made numerous TV, documentary, and podcast appearances. She is currently Associate Researcher at Newcastle Uni­ versity, Department of Philosophy, and Affiliate Faculty of the Global Centre for Advanced Studies. Her next book is entitled Patipolitics. Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano is a social psychologist who graduated from the Manuela Beltran University in Bogotá, Colombia. Moya received her master’s degree in Conflict Resolution from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Moya is currently working as a community engagement specialist at San Fran­ cisco CASA in California. Her research focuses on peace and conflict studies, refugee studies, migration studies, and human security. Alexander Muriel Restrepo is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Pontifical Bolivarian University of Medellín and research professor at the Interdisciplinary Center for Humanistic Studies of the University of San Buenaventura, Cali.

List of contributors xiii

Mia Neuhaus is a psychologist in training as a psychoanalyst. She studied cri­ tical theory in Frankfurt/M. and is currently doing research at SFU Berlin on the experience of conflict and belonging in the post-reunification generation. She is co-editing the book Solidarität – eine reale Utopie. Mario Neumann works in Frankfurt and lives in Berlin. He was involved in the Blockupy-movement and in several anti-racist collectives. Silvia Redon Pantoja is Professor of Education at the School of Pedagogy, Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile. Member of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship, and Transformative Education. David Pavón-Cuéllar is a Mexican Marxist philosopher and critical psycholo­ gist. He is Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the Universidad Michoa­ cana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, in Morelia, Mexico. He is the author of several books, including Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychol­ ogy? (London: Routledge, 2017). Massimo Perinelli is a historian, activist, and podcaster as well as author and editor of numerous books and articles on anti-racism and migrant struggle. Currently he is co-editing the book Solidarität – eine reale Utopie. He works as a consultant for political education in the field of migration for the Rosa-Lux­ emburg-Foundation in Berlin. He is a long-standing member of Kanak Attak and co-initiated the people’s tribunal “NSU-Komplex auflösen.” Andrea Perunovic´ is a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He started his PhD studies in the Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought division of the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Swit­ zerland) and obtained his doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University Paris 8 (Saint-Denis, France). His current research focuses on intersectional spaces between philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary francophone thought. Michael Ramminger is an activist and publicist. His last publication was Kapita­ lismus, Kult einer Tödlichen Verschuldung: Walter Benjamins Prophetisches Erbe. Francesca R. Recchia Luciani is based at University of Bari Aldo Moro – Italy. Carlos-Adolfo Rengifo-Castañeda gained a Post Doctorate from the Università Degli Studi Dell Insubria, Varese – Italy. He is a research professor at Uni­ versidad San Buenaventura – Cali and Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Guillermo de Ockham in category B in Publindex. Researcher of the Education and Human Development Research Group.

xiv List of contributors

Jordi Riba is Professor of Philosophy at the UAB and Visiting Professor at the University Paris 8, where he is an associate member of its laboratory Logiques Contemporaines de la Philosophie. His current research focuses on the study of the role of the individual in emerging democratic forms. Previously, in addition to his work on Jean-Marie Guyau, he has developed the theme of permanent crises as an interpretative tool of modernity, embodied in his latest book Crisis Permanente. Arturo Romero Contreras holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the École des Hates Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. Currently he is a full-time professor and researcher in the philosophy department at the BUAP, in Mexico. Thomas Rudhof-Seibert is a philosopher who works for the human rights organization medico international with numerous books and book contributions on philosophy and politics. Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo is a Colombian writer and academic. Esha Sen is currently working as an independent researcher. She completed her graduation and majors with a first in English Literature and Folk Studies. Apart from that, Esha has worked as translator in major projects of Bengali Literature. Her areas of interests are folk studies, literary theories, and criticism. Esha is also preparing for her doctorate in Folk Literature. Anita Starosta is an activist in the radical left movement. Jorge Torres Vinueza obtained a PhD in Humanistic Studies from the Rovira i Virgili University of Spain and is Research Professor at the Universidad Técnica del Norte. Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist, politician, and former Greek Minister of Finance. Most recently he is the author of Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present. Olga Vinogradova is of Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Russia and the Institute for Biomedical Ethics, University of Basel, Switzerland. Brian Willems is Associate Professor of Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Croatia. He is most recently the author of Sham Ruins: A User’s Guide (Routledge, 2022). Fernando A.T. Ximenes is a Member of Komite Esperansa, East Timor, Peace Researcher at Peace Center, National University of Timor-Leste, History

List of contributors xv

researcher at Timoriana Association and Comite Orientador 25. He is a researcher of political economy of communicative capitalism at Timorese Association for Progressive Media and Technology, Chair of the Drafting Committee of ASEAN People’s Forum 2023–2024, member of the Facilitating Committee of Asia Pacific Social Forum, and member of Civil Society Financing for Development Mechanism. His essays appear in Monthly Review, Diale­ tika, Delinking, Midwestern Marx, and Janata Weekly. Francisco Yusty holds a BA in Foreign Languages English-French and a Master in Education: Human Development. Head of Foreign Language Center Universidad Libre Sectional Cali (CLEUL) and researcher and educational consultant. Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta is a Doctor in Anthropology and Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, writer, academic, and researcher. He is a communist and an indianist-revolutionary katarist, and he reconciles the indianist theory with Marxism seeking to generate a revolutionary-community praxis. He is a mili­ tant of the Communist Party and the Front Revolutionary COMMUNE (FREC), is a member of the Latin American Critical Anthropology group and the Latin American Critical Thought Collective, and is currently Director of the Indigenous Library. Conrado Giraldo Zuluaga holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a research professor at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana of Medellín. Slavoj Žižek is Director of the International Humanities Centre, Birkbeck Col­ lege, University of London, and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. He is a lecturer at numerous universities in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, and South Korea.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank Natalie Foster, Kelly O’Brien, Elizaveta Friesem, and everyone else at Routledge for their support. In addition, we thank all the authors who participated in this book, contributing texts to rethink the challenges of our time. Last but not least, we thank the authors who accompanied us in the final stage by providing “blurbs” for our project.

1 INTRODUCTION Why Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century? Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo

Many questions and even criticisms may arise regarding the usefulness and duty of a title such as the one chosen: How to avoid falling into the dramatism of the views that focus exclusively on the present, the past, or the future? From what perspective should we position ourselves to analyze the future and the nuances that surround us? Why do we need a wide range of contributions on the crises of our century? What are the chosen themes and what to do with the challenges of our time that have not been addressed? It is very common to turn to the legacies of the past, to the writings of thinkers from other eras, to sanctify the archive of intellectuals who managed to capture the spirit of their time and are therefore transferred to ours as a sacred key under which we can decipher the mysteries of our current situation. It is also common to be focused on what has been missing, what is pending, what was not achieved, what returns as an empty point that brings us closer to the impotence of our positions and actions. Our political moment is undeniably ideological. We are inserted in ideologizing processes that force and drive us to idealize, flee, deny, pathologize, normalize, and rationalize our panorama. We live in a complex quagmire where the most tender and the most horrifying affections implode. We are in times of desperate hope and romantic hopelessness; how to deny the impending duality of our world? During the complex pandemic year of 2021, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek published an interesting text in Le Monde Diplomatique: “Mon Mani­ feste Européen,” a text that caught international attention and raised a wave of both positive and negative comments. This is the confusing origin of this book, how could a book focused on global struggles emerge from such a text? Pre­ cisely because we sought to broaden the particular gaze that was there. We set out to critique from the collaborative. DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-1

2 Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo

In retrospect, I would say that it is even comical that it was Slavoj Žižek who came to the defense of the European legacy. An intellectual who has been historically excluded and attacked by the European academy. An intellectual who has been criticized by his country of origin. From exclusion, from his external position of being excluded and on the margins, he came out in defense of that which time and again has thrown him into a corner. Perhaps, it is precisely Žižek’s advantage, from which he manages to observe the political situation. Perhaps we also need to move to the act from the mar­ ginality in which our particularities, our cultures, have remained, and yet, despite the negative elements that our own exclusion has left us, we must defend what is ours, our own, and by sharing a place with other struggles for what is ours generate an encounter with what is our own, which is at the same time shared. This same year, in the light of Žižek’s publication, we proposed, as a vindicating gesture towards the political struggles of today, to bring together various thinkers of our time. The intellectuals again had the duty to arrive at the right moment. We summoned authors from different disciplines, from different cultures, with differ­ ent interests, strangers with whom we would meet in the process of constructing the document, friends on the political path we were tracing. Where did this document come from? From the impulse and the genuine desire to meet with others, both Žižek and I started this path alone, with doubts, without certainties, and even with a kind of hope that in the midst of the uncertainty of our desire, we could leave a different mark. The book emerged from the encounter of a common desire that both Žižek and I had: To contribute to the political struggles of our time, to raise our voices once again. This time we would not do it from our trenches, I was not going in defense of my region, of the value of my land, nor Žižek of his, but we sought to give a cry together, with all those authors who meet here with whom we shared the desire that things reach another point, to build from the common a new path. The political struggle within the same ideals is not exempt from confronta­ tions, hatreds, differences, and ruptures. Žižek and I know this well. Our pro­ ject took two years to be completed and published. But differences, distinctions, and ruptures are part of politics. But above all it is an inseparable part of what it is to be human and what it means to live in our time. That’s why Brian Willems came along for the ride. In the difficult and obscure part of the construction of this book, Willems took the role of med­ iator. He is in good measure the one who showed us that the political battle involves endurance and the humility to face and yield to our personal struggles. The very configuration of the path of this book is a beautiful metaphor for the difficulties of our political moment. How to continue to maintain political commitment when the storm is sweeping us away? How to move forward with a solid political and human objective when everything is fading around us? How to use pain, horror, difference, and hatred in politics?

Introduction 3

With this desire and the confrontation of it, with assuming this desire, we rea­ lized that our attempt to give an answer to the current political, historical, social, and economic situation, required a non-answer, a space to expand the questions. Only silence, distance, pause, and reflection led me to understand that politics is in itself a struggle of re-invention of the love that we deny in ourselves. Politics requires a loving dialogue, politics advances when it is able to let go of precisely that which threatens the beauty of love. Affections are political, and they show us that there are elements that we still have to work on in ourselves in order to be able to approach others. How to deal with the loneliness that the political machinery imposes on us? How to deal with the contemporary maxim of becoming entrepreneurs of our­ selves, of competing and self-alienating? If everything is possible, then we fall into the impotence that nothing is possible and thus, we continue in a vicious circle of anguish, frustrations, melancholy, envy, and sadness that do nothing but feed the accumulation of capital from the indoctrination and numbness of the masses. How to confront the vertigo that living in the 21st century implies? For this reason, our initial objective was not to deliver precise answers, nor quick solu­ tions, it is likely that any idea or current political proposal is inevitably in permanent debt with any group; the singularities, particularities, subjectivities, and interculturalities, cannot be condensed or grouped. Therefore, we proposed to bring together varied voices from different continents so that the pending is also a political gesture. It was a lot of work; nothing was simple in the construction of this book. The process of the book, the complexity of the process, is perfectly extra­ polatable to the complexity of international work. Even from the most genuine interest in contributing to our moment, we will be thrown into oblivion, into the obscurity of criticism, into competition and obstacles will emerge. What will we do with these difficulties we must face? That is one of the lessons that this book will leave, a book that comes out in a complex political moment and that hopes to be the starting point for the long road ahead, full of obstacles for the left, our left in its eternal debt to history, to society, and to the political struggles it maintains.

2 FOREWORD Urgently Needed: A New Manifesto for Fun and Freedom Yanis Varoufakis

Yes, we need a new Manifesto. One that sums up the system we live in and outlines an alternative system that its readers find inspiring enough to want to risk every small mercy the present system grants them so as to see this alter­ native system materialise against the wishes of the world’s great powers. Today, as we watch the growing contempt in which the vast majority in every country hold their governments, an inverted Darwinist process seems to be at play: The greater a ruler’s (e.g., Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden) failure to inspire the lower the probability of an insurrection against the system that produced the uninspiring ruler. It is as if our poli­ tics, in contrast to Nature, bestows the greatest evolutionary fitness to the greatest failures. This is not a paradox. Whenever a scandal erupts or a hugely unpopular policy causes an outcry, the hegemony of established political forces grows. The reason is, of course, that, to the vast majority, the system does not appear as a system. To them, it appears as a perpetual racket where one corrupt politician competes against another. Thus, every time their hopes for something better are crushed by a politician, they privatise their hopes and fears. And so it is that the system is strengthened by events causing its legitimacy further to wither. This is why we need a Manifesto that does three things. First, to define the enemy as the unseen but all-determining system that it is. Secondly, to sum­ marise an alternative system that is at once radically different, realistic, and desirable. And thirdly, to tell us what we must do to bring it on, while also convincing us that merely mitigating the worst aspects of the current system is a step back, not a step in the right direction. For any Manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-2

Foreword 5

open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities our current reality is pregnant with. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and inspires humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom. No Manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one pub­ lished in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. It brilliantly defined the enemy system (capitalism), alluded to the alternative (communism), demonstrated sophisticated thinking (celebrating the machines, castigating the private property rights over them) and explained who the agents of change would be (the proletariat). By claiming the spectre of communism as its own, it dispelled the two spectres ruling Europe at the time: The Newtonian spectre, which depicted capitalism as a natural system akin to the solar system. And the Philanthropic Spectre which, with slogans like All Men Are Brothers, blunted any serious opposition to the system. Today, a fit-for-purpose Manifesto must put out of their misery two lethal spectres. The first is the Reformist Spectre which invites us to join it in a bid to civilise capitalism, to smoothen its jagged edges, to moderate its ill-effects, to avoid grand visions, to become more able managers of the existing system, to signal to the powerful that they, too, can benefit from its reforming oeuvre. The second spectre is the one preventing us from recognising that the Left’s permanent defeat has allowed capitalism to evolve into something worse – not into a new, more lethal variant of the same virus but into a wholly new, utterly lethal, virus – a form of techno-feudalism, as I see it. If this is so, the new Manifesto needs to dispel the fallacy that if the system we live in today is not communism then it must be capitalism (No, it is something much, much worse!) – and, in so doing, to allow us both prop­ erly to understand the current system and to imagine a successor system worth fighting for. Like Hamlet confronted by the spectre of his slain father, the reader of our new Manifesto must be compelled to wonder: Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world? This is not an academic dilemma, to be debated amongst radical academics. Our Manifesto must be a call to action to discontented millennials who need to understand their epoch’s defining dilemma:

6 Yanis Varoufakis

Conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself? Or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing, and living together? “But why do we need politics to deal with this?” they will ask. Here we must answer them like Marx and Engels did: “Because you cannot end the idiocy ruining your lives individually. Collective, democratic political action is your only chance for freedom and enjoyment.”

PART I

Towards a Historical View Without Retrospective Romanticism or Future Idealization

3 SUBLIMATION AND DISLOCATION A False Choice Slavoj Žižek

Bernard Herrmann’s clarinet quintet “Souvenirs de voyage” (1967) opens up with the same melodic line that he used a decade earlier in the beginning of the most famous piece (scene d’amour) from his score of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). We are dealing here with a nice case of dislocation, of tearing an ele­ ment (a melodic line, in this case) out from its context and placing it into a different context in which it is subordinated to a space regulated by a different logic. In our case, the same melodic line is first (in Vertigo) the opening moment of a movement that inexorably leads towards a Romantic crescendo, heavily relying on Wagner’s Tristan, while its reprisal in the quintet remains firmly within the pre-Wagnerian space of a theme and its variations. The surprising element here is the regressive direction of this shift: first a Romantic push towards a climactic crescendo, then the step back to a more classical space in which such crescendos are excluded. Such a notion of dislocation is a key dialectical concept whose proper use enables to dispel some key misunderstandings that haunt Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung (sublation). Let’s take a different case from the sphere of decoloni­ zation. Rejecting the idea of the Haitian Revolution as the true consummation of the ideals of French Revolution, Jean Casimir argues in his The Haitians: A Decolonial History that “Haiti dislocates rather than consummates the project of modernity.”1 Casimir’s critique is directed at all those (me including) who see in the Haitian Revolution the universalization and radicalization of the French Revolution: only through its repetition in Haiti does French Revolution really become a world-historical event with universal meaning. In this sense, Haitian Revolution is the Aufhebung of the French Revolution: the full actua­ lization of its potentials, its repetition at a higher level. From the standpoint of the predominant post-colonial thought, such a view is all too “Eurocentric”: if Haitian Revolution is reduced to the deployment of the immanent potentials of DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-4

10 Slavoj Žižek

the French Revolution, then – to put it in Hegelese – French Revolution, a Eur­ opean phenomenon, is the over-reaching notion, and Haitian Revolution remains a subordinate moment of its self-deployment. Even if Haitians were “more French than the French themselves,” even if they went further and were more consequent than the French, they were part of the European dynamic process. Dislocation, on the contrary, means that elements are thoroughly re-con­ textualized, integrated into a new symbolic and social space which confers on them a new meaning unrelated to the original meaning one can in no way “deduce” this new meaning from the original one. Let’s take equality, a notion which originates in modern European thought. Although many advocates of equality worked to expand this notion also to women, other races, etc., such an expansion remains within the scope of the Western notion of equality. When a true other (Black slaves, exemplarily) appropriates equality, this notion is not just expanded but transposed in a different domain which radically affects its functioning – the unease with Black Lives Matter proves this abundantly. Fur­ thermore, is the entire history of Marxism and Communist revolutions not a history of dislocations? In spite of Lenin’s abundant quotes from Marx, Lenin effectively transposes Marx into a radically different historical situation in which the revolution was executed by a narrow party of professionals and won by addressing non-proletarian issues (land and peace). Mao Zedong did some­ thing even more radical: against Marx and Engels vision, he moved from workers to farmers in the countryside as the revolutionary force – something unimaginable for Marx and Engels. Again, in each of these two cases, we are not talking about a continuous expansion but about a radical dislocation – no wonder that in both cases, orthodox Marxist opposed the reorientation (the basic reproach of Mensheviks to Lenin was that, in a non-Marxist way, he wants a revolution before the circumstances for it are ripe). We should also bear in mind that capitalism as such involves a process of continuous dislocation. Capitalism originated in Europe but then gradually expanded into a global economic order, and this expansion was not continuous, it involved radical dislocations. Not only capitalism from the very beginning linked to colonization and the new rise of slavery, but it also changed with the emergence of strong non-European capitalist countries like Japan, India and now China. Incidentally, it is interesting to note how the same post-colonial Leftists who decry every expansion of equality and democracy as a dislocation and not a continuous development always insist that capitalist is “Eurocentric,” attributed to Europe: even if it appears in China, India, etc., capitalism remains European. The underlying premise is clear: when a progressive idea like equal­ ity and democracy is expanded into a Third World, it involves a radical dis­ location and is no longer European, but the “bad” capitalism remains a foreign (European) intruder… This mistake is serious because it misses the key fact that capitalism is actually universal, trans-cultural, indifferent towards particular cultures: it is not dislocated from one culture and then appropriated by another, it rather stands for a universal dislocation from cultural space as such.

Sublimation and Dislocation 11

At this point, we can return to the relationship between the Hegelian sublation and dislocation: the approach which opposes the two (as we have seen with Casi­ mir apropos Haiti) misses a key feature of the Hegelian dialectical process, it reduces Subject to a dynamized Substance. The critics dismiss the Hegelian notion of democracy-and-equality as an all-encompassing substantial entity which gradu­ ally actualizes its immanent potentials, passing from one to another particular figure but remaining the same ground of the entire process. Say, the state goes through the stages of Asiatic despotic state, Ancient slave-owning democracies, feudal monarchies, modern authoritarian state, etc., but all these are particular formations which emerge as the immanent deployment of the same notion of state. But is this the case? If we remain at this abstract level, we have to add at least two points. First, for Hegel, the full consummation of an idea (when reality fits its idea) always implies the self-negation of this idea itself; say, the reality of states never fully fit the idea of state – when this happens, we no longer have a state, but we pass into a religious community. Second and more important, in a dialectical process predicate always passes into Subject: what was at the beginning a subordinate particular moment of the process asserts itself as its Subject and retroactively posits its presuppositions as its own moments (“predicates”). So, again, it is not the same Subject which goes from one to another particular figure, remaining the same agent which pulls the strings and controls the entire movement: what Hegel calls “Absolute” is the very process in which radical reversals happen and a predicate turns into a new Subject. Every dialectical passage is thus a form of dislocation: the previous Substance is dislocated into a new encompassing Universality. It is not the same Universality which passes from one to another particular form – in each pas­ sage, Universality itself is dislocated, it is reduced to a subordinate moment of a new Universality. Let’s take the passage from money to capital described by Marx: in pre-capitalist market exchange, money is a mediator of the exchange between producers which disappears in the final result (when I sell what I pro­ duced and buy what I need); with capitalism, however, money becomes capital, the Subject (active agent) of the entire process. Although, from my individual standpoint, I produce (and sell) things so that I will get (other) things that I need (or desire) for my life, with capitalism, the true goal of the entire process is the expanded self-reproduction of capital itself – my needs and their satisfaction are just subordinated moments of capital’s self-reproduc­ tion. In this sense, social production is radically dislocated, reduced to a subordinate moment of the capital’s reproduction. Back to Haiti, what further complicates the picture is that the tension between imitating Europe and breaking out of European modernity is inscribed into the very heart of the revolutionary process. Toussaint l’Ouverture, the first leader of free Haiti, insisted on the equality of all races and rejected any privileging of the Blacks, plus, although he formally abolished slavery, he simultaneously imposed obligatory work (plantation workers had to remain at their post so that production was going on). The two leaders who came after him, Dessalines and Christophe, enacted the

12 Slavoj Žižek

anti-White turn (all non-Blacks with the exception of Poles who supported the revolution were massacred), but mandatory work remained, so that for ex-slaves things didn’t change a lot. During Christophe’s reign, Haiti was divided into two states: Christophe ruled as the emperor the northern part and Alexandre Petion the republic in the southern part. While the North turned into a half-feudal authoritarian imitation of a European modern state focused on boosting pro­ duction and wealth (concentrated in the hands of the ruling Black elite), in the republic in the South land was distributed to small farmers who survived in a self-subsistent economy with low productivity. Although some commentators celebrate the South as an attempt to develop new communal forms of life as an alternate outside to European modernity, the experiment soon failed. A further paradox to be noted here is that the anti-White shift from equality of races to Black domination which occurred with Dessalines coincided with the rise of authoritarian class structure with the emperor at the top which imitated the worst of European authoritarian modernity. Similar paradoxes are already discernible in the case of Paraguay: before it was destroyed by the Spanish-Portuguese intervention, Paraguay under the domination of the Jesuit order which organized indigenous tribes into reducciones (missions) was not only an early form of Communism but was also much closer to cultural independence than Argentina or Brazil. Jesuits were already printing books in Guaraní language (which is even today spoken by the majority in Paraguay), so if Jesuits were not thrown out, the history of Latin America would take a different turn, with the Aboriginal language becoming one of the official state languages. Throughout modern history, Jesuits were as a rule much more progressive than Franciscans, although (or precisely because) Jesuits were organized as dogmatic fanatics while Franciscans emphasized poverty and spiritual inner life. Even today, Jesuits are the bastion of the Catholic Left while many Franciscans are neo-Fascists. Brecht was right to copy (“dislocate”) Jesuits sacred propaganda theatrical pieces in his Communist “learning plays.” There is an important paradox in the distinction between Guaraní spoken outside of the missions and the Jesuit Guaraní: Jesuits constructed new words in Guaraní to translate European notions while ordinary people simple incorporated hispanicisms: By and large, the Guaraní of the Jesuits shied away from direct phonological loans from Spanish. Instead, the missionaries relied on the agglutinative nature of the language to formulate calque terms from native morphemes. This process often led the Jesuits to employ complicated, highly synthetic terms to convey Western concepts. By contrast, the Guaraní spoken outside of the missions was characterized by a free, unregulated flow of hispanicisms; frequently, Spanish words and phrases were simply incorporated into Guaraní with minimal phonological adaptation. A good example of that phenomenon is found in the word “communion.” The Jesuits, using their agglutinative strategy, rendered this word “Tupârahava,” a calque based on the word

Sublimation and Dislocation 13

“Tupâ,” meaning God. In modern Paraguayan Guaraní, the same word is rendered “komuño.”2 We encounter something similar in many today’s languages (the state protects their purity, prohibiting anglicisms, etc.), but in the Jesuit Paraguay, foreign colonizers themselves played this role. The point of these remarks is a very simple one: to complicate the standard binary of Eurocentrism versus post-colonial thought. What if the two are inextricably linked? What if European influence is not only an obstacle to decolonization, what if it can help it? When we dream about post-colonial future, it is crucial that we take into account such paradoxes.

Notes 1 Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). I rely here on Rocio Zambrana’s “Hegelian History Interrupted” (to appear in Crisis and Critique). 2 “Guarani Language,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified March 8, 2023, https://en. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guarani_language&action=history.

Bibliography Casimir, Jean. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Wikimedia Foundation. “Guarani Language.” Last modified March 8, 2023. https://en. wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guarani_language&action=history. Zambrana, Rocio. “Hegelian History Interrupted.” In Crisis and Critique, forthcoming.

4 EMANCIPATION THROUGH A NEW GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE Pavin Chachavalpongpun

Grim projections about the future of the world are terrifying us. From the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the terrible state of ecological degradation, the inequality that has emerged in all four corners of the world, the influx of refugees and displaced population, relentless armed conflicts, and political violence, the rise of racism, to the increasing states’ digital control over our lives, these pro­ blems have come to redefine the world we are living in today. Nations are struggling to cope with these emerging crises. Most have found they are fighting alone. Some have lost their hope in regionalism and international organizations. As an Asian in Asia, the impact of all these could not have been greater. The West strives to resolve the problems through the Western lens. At times, it blamed the rest of the world as the source of crises. Asia has been left searching for a non-Western approach in tackling problems by itself. The two worlds – the West and the rest – seem so far apart. I humbly propose four visions to expand the frontier of emancipation for ultimately emancipating ourselves from the dire state of the world.1 The four pillars include: Universalizing the issues; resolving them through supranation­ alism; emancipating with good governance; and expanding global alliances. This vision is neither Western nor Asian. It is simply universal. The coming decades will demand countries to work in unison in order to steer the world towards being more sustainable, tolerable, and human-centric. The challenge will be enormous. It will require a multifaceted global movement capable of driving transformative change in political, economic, and cultural institutions. The effort must be inclusive. While state-led organizations, like the United Nations, will continue to play a meaningful role in leading the way for global movement, their achievement hinges on active participation of the peoples of the world. DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-5

Emancipation Through a New Global Perspective 15

Universalizing Issues There is a great divide in the perception of threats among nations. The different perceptions of threats produce different strategies and possibly different outcomes. True, some threats are national and well confined. However, in the world we are living in, most threats are transboundary by nature, and they generate widespread implications beyond national borders. A consensus is in need among countries to find a common ground for emancipation. Here, the key question is how to con­ form the different perceptions of threats. The Global North and the Global South have unfortunately nurtured such a divide. Developed nations see crises differently from developing nations. This is due to the different political and economic con­ ditions, the cultural factor, and advancement in technology, among others. The developed nations condemned the developing world for instigating some of the global crises, such as environmental degradation or deadly pandemics. Meanwhile, developing nations have felt that developed nations imposed their view of solutions on them without any consideration for local political, economic, and cultural conditions. The spread of coronavirus exemplifies the divide between China and the rest. While China is an original source of the pandemic, the United States under then President Donald Trump was quick to shift blame on China to evade public anger for his administration’s inability to deal with the crisis. The “China virus” was assigned as “otherness” in the United States as well as in the wider world. The coronavirus pandemic is truly a global crisis, one that has transcended national capabilities in threat management. Despite this drawback, there had been no international effort to alleviate the crisis. Even in highly integrated organizations like the European Union, members were left battling with the pandemic on their own. Slavoj Žižek stated that European individualism is the cause of the high number of cases in Europe, compared to the relatively more modest figures recor­ ded by the countries of Asia, where the sense of the general interest is stronger. The EU was deemed ineffective, unable to organize a vaccination campaign quickly, to the point that Europe gradually gave in to vaccine nationalism. At the same time, the continent is also accused of giving priority to its populations at the expense of the poor countries of the Third World.2 The importance in this discussion, and indeed the experience drawn from the coronavirus spread is that unless the nations of the world are serious in finding a common ground to emancipate themselves from common threats, they will quite likely continue to succumb to their own inability, as individual nations, and witness their persistent decadences. These common threats, be they climate change and global warming, or raging pandemics, must be translated into “universal issues,” and prioritized by all nations. By universalizing them, this means an equal share of blame and contribution. Asia alone should not be blamed as the original source of crisis in the case of the coronavirus, the rapidly changing lifestyle of peoples in other continents, which allowed the pandemics to thrive, should be taken into consideration. More importantly, claims that an

16 Pavin Chachavalpongpun

improvement in the pandemic situation was made possible by the Western innovation of vaccines, might ignore the contribution by non-Western others. Some of non-Western countries took the lead in delivering us from the pandemics, in the context of healthcare education. Universalizing the problems the world is facing is one way of reducing the burden on individual nations, as well as boosting cooperation beyond national sovereignty.

The Power of Supranationality Žižek, in his European manifesto, admitted that sovereignty has obstructed the way in which countries have attempted to overcome global problems. It is ironic that the European Union is in itself a manifestation of cooperation sans frontiers. Europe’s nations came together as one simply because of the benefits of cross-border cooperation and were thus willing to forfeit a certain degree of their sovereignty rights. As evident in the case of Brexit, nationalism took the central stage while the norm of shared sovereignty became redundant. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson implemented Brexit because the Brussels bureau­ cracy is, in his eyes, a superstate, which hinders British sovereignty and the free movement of capital, according to Žižek. The return of nationalism poses an obstacle to the solution to global issues because it prevents the concerted efforts that are urgently required. Sovereignty is at the center of the conundrum. Sovereignty is commonly regarded as the quintessential principle of pluralism within international society, which allows states to co-exist despite their different domestic political systems. Today, the same sovereignty seems to neglect its own principle of pluralism as countries tend to grow more inward-looking and increasingly state-centric. This tendency has caused a myriad of problems among developed nations, which earlier cherished the spirit of regionalism. But it becomes even more complicated among non-Western states which interpret the concept of sovereignty rather differently from the Westphalian understanding of the West. Sovereignty in non-Western states is considered an institution constitutive of their polities. Some invoke nationalist discourse in relation to sovereignty to safeguard their polities but as a result unavoidably causing international frictions.3 While pure sovereignty is rarely achieved because states concede limits or impositions by being part of various multilateral regimes, the concept has never just been about control of territory either; it can also be about independence and autonomy with regard to the laws. Globalization and global regimes, including trade, inevitably can mean decisions made outside the borders of a state can impact the populations within a state.4 Politicians seek to maintain their power and popularity within their constituencies. Should any policy be implemented as a result of international cooperation that deprived some rights of the local populace; those politicians would not hesitate to invoke the concept of sovereignty as being independent and autonomous from international obligations to satisfy their political supporters at home.

Emancipation Through a New Global Perspective 17

To truly confront problems at the global level, the concept of supranationalism, not that of sovereignty, must be actively promoted. Problems such as climate change and global warming, nuclear threats, or natural disasters at a grand scale (recalling the Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004), require a degree of supranationalism – that is, governance arrangements whereby states delegate some responsibility for decision-making to an institution that stands above the nation-state. Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 provided a good example of how an adherence to sovereignty could deeply deteriorate the situation. Weeks after the cyclone hit the nation, the Myanmar government continued to refuse foreign assistance for fear of external interference in domestic politics. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member, was at the beginning slow in providing the necessary support for its member. When the help from ASEAN finally got through the political bar­ riers, it was almost too late as the number of deaths had multiplied. Although supranational developments have been around for some time and more vividly since the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, they have been intermittently compromised by national agendas. However, the world in 1945 was very different from the world today and international cooperation à la United Nations renovation is critical. Supranationalism is still fragile and requires support to continue expanding in the face of con­ stant pushbacks from powerful nationalist and other counter forces.

Emancipation with Good Governance Good governance is essential in tackling global issues on a sustainable basis. States pursue different approaches in dealing with national and transnational threats. These approaches mostly reflect the nature of the regime. Democratic states tend to resort to solutions based on public mandate, although there were also cases of democratic regimes pursuing illiberal approaches. For example, the elected government of Thailand adopted a hard-hitting approach in resolving the violent conflict in the country’s Deep South where Muslims have been seeking autonomy for centuries. Needless to say, the rights of minorities is a global issue. What happened within the Thai borders certainly engendered a wider impact at the global level. In addition, the illiberal policy of the Thaksin government proved violent, thus ineffective, and contributed to the prolongation of insurgencies. The focus in this discussion is on the non-democratic regimes implementing policies with no regard to any consideration for good governance. When bad governance becomes means and ends at the same time solving a crisis by creat­ ing another crisis becomes an even greater disaster. Illiberal regimes will defend their policies as a fast and hence essential approach to deal with time-sensitive issues. Some employ nationalism to solve issues in order to externalize the problems and legitimize the state’s policy. This is because nationalism arouses a public sentiment demanding the people’s total support. That the brutality of the

18 Pavin Chachavalpongpun

Buddhist state of Thailand against the Muslim minority has been largely accepted by the Thai public is a good example of how the power of nationalism eclipses basic human rights.5 In turn, Communist states like China have chosen genocide to justify their policy vis-à-vis Muslim otherness. Though illiberal policies hardly achieve to lessen the crisis with minorities sowing the seeds of hatred instead. Likewise, China did not tell the whole truth regarding the outbreak of coronavirus as a tactic to avoid the blame for the deadly disease. The lack of good governance on China’s part has set a new practice in its dealing with the health crisis. As already mentioned, it opened the door for the Trump administration to condemn China as the global manufacturing hub for diseases, deepening the image of China as an enemy – and leading to an ever more confrontational world. Meanwhile, Islam fundamentalist regimes dwell on their own version of emancipation through a world governed by Sharia law. This version has brought a new crisis, resurrecting a discourse of the clash of civilizations, which justify a zero-sum mentality. From this perspective, the approaches toward solving critical issues inexorably link to the different type of regime in question. Good governance is a vital measure regarding how public institutions conduct public affairs and manage public resources in a preferred way. Governance is the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented or not implemented. By adding the prefix “good” to the notion, the term contains the meaning of responsibility, accountability, transparency, and sustainability. Good governance is often used in the national as well as in the corporate context. At the international stages, this term is mainly used in international development. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once said, “Good governance is ensuring respect for human rights and the rule of law, strengthening democracy, promoting transparency and capacity in public administration.”6 To manage the global issues today efficiently, members of the global community must begin with adhering to the principle of good governance. Without it, any effort will become meaningless.

Expanding Global Alliances Global questions need global action. Building global alliances with like-minded supporters is imperative. Global alliances are the effective tool for emancipation that must be built across different sectors and institutions. States must cooperate with non-state actors. Civil society organizations and non-government organiza­ tions are tasked to perform as a bridge connecting peoples with states. Such kind of alliances will enable us to broaden our understanding across different issues, from health, education, livelihood, displaced population, political violence, war and terror, gender equality to rights of LGBTQ. Different sets of problems bring about different participants through global alliances. Hence, expanding global alliances among different participants allows problems to be managed more straightforwardly and to the point.

Emancipation Through a New Global Perspective 19

The objective of building global alliances is to involve all concerned participants collectively to produce positive policy change seeking the solution to world crises. The goal is to establish networks among states and organizations at the interna­ tional level to work together in different fields. The networking is important in the search for supporters to the cause of universal emancipation within and outside the frameworks of the United Nations, the European Union, and blocs in other regions. By networking, it is meant the attempt to “get to know” one another, building trust, sharing ideas and opinions on issues affecting the world, and ensuring firm support to the overall cause of emancipation. The mission is for all participants to work together and place international crises under the global spot­ light. In Southeast Asia, ASEAN, despite coming under criticisms over the years for its lack of organizational progress, can step up and play the supporting role required. Countries like China have successfully explained away their responsi­ bility vis-à-vis crises that originated in their own countries. International alliance helps build up a sort of peer pressure while calling for a greater responsibility from members of the global society. I understand this process to be one of coalition building with the aum of achieving a consensus on the urgent need to manage global crises at the international level. This consensus is based on a common agreement that global crises have generated devastating impacts on human lives. These crises must be eliminated once and for all. This alliance-building will leave the door open for small countries to become a part of the global effort for emancipation. For a long while, the world has operated under the colonial mentality. The West leads the way, the rest follows. This mentality only intensifies the superior status of the First World at the expense of the Third World. Conversely, being a Third World country can also serve as a pretext to feel free from responsibility. This mentality must change. Global alliances will be useful for all countries to work together in a capacity commensurate with their status. In particular, they will provide countries under Third World etiquette a sense that they can be a direct part of an effort in making the world a better place.

Conclusion In some ways, critical issues facing the world offer much-needed lessons for global alliances building. In other words, the world is forced to learn how to cope with these issues through concerted efforts. No political, economic, and social transformations will come easy. Past failures serve as a guide that will illuminate the future. Asia has much to offer. Today, they remain sources of some of the world’s serious problems, the coronavirus pandemic being one among many problems that originated in Asia. Lessons, however, are not to lead to condemnation but serve as factors that drive states into working in unison or at least more closely together. This essay has spoken of the world transiting through a variety of seriously alarming obstacles. Here four visions have been suggested for overcoming them

20 Pavin Chachavalpongpun

and moving forward towards achieving emancipation: Universalizing the issues, resolving them through supranationalism, emancipating with good governance, and expanding global alliances. All four are meant to offer a new perspective and ultimately show the way in building a movement capable of providing a better life for humankind.

Notes 1 This essay is inspired by the work of Kathryn Sikkink on overcoming obstacles in the promotion of human rights as universal value. See Kathryn Sikkink, “Human Rights: Advancing the Frontier of Emancipation,” Great Transition Initiative, April 2018, https://greattransition.org/publication/human-rights-frontier. 2 “Slavoj Zizek: ‘Mon Manifeste Européen’,” Le Monde, May 13, 2021, https://www.lem onde.fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html. 3 Jason Hall, “Sovereignty: An Institution Nexus Between Southeast Asia and International Society” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2020). 4 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3. 5 See Duncan McCargo, Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007), 58. 6 See “What is Good Governance?” ESCAP, July 10, 2009, https://www.unescap.org/ resources/what-good-governance.

Bibliography ESCAP. “What is Good Governance?” July 10, 2009. https://www.unescap.org/resour ces/what-good-governance. Hall, Jason. “Sovereignty: An Institution Nexus Between Southeast Asia and International Society.” PhD diss., Australian National University, 2020. Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. McCargo, Duncan. Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2007. Le Monde. “Slavoj Zizek: ‘Mon Manifeste Européen’.” May 13, 2021. https://www.lemonde. fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html. Sikkink, Kathryn. “Human Rights: Advancing the Frontier of Emancipation.” Great Transi­ tion Initiative. April 2018. https://greattransition.org/publication/human-rights-frontier.

5 MANIFESTO: COMMONISM NOW! Bara Kolenc

Situation of the Now With bringing the devastating consequences of capitalism to the extreme, as some sort of a caricature, the global Covid-19 pandemics made it clear: we are witnessing a definite end of a certain period, and something un-comprehensively new is popping up. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, we have been living in a political landscape littered with what Alex Williams called the “ideological ruins.” Certain possibility of what seemed impossible in the so-called post-historical or post-modern period has started to show its contours: a possibility of the end of capitalism. The neo-liberal chimera cracked. More and more, we have been shaken by the bumps of the real. The consequences of the total financial deregulation began to unveil its claws: disintegrated public sphere, impotence of the political, bureaucratization and technocratization of public apparatuses, accelerated growth of massive poverty and of the uncountable wealth of the few, unequal distribution of goods, services, and rights, global nutrition problems leading to starvation or obesity, poor physical and psychical public health resulting in the pandemics of anxiety, depression, and mental disorders, systemic violation of workers’ rights and raise of slavery, and, on the top of it, the alarming heating of the planet. It has become clear that all these processes are interconnected. That they are all the symptoms and the effects of one single systemic cause: the capital. In 2009, Mark Fisher pointed out that the end of neo-liberalism does not necessarily mean the end of capitalism. A novel ideology could replace the neo-liberal stance to support the accelerated growth of capital. Taking a closer look, we can see that in the last ten years, the neo-liberal idea has been persistently replaced by a new fantasy – the fantasy of a green, sustainable, DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-6

22 Bara Kolenc

clean, digital growth that will benefit the planet and humanity. Of course, the idea of eco-liberalism is a huge falsification. Most of the renewable energy companies are not fundamentally different from fossil fuel companies and are not meeting the climate change targets. They are consumption driven and seek to build market share. What is presented to be a contest between dirty and clean energy, is a myth: more fossil fuels are being burned today than ever before, and emissions in 2022 were at record levels. More to that, in the future, due to the expected environmental migrations, eco-liberalism is likely to turn into eco-fascism. But what if the situation of the now is exactly the opposite? What if we turn Fisher’s perspective upside down proposing that neo-liberalism is still alive while capitalism is already dead? What if – as is the case of every true historical dialec­ tical turn – neo-liberalism (now masking itself into eco-liberalism) persists exactly as the phantom of something that has long died (say, after 2008)? Yanis Varoufakis claims that the end we are witnessing is actually the end of capitalism. Eventually, capitalism is not turning into communism by its structural necessity as Marx mis­ takenly anticipated (due to the assumption of the descending interest rate), but is degrading into some counter-enlightenment techno-oligarchy. Surely, what is at work in our socio-economic reality now is, from a Hegelian perspective, a certain false drain of historical dialectics, which might, if not sublated, lead humanity towards the darkest period of its existence. Most probably, however, a sublation is impossible, and there is no other option left but a surrender to the pessimist prediction like Georgescu-Roegen’s that we are doomed to downfall, destruction, and demise. This, he argues, is because of the limited Earth’s capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels and because of the persistence of the social conflict, which can be eliminated neither by man’s decision to do so nor by the social evolution of humankind (Freud would agree on this in contrast to Einstein’s pacifist illusions). Since man’s economic struggle to work and earn a livelihood is largely a continuation and extension of his biological struggle to sustain life and survive, there will be rulers and ruled in any social order, and this was not diminished neither in capitalism nor in socialism or communism. Georgescu-Roegen predicts the world economy will continue growing until its inevitable and final collapse. From that point on, the increasing scarcity will cause widespread misery, exacerbate social conflicts around the world and intensify people’s economic struggle. A prolonged “biological spasm” of our species will follow, which ultimately means the end of humankind itself, since human beings are completely and irreversibly dependent on the technological economy for their biological existence. But let us see things in a positive light and say we can be thankful to Covid-19. Itself a biological phenomenon, the pandemics functioned as a huge social experi­ ment. It has deciphered the devastating consequences of capitalism and offered us a sneak peek into another reality, a reality beyond the measures of production, con­ sumption, and growth. On the other hand, it forcefully accelerated digitalization, and so it made us clearly see its effects.

Manifesto: Commonism Now! 23

In a very short period of two years, it has become evident that postmodernity is seeing its end, and that we are entering a new era: the instantiernity of the digital age. The features of instantiernity, however, are nothing but an utmost fulfillment of the bold ideas of postmodernity (articulated most profoundly by Deleuze), which has become possible with digitalization: spatialization of time, proliferation of coexistent realities, replacement of the linear hierarchical structures with a horizontal dynamic network of multiple co-effective centers (of power, knowledge, creation, etc.), detachment of the virtual from the actual, instant relativization of any identity proposition, and ephemerality of sub­ jectivity. All these ideas have a liberating and democratic potential, which was in the mid 80ies eagerly trusted to the emergence of the internet, but can, as it is becoming all the more evident, also lead to autocracy and serfdom. Exactly therein lies the bitter truth of the postmodern dream the Left is still unable to acknowledge. What actually happened in the last thirty years of the 20th Cen­ tury is that the revolutionary, liberating, anti-authoritative, and democratic ideas stemming from the student movements of 1968, were – in some sort of a vicious twist – perfectly realized not only in the subversive anti-capitalist, antiimperialist, and anti-totalitarian strivings, but also, and more comprehensively, within capitalism itself: with the globalist and internationalist tendencies of the free-market economy, with the networking, and the idea of post-ideology (which has proved to be the greatest hegemonic ideology of all). The outcome of this revolution is therefore rather meager: instead of being liberated from the authoritative and regulative power of the nation-states, we have been, attached to the fantasy of such a liberation, imperceptibly, and unconsciously enslaved by a governance of the corporate market economy, which is now, with digita­ lization and its raw materialist backside, bio-technology, gaining new features. Today, we are witnessing the accelerated digitbiotech re-positioning of the socio-economic relations structuring the world. Global monetary system is going viral, which brings deregulation of the market economy to a new level, not resulting in a redistribution of wealth, but rather in its historically most punctual and highest accumulation. The gap between “bare life,” that is, the living conditions of each individual, and his tendency to transcend these condi­ tions (as a thoughtful, cultivated, communal, political being) is growing deeper. Capital growth is less and less linked to production and sales, and more and more to stock market speculations and relations between shares. We are at a stage where the ultimate feature of capital’s ability of abstraction detected by Marx (money begets money) has grown to such an extent that it can, hypothetically, branch off from its foundations (labor, production, sales, and consumption) and turn into a self-managing system of virtual relations. One of the symptoms of this transformation is for example the fact that work and consumption are becoming ever more indiscernible (not mediated by wage): in our everyday use of digital platforms, we work for them at the same time as we consume them – and we also consume them during our work. This is prone to be further reinforced by advan­ cing working from home, privatization of digital space, and 3D technology.

24 Bara Kolenc

Universal basic income (UBI) might in this sense not be seen as “the measure of equality and a guarantee for a good life of everyone” but rather a minimal booster needed to sustain lives of individuals as long as this is still needed for capital growth. Replacing people’s salaries with UBI could lead to withdrawal of the individual’s freedom of accepting or rejecting the conditions of work, which is the basic predisposition of capitalism as the contractual economic system. In a radical dystopia, this transformation tiles the shift of digital capitalism into an indentured servitude based on debt bondage and into some form of digital manorialism. With the emergence of digital platforms, man is entering a novel form of existence – intersolation. In an unprecedented supposition of physical isolation and digital social interaction, the individual is caught in a trap: the more she is isolated, the more she engages in digital interaction – and the more she is iso­ lated. Digitalization mathematizes language, turning statements to binary inscriptions and making them directly transformable to monetary values. This leads to a new anesthesia of the political subject: statements, detached from their utterances, are forming a multiplying market of truths, of which the ten­ dency to universality is algorithmically managed. Because their power is already materially instituted in possession of physical and digital space, energy, food, and health supplies, technology, and arms, the security-wall of the new elites is soon going to reach the point of impene­ trability, immunizing the contra-power of the masses (which are now still having some strength with strikes, consumption boycotts, protests, and upris­ ings). Another threshold being recently traversed is that with the development of bio-technology, technology allows human not only the indirect production of life through the production of the means of subsistence (maintaining thereby favorable conditions for biological reproduction) as was the case in the indus­ trial era, but weighs towards direct production of life (artificial insemination, cloning, growth of “organs without bodies,” genetic research for prevention of aging) having for its final goal a complete control over life; in face of this aspiration, blasphemously enough, it is now for the first time in human history that the threat to life concerns not only a particular individual or a social class, but is, with the danger of the global environmental catastrophe, becoming common.

Political Subject Is Alive – Common Is Not in a Coma “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto These famous lines, which had been floating for years in the light air of aca­ demic quotations, have now, once in a while, or even for the first time since 1848, hit the ground. In the act of their enunciation, word by word and over the

Manifesto: Commonism Now! 25

suture of the final dot, somehow unconceivable – in this very moment, without an echo of the second thought – they open up into the ontic, into the bare materiality of the situation of the now. There is something brute and brutal shaking their utterance, and something radically sober. There are periods of “historical necessity” that overrun thought. When the material conditions of life become unbearable, there is little space for con­ sideration about political engagement left – we are compelled to act. While at the turn of the Millennium the rift between posture and doing, which had been euthanizing the Left for decades, sharpened, provoking thereby critical and philosophical reflections driven to detect the source of the problem, now, in 2023, such considerations seem redundant. We are urged to – to paraphrase Marx again – stop interpreting the world and start changing it. In these cir­ cumstances, however, philosophy and critical thought should not succumb to the self-pitying of their own uselessness in relation to the practical political engagement (remember the decades of immunization of philosophy provoked by Marx’s spell discussed by Althusser), but should, on the contrary, recognize and take upon their necessary role in it. Not only in following Benjamin’s instruc­ tions for the Left intellectuals to leave their ivory castles and start working on the terrain, but even more so in performing the task they are most competent for: a concern for universalities. Now, it is about time for the Left to take upon itself the mandate of re­ appropriating the hegemonic struggle posed by Laclau and Mouffe already in 1985. It is pretty clear today that the thirty years long euthanasia of the Left following the disastrous failure of the Eastern block was not at all a con­ sequence of this failure. More likely, it was a profound distrust into the ideo­ logical mechanisms rising both on the West and on the East from the mid 70ies, which, along with the inner inconsistencies of the system and the persistent strategic penetration of capitalism and neo-liberalism beyond the iron curtain, contributed substantially to the collapse of the socialist societies. From this perspective, the big issue of the incompatibility of universalities and particula­ rities, which has been roaming around in the last decades, appears only as a distraction or a covering (in the sense of Freud’s Ungeschehenmachen) of the true problem – the fact that the Left has, precisely through the inherent critique of ideology, unconsciously surrendered to the post-ideological dogma of neo­ liberalism. This means that in the last thirty years, a major part of the Left has given up its own beliefs in the name of the ideology of its adversary. What is to be done? Instead of juxtaposing universalities and particularities as elements of discourses, like Laclau and Mouffe, who have done a majestic job showing the Left that the problem with their proclaimed incompatibility is solvable, that is, illusory, let us expose here a different antagonistic relation, which plays a central role in the hegemonic struggle. From a Lacanian per­ spective, identity tendency is inscribed in language as its very condition of pos­ sibility, which means that universalities are produced in language as its structural effect. On the other hand, language itself forms a realm of

26 Bara Kolenc

representation – there are no sub-representative linguistic forms. The flipside of the identity tendency of language is a radical non-identity forming its core, the gap opening around the inscription of the subject into the signifying chain. What constitutes ideology is therefore not just (a specific aspect of) identifica­ tion, universality, or representation, but its phantasmal component, which engages desire circling around the gap. Perhaps, Lacan has best described this negative dialectics in his concept of repetition as a double movement of the return of signs (realm of the symbolic, automaton) and the recurrent apparition of the un-symbolizable remainder (realm of the real, týche). These two realms are negatively interconnected: týche is a gap in automaton. Týche, however, has a Janus face: it is at the same time the return of the lack, the purely formal cut in the symbolic order, and the return of the surplus, which triggers some sort of immaterial accumulation as an imprint of something ontic (physicality, motility, work, life, etc.) in the structure. Over this imprint, which is itself negative, the remnants of the bare materiality, which are un-symbolizable and cannot be unified in any kind of universality, are entering the process of symbolization. In this manner, as something radically non-existent, and mythical, the ontic conducts the ontology of the structure. Accumulation imprinted in the structure is a certain collision of particularities beyond universalization, some sort of bumps of the dumbs, the bare conditions of life. It is these collisions, which form commons. From the perspective of the alienated, that is, always already ideologically interpellated subject, commons can only be grasped negatively. However, it is exactly this negation, which is the condition of possibility of symbolic identification. This is why, without structurally impossible interrelations of the commons, any posi­ tive idealist struggle for universalities is in vain, and looking for the political subject remains an abstraction. Only the incompatible intertwinement of uni­ versals and commons forms the solid ground for political activation. This should be the starting point of the Left today, building up a transformative power of and for the new society. Today, the most all-encompassing common in the human history is being formed, uniting a major number of particulars over the threat to life by the techno-oligarchy of the elites and the environ­ mental catastrophe. This is a common connecting everyone except the elites – all those who cannot count on the space asylum and are destined to stay on Earth having no other choice than taking care of it. Earthling, this is the uni­ versal political subject of the now.

Concerns for the Now Active politics of the now should deal on all scales with the two main problems of the world threatening life: social inequality and heating of the planet. Pro­ cedures of active politics need to be simultaneously built as transformative concerns on the four levels supporting each other.

Manifesto: Commonism Now! 27

1.

2.

3.

4.

Concern for the commons. Following this concern, individuals engage in social activities to deal collectively with the unsatisfactory conditions of their lives and with the prospect of their further decline. Stemming from the bare materiality of life and concrete human relations, this concern is radically pragmatic. Concern for the universalities. This is a concern for the inherent uni­ versalist tendency of discourses. It is a concern for the appropriation of ideology not only as something inevitable, but also as something con­ stitutive, which can lead its way to diminish and replace the hegemony of neo-liberalism. As the empowerment of the new fantasy of the Left, recuperating from the betrayal of the socialist-democratic idea as the only radical alternative to capitalism, this concern is radically idealistic. It bears the power for establishing the future. Concern for the structure. This is a concern for the systemized, abstracted social relations. Today, this concern is a concern for the radical restruc­ turation of the socio-economic structure as there is. It works both from the inside (re-structuring the structure from within) and from the outside (building an alternative other structure). Concern for the non-existent. This is a concern for the vision of a world that is not. Radical changing of the world is a path to the unknown pro­ ducing unexpected and unimaginable consequences. It is a utopia rather than a projection. At this point, the new post-capitalist democratic society to be achieved is given a name: commonism. It begins with Marx’s maxime of communism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. It is a pacifist, trans-nationalist vision of a demo­ cratic and just society respectful to all forms of life and the non-human nature of nature. Structurally, commonism tiles a third path between Marxist and anarchist tradition, leaning partly on the ideas of libertarian socialism, social ecology, degrowth, and decentralized horizontal planning. Out of the four concerns, a commonist program is being developed.

Manifesto for Commonism. People of all ages threatened by social injustice and heating of the planet, come together – commonize! People in every local com­ munity – commonize! Unite against imperialism of Earth, space, and digital space! Unite to expropriate the elites! Unite to stop the global production and consumption! Unite to restrict private property! Unite to abolish debt-economy! Unite to commonize health-care, social services, education, science, media, and web services! Unite for disarmament! Unite to give value to knowledge and expertise! Unite to use technology for the right purposes – for sustainability, democracy, and equality! Commonize to make the Earth a common place.

6 A LEFT OF THE PASSAGE Timo Dorsch, Anna-Maria Imholz, Tomás Imholz, Mia Neuhaus, Mario Neumann, Massimo Perinelli, Michael Ramminger, Thomas Rudhof-Seibert and Anita Starosta

We are leftists from across Germany, living in various cities and belonging to different generations. We are active in diverse movements, and for many of us activism has long been a constant – along with the optimism required to sustain activist life. We know each other from the streets, and most of us have known each other for quite a while. We were brought together over time by a common interest in creating a social and political antagonism against the prevailing conditions – in the alter-globalization movement, in the post-2008 crisis protests, in solidarity movements during Germany’s “summer of migration” in 2015, and in some more recent experiments. Such is the context of our longstanding and ongoing con­ versations. In the loneliness and hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, we started to meet regularly online. During weekly discussions, we tried to understand how the political field was rapidly and radically regrouping around us. Our debates proceeded from a shared sense that the political subjectivity revealed in the responses to the pandemic indicated a deep and longer-standing crisis of the German left. During the last decade, debates became increasingly fixed in terms of claimed binary distinctions between event and continuity, internationalism and grassroots work, class and identity politics, and refugee solidarity and social welfare politics in which the event was to become national once again, thus reflexively repeating the worldwide capitalist lines of division instead of overcoming them. All these divisions revealed the lack of a shared vision of an antagonistic position to the status quo, and a left that had split in multiple ways. The German petition of the international #ZeroCovid campaign called for a full societal shutdown, which it framed as an “attack” on the economic pro­ cesses still in operation and a claim to the right of all to life and safety by “staying at home.” It became wildly popular, receiving more than 100,000 sig­ natures from all segments of the left: from moderates and radicals, party DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-7

A Left of the Passage 29

members and movement activists, trade unionists and traditionalists.1 But the campaign’s success was a symptom of a lack of revolutionary imagination, which we make out along its underlying characteristics and effects: the embodiment of a voluntary submission towards the State, which is appealed to as the sole legitimate instance of problem-solving; the ideological reframing of solidarity as an individual posture towards oneself; the promotion of a reductive and binary mode of thinking, which consists in analyzing and per­ ceiving the world and its moral divisions in terms of good and bad; and the focus on surviving instead of good living – a consequence, in turn, of a lack of autonomy, imagination, and rebellion.2 Amidst the ongoing devastation and desolation we are living through at a global level, in the face of economic and ecological abysses and the dystopian algor­ ithmization of the social, it pained us to conclude that ever-larger parts of the left, in their simultaneous trade-unionism and identitarian etatism and authoritarian­ ism, have ceased to desire, or even to think about, radical social transformation. From this starting point, we see ourselves as a left inhabiting a passage, a left that doesn’t know better but can no longer represent what is wrong.

Superficial Rebellion: The Failed Critique of Neoliberalism The left has become a prisoner of its favorite enemy, ironically conforming to it more and more the stronger accusations against it were declared. This enemy is neoliberal capitalism, its state, and its everyday life. But without thorough analysis, it cannot be challenged politically. COVID-19 has exposed this deficit and what it gives rise to: a merely superficial rebellion. The core of the deficit lies in categorically reducing anti-neoliberal critique to “economic” macro­ structures without understanding their political and subjective dimensions, and without wanting to face the pitfalls of one’s own situatedness. Instead of grasping neoliberalism as a political, moral, and social regime of subjectivation, it is considered according to its own self-understanding as a kind of “free market” that is externally opposed to people and their lives, as a de-regulated market that must be re-regulated politically. In its externality to subjects and to the political, neoliberalism is, in the narrowest possible understanding, “capi­ tal” as a “system” that society (or the “99%”) faces. In scandalizing social pressure to perform and compete, it emphasizes the “internalization” of external constraints, but it offers no explanations whatso­ ever for the degree of real subsumption under capital that shapes us politically, morally, and culturally. Because the reduction of neoliberalism to a de-regulated market process overlooks the fundamental role of the State in the neoliberal regime, the critique misidentifies social dislocation with the State’s supposed absence, and consequently ends up with its direct or indirect glorification. Sud­ denly, the State appears again as an instance between capital and society, and is understood as an entity that can be governed instead of as a political-economic manifestation of capitalism itself.

30 Timo Dorsch et al.

Such critique of capitalism or neoliberalism reproduces in its own political pro­ nouncements precisely what it wants to attack. It became apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic that this supposedly critical stance reproduces the basic his­ torical figure of bourgeois subjectivation. That is, it reduces both subjectivity and sociality to the finite private person and the relations and relationships that such persons enter into with one another. Accordingly, proposals for the political treatment of the pandemic that were informed by this kind of account fit the logic of neoliberal state policy, to which they added a veneer of anti-capitalist antagon­ ism in their demand for factory closures. In this way, they stylized submission to unavoidable infection control measures in the fight against the pandemic as an emphatic expression of lived and shared solidarity.

The Left and Neoliberal Subjectivities Without noticing it, the anti-neoliberal left became a neoliberalized left. And such a formation was destined to fail, not least (and precisely) in and because of its own subjectification. It gambled away the forces of the social and the sub­ jective because it has unlearned and forgotten the social and the subjective. Because it has forgotten that the neoliberal regime, in its own socialization and subjectification, absorbed the struggles of the 60’s up to the dawn of the 80’s for a liberated sociality of liberated subjectivity. Because it has forgotten that all historical forms of the capital-labor relation, and thus the relation itself, take shape and are maintained by absorbing the struggles that break out within and against them, and that the capital-labor relation reproduces itself by that very process. Thus, of all possible candidates, it is the supposedly anti-neoliberal left who finally seals the neoliberal victory over the revolts of the 1960s. While the revolts of those years aimed at the self-liberation of subjectivity from the Fordist norm and discipline, they were absorbed into the capital-labor relation as that subjectivity was reduced to a calculus no longer understood to be anything but private, ready to voluntarily and seemingly freely submit to the command of neoliberalizing capital and the State. The neoliberalized left intensifies this development by articulating it in terms of the slogans of the 1968 revolts, which in the process are literally inverted. Perhaps most explicitly, this occurred with the statement that the personal is political and the concept of politics in the first person. The revolts originally articulated through these slo­ gans were premised on a politics in which the individual was understood to transcend private life. Today, a neoliberalized left uses these slogans to absorb life that is no longer understood to be anything but private into the basic stuff of a thoroughly moralized politics. At the same time, however, such a left fails whenever and wherever it succumbs to the apparent status of neoliberalism as consisting primarily in an attack on, or even a denial of, society as such. This understanding completely overlooks the fact that neoliberal absorption of the (post)1968 revolts also included what was pre­ cisely their most powerful aspect. Those revolts had undertaken to liberate

A Left of the Passage 31

subjectivity in a dialectic of socialization and singularisation, placing that dialectic as such under a primacy of the freedom of the individual. In this way, the revolts caught up for the first time with a seemingly banal point of the Communist Party Manifesto which until then had been conveniently ignored: namely, that com­ munism is about “associations” in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” and not the other way around! But when neoliberalism absorbs these “associations” and their subjects into the capitallabor relation, it succeeds by reducing their free socialization and singularisation to a narcissistically grounded competitive individualism.

Digitalization and Left Technocracy The lack of societal alternatives in this perspective is also reproduced by the logic of the algorithm, which penetrated our lives with new force during the pandemic by exerting a kind of material domination over our digital interactions. The algorithm knows no escape from the system. In the either-zero-or-one logic, there is no provision for an in-between or a beyond. We must recognize that in the last ten years, our everyday thinking has been pushed and exercised by digital capitalism in this specific way. In terms of both the questions asked and the answers given, a style of thinking is becoming entrenched that knows no contradictions, but only unambiguousness. This style of thinking pushes us to concrete and immediate action: yes or no, right or wrong, now or never. This is precisely the thinking that took hold in the nihilism of survival that desired total lockdown. The human contingency of thought and action, inherent in the irrationality and emotionality of social experience and intellect, cannot be taken into account by algorithmic machines, which can at most imitate such contingency. This style of thinking thus shuts itself off from the fundamentally different, from moments that break out of what exists, from the dialectic, and ultimately from communism. In this respect, digitalization means not only a dematerialization and disembodiment – a zoomification – of human existence, but also a dehumanization of thought. If we understand the critique of the limited nature of digital logic more generally in terms of a critique of the instrumental reason of modernity, however, it is possible to distill the radical potential for breaking out of the constantly self-reproducing alternativelessness of the binary framework: as long as humans exist as such, their existence urges revolt. Thus, the problem we face is not that the machines will take over and dominate humanity, as the contemporary dystopianism rehearses, but that we can no longer think the disjunctive in an inclusive way, or in other words, that all both/and is being reduced to one and the same either/or. The current situation cannot simply be attributed to a misunderstood neoli­ beralism and the digitization of the world. The booming of identitarian closures must also be traced to the real global crisis, to the further fragmentation of forms of relationship, to the loss of an orientation towards the future, and to

32 Timo Dorsch et al.

the experience of powerlessness vis-à-vis the increasingly obvious end of any fan­ tasy of infinitude. This loss is fed in the dialectic of the culture industry. While people in the centers of power spend their evenings staring at personal entertain­ ment screens, watching as countless series and films spin the most brutal dystopias and giving space to their reasonable fear of the impending future catastrophes in this way, that reasonable fear, thus displaced into the cultural imaginary, is then to be banished in the real with ever-stricter devotion to instrumental reason. Those who nevertheless take their irrationality and rage to the streets are consequently met with contempt and punishment fantasies, not least by parts of the left. Our German left, at any rate, wants to exclude fear and anger from the program, instead promoting norms and commandments, and increasingly, also, authoritarian wishes to be fulfilled by the State. The “irrational” is frowned upon by the left, which does not love the humiliated, is frightened by the new, does not desire the foreign, and does not long for what is to come. Therefore, the political, from COVID-19 to the climate catastrophe, should and must be objectified under the standards of “scientific knowledge.” The outcome is a leftwing technocracy, which, of course, we criticize not for its appreciation and politicization of science, but for its attempt to banish everything else. This technocratic stance fuels the self-accelerating process of algorithmic logic by joining in its desire to banish every “disturbance.” For where there is neither room for longing and dreaming nor for rage and resistance against the imposition of conditions, and where the highest precept is the apparently most reasonable but in reality, merely subservient “insight into necessity,” anger and resistance only feed the racism, chauvinism, and misogyny that in our societies invite the angry to direct their rage against the Other (in them). Thus, it is precisely the left’s loss of contact, its own disinterest in the Other, the rejected, that contributes to the real world we live in becoming more violent and dystopian. Recognizing this, and remembering the dialectical entanglement of reason and barbarism, would mean defending an ambitious notion of solidarity, one that would consist of explicitly recognizing our fundamental human dependence on encounters with the stranger (in us) – and in forming bonds with the stranger in the name of freedom. Instead of living this solidarity in the first person, the left has taken up the mis-use of this indispensable concept as its own, has scaled down its relation to the non-identical in a frenzy and turned it into its opposite. Today we are no longer in solidarity with each other, but with ourselves. In the centers of power, people fearfully hide behind the rationality of instrumental reason from their own affective involvement in the world, a world from which they no longer know any escape. In this way, we have also become devoid of history.

The Passage: Imagination and Heterotopia Despite the objective state of the world, we have no right to maintain a sense of powerlessness and self-inflicted disorientation. We would do well in these times to witness the condition of the subject in its utter depravity, to recognize it as

A Left of the Passage 33

our own, and at the same time, to understand the past, present, and coming struggles for new ways of living, for new subjectivities. We know, to borrow Enzo Traverso’s words, that our “left-wing melancholia should not evade the burden of the past” but must rather be a melancholy criticism that, while being open to the struggles in the present, does not avoid self-criticism about its own past failures …that is not resigned to the world order sketched by neoliberalism but that cannot refurbish its intellectual armory without identifying empathetically with the vanquished of history.3 This necessary identification passes through time and across borders. Which brings us to our own tasks. What is sought is a left of transition: a left that disappears in order to return. A left that, from the perspective of the passage, would recognize its own strategic option of being avant-garde in the sense of being able to anticipate the possible, opening to it, and listening to it avant la lettre. Reality is more drastic and more frightening right now than the left allows itself to be. We believe in a sometimes silent and subterranean work on the radically new, one that abstracts from the immediate and present struggles but finds in them its starting points and inspiration, coming from and connected to his­ torical time. A left that seeks to break away from the present can thereby become the left of new movements. The imaginary and the heterotopias we need are not dreams of a return to a safe pre-colonial world or a fantastic futurism. What we need always already exists as unresolved real practice. In the unresolved and yet outstanding – as in the global autonomy of migration, which not only challenges border regimes and undermines nation-statehood, but also problematizes the connection of rights and citizenships and brings a transnational class struggle into the nationally-based welfare states of the metropole. As in the imaginary and het­ erotopes of the postponed, unfinished Arab rebellion and its echo in the Mar­ ches of Hope from the Middle East to Europe in 2015, which generated an enormous impulse of solidarity in European societies, against which a part of the population that has become increasingly fascist in recent years is now up in arms. As in the movements of the squares, which, as interrupted movements, generated worldwide references and were even able to raise the question of power in countries like Greece as well as in Spain, where it continues to unfold. As in the living memories of the 1960s, when the queer and the black, the young and the gay, the left and the women, the latinxs and the poor took the street beyond their particular interests in the name of revolution, foreshadowing a potential, a virtuality that could be actualized. As in the related potentialities we hear in feminist promises from Chile to Turkey, and in the challenges to self-liberation presented to us from Chiapas and Rojava.

34 Timo Dorsch et al.

In all of this we see interruptions of the order of things, in which sexism, colonialism, racism, and maybe even capitalism were able to be overcome again and again as people forged, in a transcending way, relations that do not yet exist. Together, we cross a terrain that forms along with steps. We learn that identities are never identical, and from precisely these contradictions, we divine places that will be worth taking. We are aware that the current revival of identity-political positions is related to the defeats of those who wanted (and still want) to tear down the segrega­ tion lines of our world and who see themselves thrown back to their origins again and again. These defeats also include the reality that the current cycle of global social struggles, which has erupted over and again since 2010, has despite all radicalism until now lacked a political project and the will-to-power that goes with it, notwithstanding the speed with which mass assemblies in the large squares have demanded and occasionally even forced the fall of governments. And this all is additionally grounded in the radical presentness of our moment, an order that draws its greatest strength from non-memory, forgetting, isola­ tion, and separation. We refer here to what is unresolved and what remains outstanding, because our interest in collecting and adding up the movements of others is not in detaching ourselves from our own melancholy. We do not (yet) have answers, but we do have references where they might be sought. The heterotopian places we have alluded to here show us passages that we ourselves have to open and cross. This requires a counter-design, one that takes the particular, in the tes­ timony of its radical difference, as the universal starting point and horizon to organize the passage.

Notes 1 #ZeroCovid, “The Aim Is Zero Infections!: For a European Shutdown in Solidarity,” January 12, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210203205649/https://zero-covid.org/ language/en. 2 As a way of thinking, analyzing, and acting, this has now been extended to the cur­ rent Russian war against Ukraine. 3 Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), xiv–v.

Bibliography Traverso, Enzo. Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. #ZeroCovid. “The Aim is Zero Infections!: For a European Shutdown in Solidarity.” January 12, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210203205649/https://zero-covid.org/ language/en.

7 UNIVERSALITY IN THE MIDDLE A Buddhist Post-Global Perspective Hung-chiung Li

The globalization of either the capitalist or communist system has proved to be disastrous; part of the reason is that both were born from within modern capit­ alism and accepted its basic matrix. As a radical political economical reaction to capitalism, communism in some way can be taken as an oppositional or spectral subspecies of capitalism and thus mostly thought of solutions from within econ­ omy, the same ground for capitalism which, itself, should be seen as both the genus and a member species. This might explain why capitalism is the winner, elevating itself to the status of the structuring principle, not unlike the elevation of the penis as one organ to the phallus as the symbolic totalizing principle. For this reason, communist China has found its own solution, i.e., “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” by assimilating capitalism as its species, that is, by becoming itself both a member and the set such that it begins to globalize by its “one belt, one road” initiative – one can read the belt on sea as capitalism and the road on land as communism, the proof of the assimilation. Whenever a hierarchical system is set up, one element will prevail to totalize the multiple whole and constitute the genus. This conforms with the basic model of universality accounted by Žižek: the neutral abstract universality which is an all-subsuming pure form and should be like an empty space, and a particular hegemonic element that fills in the empty universality and “acts as its stand-in.”1 First of all, this “one form, one element” structuration constitutes a more sophisticated version of Mao Zedong’s law of “one splitting into two,” which is cogently designated by Deleuze and Guattari as an idealist “spiritual” principle alienated from the natural material world.2 Dialectics, at least its vulgar version, pertains to the same principle. Secondly, Žižek’s signature tour de force consists in “reflexively” internalizing the external opposition as the inherent deadlock.3 Thus the distance between the neutral frame and the parti­ cular content would become an internal gap within the latter: “the paradox of DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-8

36 Hung-chiung Li

the proper Hegelian notion of the Universal is that it is not the neutral frame of the multiple of particular contents, but inherently divisive, splitting up its particular content.”4 In fact, this is the basic model of Žižek’s “con­ crete universality” which emphasizes that the universal qua the Lacanian real exists in every concrete content as its “ultimate failure” or “central impossibility” of fully exemplifying the universality, that is, as the pure negativity, “the absolute gap” inside everything.5 Thus, it is not as Wendell Kisner claims that in this version, the universality is not yet concrete because it still does not “include itself among its parti­ culars”6 – this inclusion being Žižek’s criterion for concrete universality.7 For the universal is always already within everything that actually exists, as its inherent deadlock. But Kisner is justified to contend that Žižek’s “biggest mistake is to take negativity as foundational rather than as a beginning” so that, apart from this constitutive negativity, he does not provide a satisfying further account as to how a positive content can accede to the status of uni­ versality.8 That is to say, besides the inherent negativity in everything, which is the conclusion of reflexive logic that deals with essence, Žižek still has to explain how universality actually dialectically develops into particular con­ tents. Therefore, Kisner focuses on explaining that Hegel’s concrete uni­ versality belongs to the realm of “concept” which is a further and the culminating development of the system, while “being” and “essence” are the earlier two spheres.9 In precise terms, Kisner puts down his definition: “This process that remains itself in and through becoming other is universality – the ‘other’ that the universal becomes is its particular content through which alone it can be universal.”10 Simply put, Hegel’s absolute is a system which universality has to develop to be through dialectical moments, and thus, uni­ versality can only be actualized when the whole logical system is materialized and its individual concepts are engendered: the system or the universal has to enter into “the movement of its content,”11 because it inheres immanently in these concepts. This movement of concretization is a process for the universal to lose itself and become other in order to be a system. Kisner’s major contribution consists in clarifying the difference between Hegel’s universality as a concrete system and Žižek’s universality as pure negativity. The difference can be framed as that between structuralism and poststructuralism: Hegel’s negativity is synonymous with structurality and is opposed to positivity, while Žižek’s real qua negativity is the hindrance of the system, preventing it from completion. But Kisner misses one key point: Hegel’s concrete universality signifies exactly the completion of the system of logic and thus should not be taken as equivalent to the pragmatic concept of “universal singularity” which, as exemplified by political events, aims to disrupt the system. That is to say, concrete universality as embodied in individuals is not yet singularity: Kisner’s change of the translation of Hegel’s “Einzelheit” from the usually adopted “individuality” to “singularity” is thus unwarranted,12 though pointing toward the latter which is, however, beyond Hegel.

Universality in the Middle 37

It is probably because of the influence of early structuralist Lacan, which is used to creatively read Hegel, that Žižek especially emphasizes negativity. When this structuralist negativity is grafted to political practices, he somehow makes this structural condition into a disruptive concept. It is probably this confusion that leads him to conflate capitalism and emancipatory struggle as two exemplary cases of concrete universality, just because the former undermines organic traditional worlds and the latter disrupts the determining socio-cultural particularity.13 This is to mistake the “mediating” negation as the subversion of this mediation just because both modes involve some operation of negation. In short, the Other qua a negating mediation, i.e., castration, is confused with the negation of the Other, i.e., the castration of castration, that is to say, O confused with Ø. Probably also because of this conflation, and thus slippage, of structural (im)possibility and subjective practice, Žižek conceives and insists on a corresponding negating act on the subject’s part: “The subject is the immense – absolute – power of negativity, the power of introducing a gap or cut into the given-immediate substantial unity.”14 But negativity is a notion for essence; it can unground being or substance, exposing the inherent emptiness, but cannot be equated with production or creation. Here the difference between Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism may provide an effective elucidation and further explication. What is common to both is the basic understanding of impermanence: things are changing and transient, and thus do not have fixed essences and identities. The thing-in-itself does not exist because all there is comes from “dependent origination”; a pithy definition of nothingness is: “Things are dependently originated and therefore nothing.”15 Not as Žižek often criticizes, Buddhist nothingness does not desig­ nate any primordial ground or abyss to which things will return. Instead, it is proximate to his concept of pure negativity or non-identity: “at the beginning (even if it is a mythical one), there is no substantial One, but Nothingness itself.”16 And his claim that “even Nothing does not exist”17 also agrees with the Buddhist fundamental, non-mythical understanding of nothingness: “If there is no existent thing, / Of what will there be nonexistence? / Given that there is no existence or nonexistence, / Who knows existence and nonexistence?”18 As it is, both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists should be able to unground being to achieve the understanding of nothingness and terminate the continuation of the law: Lacan’s aim of teaching to “dissociate a and A”19 corresponds to the Buddhist “cessation,” the literal meaning of Nirvana, of the law by traversing the identity fantasy supported by desire. What is significant is that both Theravada and Mahayana subjects are not Hegelian individuals who merely actualize the universal system; instead, they should be taken as singulars which, however, do not coincide with Rancière’s “part of those who have no part,”20 i.e., those who, though belonging to the society, are not recognized or represented as a part of it. For the abject or minorities in themselves do not immediately disrupt the whole; any totalized whole will exclude groups of the kind who do not readily have political

38 Hung-chiung Li

meanings and thus are marginal rather than singular – or they can be called weak singularities. This touches upon a problem of the left. In explicating universal singularity, Žižek resorts to the same part of no-part and describes it as “pure difference”: “they, the excluded, those with no fixed place within the social edifice, presented themselves as the representatives, the stands-in, for the Whole of Society, for the true Universality.”21 The point is that objective minorities do not directly amount to singularity if the term signifies radical difference which can unsettle the law. If desired, we can call this kind of effective subjectivized singularity strong singularity. To use Hegel’s phrase, we can say that singularity should be “not only as substance but also as subject,” the difference being that Hegel’s subject/individual is objectively subjective – versus substance as objectively objective – for contributing to the existence of the Other qua subjectively objective, while the singular subject should be seen as subjectively subjective. This means that structural negativity does not coincide with an act that effec­ tuates it. It is, therefore, necessary to make a distinction between structural or ontological negativity and the subjective act of negation. The point is that Theravada Buddhists can testify to the fundamental negativity by this act, but they stop there and retreat from the secular world. But Mahayana Buddhists take a further step and actively participate in it. Bodhisattvas as representative Mahayana practitioners are mostly lay people who live and practice in different professions and life worlds in order to, on the one hand, experiment with singular and multiple ways of cessation corresponding to the specificities of these worlds,22 and, on the other, administer and adorn the worlds so as to deepen and multiply universalize the truth which does not exist anywhere else but in this very world: “the great retreat is retreating in the mar­ ketplace,” as expressed by this famous Mahayana Buddhist aphorism. Though this might seem congruous to Hegel’s concrete universality, it should nonetheless be a kind of concrete negative universality. Moreover, this resonates with Butler when she interrogates Žižek and Laclau’s Lacanian universality qua the “structural,” “ahistorical,” or “quasi-transcendental” limitation, and instead emphasizes the “historical possibilities … within a given political horizon.”23 She is justified to underline the inseparability between structure and history or form and content,24 but since Žižek’s real is nothing real but rather “reflexively” exists in every entity, he does not fall into the external form-content distinction. But still, plurality which underlies materialism and practice needs to be affirmed, and a further crucial question is what is to be done after the reflexive self-turn to negativity. Do we have the ability to build up a world or just stop at disruption and uprising? Things are further complicated by the fact that Bodhisattvas are in great numbers and are dispersed in different worlds that are far distant from one another. Two points are to be noted. First, Bodhisattvas are many, too many. This plurality is a defining characteristic of singularity, as Nancy has indi­ cated.25 Secondly, the plurality is not ordinarily plural. This can be related to an enigma in Buddhist scriptures. Bodhisattvas still meet with one another often though their worlds are far in between, and they can also inhabit the same

Universality in the Middle 39

world. As for Buddhas, there are also many of them, indeed innumerable through infinite spaces and endless times, since the title of Buddha merely means the enlightened and nothing divine or mysterious – in theory, nouns do not exist in Buddhism which is atheistic. However, they do not meet or do not seem to move at all, and their worlds of practice are even impossibly distant in between, like different cosmoses, and there is only one Buddha in one world. Here resides the meaning of the close connection between singularity and distance. And plurality needs to be grasped in accord with the sense that the distance between the worlds is not physical but singular, subjectively singular. Furthermore, the plur­ ality of singularity does not refer to simple multiplicity. The singular plural is singular because it concerns difference, and is plural because there are many specific worlds and thus many practices of cessation. That is to say, there is a kind of Leibnizian incompossibility here – incom­ possible, first of all, because the worlds are not ontologically or logically so but pragmatically, i.e., through practice and therefore one by one, that is, achieved singularly. They are incompossible, secondly, because of being singularly distant and thus plural, equal and coexistent rather than merely incompatible and mutually exclusive; true incompossibility is incompossibly compossible.26 On the one hand, each world is a changed world, not just because of the absolute nega­ tivity within, but because of a non-Hegelian singular universality which applies universally, i.e., traversing while respecting, or revolving while transforming, different walks of life. Here, a universality rather than mere singularity is involved. But this singular universality is distinct from the Theravada Buddhist subjective act of singular negation which is able to achieve cessation of the dominant universality but cannot be said to be truly universal. It is mostly a universality of the negative, i.e., by what things are not, but does not enter the world, observe the universal multiple differences, and create corresponding spe­ cific practices and establish a different singular universal world: Bodhisattvas’ “universalization” is to practice truth “everywhere and everywhen,” making it differently universal.27 In this sense, the subjective act is limitedly universal. And on the other, the incompossibility and equality have to do with the meaning of truth as achievable in distinct singular ways, because differences are observed and transvalued rather than merely destroyed. The very difference between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhisms does not reside in the wisdom of nothingness but in compassion, that is, the ability to be affected by ontological multiplicities, with the consequence that the wisdom would be deepened beyond mere negativity for being transformed for positive productions. In The Lotus Sutra, which is said to be the very sermon each Buddha will deliver when he is revealing the ultimate universality of Mahayana at the last stage of his teaching, a jeweled stupa with long bygone Buddha Prabhutaratna in it emerges from the ground, i.e., from another infinitely distant world, because he once vowed that he and his stupa would emerge to meet any later Buddha preaching this sutra, so as to testify to the truth of Buddhahood as attainable to all sentient beings, which is the only “vehicle” and ultimate

40 Hung-chiung Li

then invites universality for Mahayana Buddhism.28 Buddha Prabhutaratna ´ Buddha Sakyamuni to enter the stupa and shares the seat with him; in Buddhist art, a motif derived from this scene is called the “Co-sitting of Two Buddhas.” The episode is usually read to signify the close connection between “original,” “transhistorical” truth and its “historical” realization,29 but our discussion can give it another interpretive possibility. The distance between the two Buddhas sitting side by side should be infinite, though physically tiny in image repre­ sentation, while they are also infinitely close, with no distance between them, because there appears a community of the absolute incomparable universalities. Therefore, on the one hand, negativity is not empty.30 It is the ground for equality between things which have lost their identities. “Less than nothing,” to refer to Žižek’s book title, should mean that negativity is not empty but full of things and thus can be called full negativity. On the other hand, even pure negativity plus the subjective act of cessation is not the last word but should be continued by a Mahayana objective act which will bring about two further understandings. One is that things are many, different, and equal; this is congruent with Badiou’s “pure multiple,” or “the multiple qua multiple,” on the ontological level.31 Differences along with their equality on this level might be just relative, but they are objectively relative. A universality is involved on this first level, which can be called ontological universality. The other understanding or production achieved by creating universal worlds is the singular plurality of truths, which amounts to a second-degree multiplicity. Another universality is involved here, which is singular, incompossible, plural, and equal. It can be called incommensurable common universalities.32 There is also an equality on this level, one which is deepened and absolute, with the differences and universalities becoming singular and absolute too. The plural universals are not multicultural particularities, because the latter do not undergo subjective negation and do not concern singular practices and productions in distinct socio-historical structures. Therefore, if for the earlier Theravada negativity stage, we can use “not only as substance but also as subject” to describe the relationship between structural negativity and subjective negation, this Hege­ lian phrase can also apply to this post-negative stage: multiplicity is not only as substance (on the ontological level) but also as subject (on the truth level), with the reservation that the “subject” should have the meaning of objectivity. From these discussions, we can derive some implications for our envisioning of resistance. That is to say, all struggles regarding class, gender, race, animal, ecology are incomparable and relatively incommensurable and thus can be articulated, but not in the ordinary model of hegemonic articulation which is often envisaged as happening in one single space: theorists and activists usually imagine how to integrate different lines of resistances within the same, say, national space, and thus only one form of resistance will be privileged while the others are de-subjectivized. But incommensurable resistances mean that each one can form its own articulation in a different world; thus, there should be global gender movements across nations alongside with global ecological

Universality in the Middle 41

movements, global anti-authoritarian movements, etc.: these incommensurable different worlds can also be called singular globals. And each particular struggle can obliterate itself in forming an articulation around another particular strug­ gle to contribute to the latter’s singular universality. This happens to corre­ spond with Serres’s image for “the universal”: a flock of starlings concentrate and unify around one bird to head toward one direction, and then undo this gathering the next moment to unify around another bird for another direction, with these multiple units “in turn taking on the role and function of centre.”33 This crisscrossing articulations of universal resistances should be the model during the globalized world in which exploitations and dominations are also multiple and concatenated. Conversely, each specific space such as a state can become a site in which multiple universal movements are happening, simultaneously or not. Therefore, both on the outside and inside, there are not one but singularly multiple universalities. This also means that the hegemonic imagination of the social space does not stand here, because the practices do not compete for the universal position and, furthermore, the social space is not one but much more radically empty and thus full of multiple articulations. Here we touch upon the limitation of the impossible, or, if desired, different modes or stages of the impossible. For the impossible to happen, it is of course necessary to carry out an act that does not just provide alternative possibilities within the same system, but “changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.”34 But this kind of the impossible may not be enough; what is needed is post-negative productions, i. e., the impossibly possible, that is, possibles that are produced from the impos­ sible. Revolt and resistance do not suffice. In his discussion, Žižek mentions the case of Egypt in the Arab Spring. With hindsight, we now know that the lack of sufficient ability to withhold and build up their world after it was cast into negativity or mere contingency led to the pessimistic post-revolutionary develop­ ments in those countries. Thus, Hardt and Negri would need to emphasize that mere “protest is not enough” to produce lasting changes.35 They underline the importance of “leadership” or “democratic entrepreneurship of the multitude” in order to negotiate between very heterogeneous peoples and to secure for them “well-being,” “wealth,” and “happiness” apart from “equality, freedom, and democracy.”36 This conception is already close to the post-negative productions of Bodhisattvas who endeavor to change and administer their life worlds bit by bit in order to make the truth materializable and universal in all walks of life. Therefore, Mahayana Buddhism’s plural universalities are not unrelated to the multitude, i.e., the multiplicities on both the ontological and pragmatic levels. At this point, we might be able to derive a sequence for our universality. It can be expressed as (x)!(0)!(+0)!(+x), that is, from ontological uni­ versality, through a doubled negative universality (ontological negativity and subjective negation), to incommensurable common universalities, which can also be divided into singular universality (+1), i.e., a Bodhisattva’s production

42 Hung-chiung Li

of his world based on his chosen practice, and (+x) which stands for the equality and coexistence of these singular incommensurable universalities. In other words, the sequence consists of two sets of numbers and involves two universal repetitions and further deepenings. On the one hand, subjective negativity repeats ontological negativity by arriving at the nothingness of things and achieves universal ungrounding. This act should be continued by being dee­ pened in the post-negative stage which will return to the ontological multiplicities and repeat them by transforming them into multiple singular worlds. Here uni­ versality is not one, not just because it has to be empty or is underwritten by an inherent deadlock, but because it concerns the movements of the four universalities and thus can be said to be in the middle. Universality is in the middle, meaning that the movement has to go through the four levels for universalities to exist in sin­ gular, plural, and positive forms in the post-global world. The last thing to do is to prove that our concept of university does not just exist in purely philosophical speculations but also in reality. For that, it requires a concrete example, and Taiwan might be a fit one. Taiwan is a typical case of singularity or, more precisely, weak singularity. Under China’s bullying and pressures, Taiwan cannot receive representation in important international organizations, such as the UN and WHO. It becomes a part of no-part in the global world. Recently, a Taiwanese company TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) has been found to determine the success and decline of world economy as well as political and military power. From cars and smart phones to weapons and Mars-landing vehicles, not to mention all information driven machines and devices, in a word, the global world counts on the supply of chips from TSMC and Taiwan’s IT industry. For its global significance, Taiwan and its stability has become a pivotal interest of the whole world, or at least the global powers. Is TSMC or Taiwan in this instance a universal singular, since the concept is characterized by a “short circuit between the Universal and the Parti­ cular: the paradox of a ‘universal singular,’ of a singular that appears as the standin for the Universal”?37 Not readily so, for it seems to mostly participate in the current power structure of the world, instead of changing the game and producing singular universalities. But the critical importance of Taiwan does gain much sup­ port for it in joining the international societies. From this aspect, representation has its protective functions which are crucial for survival – it suffices to think about the Kurds and Xinjiang’s Uyghurs. What is needed is much less the destruction of representation than ways for it to enact subjective negation and post-negative productions. Taiwan was the first county in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019 and was supposed to host the 2025 WorldPride event, which should have been the first one taking place in East Asia and the second in Asia only after Jerusalem, with all the other hosting cities in the West. But the event was controversially cancelled because of the dispute between Interpride and Taiwan’s organizer about the name of the event: in spite of an earlier agreement on the use of the name Taiwan, Interpride later on insisted on the use of the city name Kaohsiung. No

Universality in the Middle 43

matter whether Interpride was under pressures from China, Taiwan’s LGBTQ+ events are presumed to be the biggest in East Asia and probably also in Asia. This short circuit between a Han-dominated society in patriarchal East Asia with the global (north’s) movement can be a proof of Taiwan as a potential universal sin­ gular. Furthermore, minority, Indigenous, ecological, and anti-authoritarian movements can positively influence Taiwan’s election results and policies. Here, Taiwan seems to produce a relative form of community of incommensurable uni­ versalities and to make these singular globals sustainable, on condition that it can keep looking to the souths, and subjectively and positively becoming a compossible society of singular practices and universal productions.

Notes 1 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 100–01. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5. 3 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Mate­ rialism (London: Verso, 2014), 149; Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 361–62. 4 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 101.

5 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 103; Žižek, Less than Nothing 377.

6 Wendell Kisner, “The Concrete Universal in Žižek and Hegel,” International Journal

of Žižek Studies 2, no. 2 (2008): 7.

7 Žižek, Ticklish Subject, 92.

8 Kisner, 16.

9 Kisner, 2.

10 Kisner, 18.

11 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 360.

12 Kisner, 34n29.

13 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 361.

14 Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 140.

- rika- (Xinzhu

15 Yin-shun, Contemporary Commentary on the Mulamadhyamakaka County, Taiwan: Zhengwen, 1990), 1. 16 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 378. 17 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 378. 18 Na-ga-rjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Na-ga-rjuna’s Mula­ madhyamakaka-rika-, trans. and comm. Jay L. Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15; the translation has been modified. 19 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 83. 20 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Min­ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 9. 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cam­ bridge: MIT Press, 2003), 64. 22 Shohei Ichimura, “Buddha’s Love and Human Love,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 13, no. 2 (2000): 139. 23 Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), 13.

44 Hung-chiung Li

24 Butler, “Restaging,” 29. 25 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 32. 26 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 174. 27 Brook Ziporyn, “How to Will Backwards: Time, Forgetting and Repetition in the Lotus Sutra,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 13, no. 2 (2000): 36. 28 The Lotus Sutra, trans. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 167–68. 29 Ichimura, “Buddha’s Love,” 144. 30 Cf. also Žižek, Less than Nothing, 374. 31 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 28. 32 Part of my inspiration for the community of incommensurables is from Jacques Ran­ cière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 34–43. 33 Michel Serres, The Incandescent, trans. Randolph Burks (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 175. 34 Slavoj Žižek, Demanding the Impossible, ed. Yong-june Park (Malden: Polity, 2013), 143. 35 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xiii. 36 Hardt and Negri, Assembly, xv, xviii. 37 Žižek, Puppet, 64–5.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005. Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. By Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2000. 11–43. Deleuze, Gilles. Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Ichimura, Shohei. “Buddha’s Love and Human Love.” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 13, no. 2 (2000): 127–171. Kisner, Wendell. “The Concrete Universal in Žižek and Hegel.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 2, no. 2 (2008): 1–35. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1998. The Lotus Sutra. Translated by Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007. Na-ga-rjuna. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Na-ga-rjuna’s Mu-lamadhyama­ - Translated and commented by Jay L. Garfield. Oxford: Oxford University kaka-rika. Press, 1995. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2007.

Universality in the Middle 45

Serres, Michel. The Incandescent. Translated by Randolph Burks. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. - rika-. Xinzhu County, Yin-shun. Contemporary Commentary on the Mulamadhyamakaka Taiwan: Zhengwen, 1990. Ziporyn, Brook. “How to Will Backwards: Time, Forgetting and Repetition in the Lotus Sutra.” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 13, no. 2 (2000): 21–43. Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2014. Žižek, Slavoj. Demanding the Impossible. Edited by Yong-june Park. Malden: Polity, 2013. Žižek, Slavoj. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.

8 MANIFESTO IN FAVOR OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND TOLERANCE TO DISSENT José E. García

The genus homo has populated the Earth for at least two million years, a period that can be extended to four million if the ancestors of modern humans, particularly the australopithecines, are also included in the phylogenetic history of the species. During this prolonged stage, humans changed continuously and in various ways, altering their morphology to achieve an efficient adaptation to demands of the environment and respond to the alterations and challenges that it could present to them in the face of daily survival. In doing so, they obeyed similar adaptation strategies that drove the evolution of all the other species existing today on Earth, as well as those that now are going extinct. This vision of the origins and transformation of the human species is based on knowledge provided by science and replicated numerous times through systematic research, for which, it contrasts and frequently incurs in open conflicts with other tradi­ tional thought orientations non-based on scientific discourse. These alternative approaches usually come from the realm of revealed religions. In a general sense, evolutionary processes promoted fundamental transformations in all aspects concerning the uniqueness and identity of humans, both in the strictly physical and behavioral aspects. Such particularities are the object of a regular research for different current sciences, from biomedical disciplines in their different branches to social and behavioral disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. These sciences specialize in elucidating the cultural and environmental influences that affect human life and the organization of society in general. But the adaptations that led to singularities that humans exhibit today have particularly affected the gradual formation of the brain. The behavior of all animals, and of course that of higher mammals, including us, is commanded and directed from that organ which, in the case of the human species, acquired the largest relative size proportional to the rest of the body mass1, which DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-9

Manifesto in Favor of Freedom of Thought and Tolerance to Dissent 47

becomes very noticeable when compared with the other existing species. The human brain is large, heavy and complex, and for this reason, we can expect from it not only an executive condition of coordination and command of the basic biological functionalities, but, above all, the possession of unique capa­ cities, as well as the enjoyment of mental and behavioral properties, that are prototypical of the species, and determine a very significant qualitative differ­ ence. The functions of the brain are multiple and occur at various levels, ranging from the basic physiological mechanics of the organs, the coordina­ tion of sensation and perception of the external world and the basic muscular responses that allow adaptation to the environment, to higher processes such as learning, memory, intelligence, creativity, and social cognition. Particularly, the functions of language and thought stand out. In the characterization that it received from different philosophical perspectives throughout the centuries, language was claimed as the identifying insignia of the human, as that mark, fence, or barrier beyond which other organisms cannot cross. The gap that separates humans from beasts, according to some Renaissance philosophers such as John Locke (1632–1704)2, is an undisputed dogma by many, even today. So is the conception of language seen from other gnoseological shores, such as those represented by the traditions of the Bible, for which the lin­ guistic is a transcendental element, captured in the well-known admonition that the verb became man. On a psychological level, the brain organ is our main link with the external world. Its functions do not only concern what would be a merely passive record of the facts. The processes involved with the functioning of the brain for the knowledge of the world do not act as an automatic rebound of external reality over the senses. In fact, the assimilation of the processes that occur outside us is far from being passive. It is more correct to speak of an active and permanent construction and modification of the environment, through the operations that thought executes on objects. The brain never resembles a camera, recording all the elements around it with the quality and accuracy that an exact impression of events would suppose. The mind, on the contrary, has a more dynamic and active role, contributing its own elements to the knowledge process. These functional components are already present from the moment of birth and influence and even determine the way we have to assimilate and understand the universe. The characteristics that this process acquires have been studied for centuries by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), for whom the innate elements of thought constitute “a priori categories of reason”3 that do not depend essentially on experience but critically condition our perception, and make impossible any rational understanding of the raw data provided by the senses, considered by themselves, and regardless of any innate structure of the mind. Also, some psychologists of recent times such as Jean Piaget (1896–1980) appealed to the so-called “functional invariants”4 as constitutive elements of our cognitive system that diversify not only the individual potentialities of each human being, but also contribute to the structuring of learning processes

48 José E. García

occurring in a unique and particular way. In other words, although the dynamics of mental development may be universal and equal for all human beings, the results, individually considered, are unique. Due to multiplicity of individual experience, the cognitive system of each indi­ vidual does not perceive or assimilate the changes that occurred around us in a unified or invariable manner and in an equal and uniform way. Variability is always present. From birth, and during the long course of life, which includes physical growth and gradual maturation of thought, human beings actively and fluidly interact with our environment and assimilate from it, through learning, all the elements that make up the essentials of our behavioral habits and the con­ formation of a way of thinking and assimilating the world in unique and char­ acteristic ways. We can speak of entities or objects of experience that are shared by everyone through socialization and that come from direct physical contact with objects. They impress the senses in a generally uniform and consistent way. The exception is given by certain alterations or abnormalities that result from some disabilities or perceptual anomalies, such as color blindness in relation to the organ of vision. These limitations emerge in individuals under certain circumstances and are perfectly explicable in terms of the physiology of sensation and perception. Concerning the objects of experience that impact the normal stimulating flow, it is common to verify a shared consensus between different observers, which doesn’t give rise to notable variations of opinion, points of view, or judgments. But there are other conglomerates of ideas, whose basic characteristic is that they don’t have material or objectives references that could be unquestionable, that is, they lack any possibility of arbitrating divergences between different observers, based on direct contact with them or through a direct appellation to the sensory experience. They are concepts that originated in the human abstractive capacity. This type of ideas or beliefs are entirely dependent on the mental interpretations and reconstructions of conceptual realities that each individual performs, although, of course, based on collective learning and transmission. That is why, by admitting differences of interpretation with respect to the objects that are spoken of, the concepts generated by the abstract discussion can give rise to potentially conflicting views of reality. It’s in this area where discursive controversies arise between people. Concepts so funda­ mental to our existence such as beauty, freedom, democracy, moral values, the soul, God, and almost all those pertaining to religious or political ideologies fall squarely in this group of concepts. The great human discrepancies throughout history arose, almost always, in these specific contexts, motivated and explained by the presumed unrestricted validity of these constructs, and the greater or lesser adherence of people to them. There is no doubt about its importance and durability in our lives. However, we are unable to give a real consistency to them, or to offer any demonstrative strategy that easily frees them from the prison that supposes the particular perspective of each individual’s thought, and which also imposes the coercive force of the opinion of the one who, with the certainty of conviction, keeps them unscathed.

Manifesto in Favor of Freedom of Thought and Tolerance to Dissent 49

Humans transform their environment, sometimes in radical ways. Modifications occur through multiple means, either thanks to knowledge, technology, or industry. The most essential and forceful modification, however, is the creation of culture. All biological organisms are endowed with a defined genetic struc­ ture, which is responsible for coding the basic elements for the survival of their species, and they remain stably constituted from the moment of conception. On the basis that genetic information encoded in DNA provides, the environment exerts its shaping action. In the maternal womb, it’s already possible to verify the influence of the external milieu, enabling some specific acquisitions through intrauterine sensory contact. The psychological responses that can be detected through the muscular activity of the baby or certain infections or pathologies that can be acquired during the time of gestation are good examples. But once birth occurs, the vast majority of habits end up being established through the various mechanisms of learning, with a lower incidence of hereditary factors which, of course, never disappear or completely extinguish their action. But in the human species, the high variability on the modes of interaction with the environment is very characteristic. These are subject to numerous and some­ times countless external variables that determine it, both at the level of the repertoire of behaviors characteristic of each individual member of the species, as well as their thoughts and systems of ideas. The brain, therefore, is an extremely plastic and malleable organ that favors modifications and the acqui­ sition of new responses, adapting to mutable contexts. In short, we can see ourselves as essentially changeable and flexible beings. That’s why humans are extremely dependent on learning. Each individual has unique experiences, with events and situations not present in the lives of anyone else. This encompasses all levels of human action, but above all, the sphere of learning, and within this broad category, a form of mental content in parti­ cular, with very specific projections on behavior and social cognition. We talk about attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes. Individuals don’t run in the various instances of their social and subjective world by an unrestricted hegemony of objective information provided by sensation and perception. They do so, above all, by the strength and validity of those structures of thought and values, sometimes called ideologies, which constitute a very powerful guide to behavior and are often expressed in the form of preconceived ideas. It’s clear that human thought is not always or necessarily rational. Rather, it’s based on the assumption of ideas and principles that are often not objectively supported. But the fact that individuals’ ideas cannot always be referred to objective referents, such as, for example, the contemplation of the color of the sky or the increasing intensity of a sound, only reinforces the inherent relativity of thought. This relativity, when it refers to ideological components aimed at the understanding of social issues and problems, always entails some degree of arbitrariness. Human behavior is based, in an appreciable proportion, on mental appraisals with relative validity and interpretive kind. That is, by disquisitions and sub­ jective evaluations of reality, which usually cannot be resolved by resorting to

50 José E. García

systematic and replicable scientific experimentation. For this reason, the probability that conflicts or disagreements arise caused by the differences of appreciation that different people harbor is an always latent risk. These various ways of conceptualizing the phenomena and events that take place in the natural world, and especially in the changing social reality, led to some of the most dramatic confrontations observed in the course of history. Human beings have unleashed persecution, siege, harassment, unjust dispossession, cruel marginalization, torture, or atrocious crimes, and Dantesque genocides, in defense or in support of ideas, ideologies, principles, theories, and beliefs of various kinds. They have clothed themselves with all the possible variants offered by intellectual themes: political, religious, racial, sexual gender, inter­ pretations of the nature and destiny of the world, and many others, to impose their validity on other individuals through seduction, manipulation, threat, coercion, or by brute force. The issue is often about establishing the hegemony of thoughts and ways of understanding the world or conceiving society that only belong to a minority, and not to the rest. Certain majorities that consider themselves superior by their number and the alleged right that this condition assigns them have tried without the slightest consideration or respect for their status as persons, to minority communities and sometimes defenseless. Groups that in many cases had to quietly and resignedly submit to the rule of majority, or in others, die heroically for their reluctance to abandon their own interpretations of reality and personal convic­ tions. Particularly significant is the case of those who had to face the inclement harassment against their vision of the world and who, paradoxically, were promoting with their efforts the true qualitative advance of humanity, as hap­ pened with Galileo, and many other scientists and social reformers, correcting ravings settled on dogmatism and error. Religious wars, which are among the most atrocious and virulent in human history, have always been fought by the confrontation of interpretations of reality that are impossible, or at least very difficult to resolve on the basis of strictly objective means and publicly shared evidence. Many times religions, even when they carry as their banner the preaching of love of neighbor and compassion towards the weak, have been the justification that pushed historical genocides, such as those that were witnessed in various parts of the Americas during the Spanish and British colonization, of which many indigenous populations were victims, who had to witness not only the denial and invalidity of their traditional culture by the dominant power elites, but even the most direct and open physical extermination. This will to impose systems of ideas on those who present divergent views has also motivated the emergence of violent concepts in religious clothing such as the holy war and, in the modern world, the open and indiscriminate practice of Islamic terrorism. The evolution of societies and states with regard to the construction of efficient legal systems and institutions, which are in charge of safeguarding and defend­ ing the right to difference and dissent, were not enough for the imposition of

Manifesto in Favor of Freedom of Thought and Tolerance to Dissent 51

some conceptions of the world on others continue to take place, not only at the level of society as a whole, but also, at times, within more restricted areas of life, such as family relationships and school. We must advocate for an open, respectful, tolerant, and peaceful world. It’s necessary to understand and assimilate that the existence of different expres­ sions of thought has its ultimate explanation in the peculiar characteristics of human psychology, and the formation and functioning of our brain that arose in the course of phylogenetic evolution. We live in a world in which there are unquestionable objective referents, such as those referring to the images and contents that originate in our sensorial experience. But there are also questions outside any objective elucidation that don’t offer examples of direct falsifia­ bility, and therefore remain in the realm of the discursive and even the spec­ ulative. The ability to formulate abstract ideas and systematize them into constructs, theories and ideologies constitutes one of the most important cog­ nitive attributes that evolution of the human species gave rise to. Thanks to the validity of these attributes of thought, art, oratory, great religions, science, and technology, which changed the world for human benefit and for the search for continuous improvement in our living conditions have been possible. But they have also been the origin of many sectarian, authoritarian, violent, and intru­ sive attitudes, which seek to modify the thinking, values and lifestyle that others choose to replace them with their own parameters of evaluation and analysis of reality, ignoring the relative validity that accompanies each belief, despite the existing divergence in perspectives on the world and in open detriment of the right that assists each one to trace their own path and build their destiny. Undoubtedly, evolutionary biology and psychology provide essential elements for the achievement of these objectives. They help us to understand not only the mechanism that led to the origin and formation of the brain through a con­ tinuous process of dynamic adaptation to the environment, but also the process that shaped the mind. This follows a sequence in ontogenetic evolution through time that comprises an individual life and originates the higher activity of con­ sciousness, mediating a permanent interactive process with the external world. Language and discursive thought take an active part in it. Both are constituted on the basis of our sensory experiences, shared mostly with the rest of the people, and abstract analysis, which although originated in the social trans­ mission of language and its conceptual contents, also originates idiosyncratic views and interpretations. Beliefs about the world and reality have estimates and evaluations that because they are the result of subjective elaborations, cannot claim universal validity for all individuals. The compulsory alternative is the search for consensus, dialogue and agreement between people and groups with divergent views, and the progressive abandonment of all hegemonic claims in relation to their own exclusive interpretations for the conception of social reality. We don’t pretend that systems of ideas necessarily contain allusions to objective and verifiable truths, but that, as systems of global interpretation, and of value statements that sustain them, cannot claim the possession of a universal

52 José E. García

validity. A better understanding of the dynamics that take part in the formation of our ideas will not be enough, however, if it is not accompanied by the will and aspiration to guarantee conceptual diversity and acceptance of the right to be dif­ ferent. If we succeed in consolidating a society based on these assumptions of tol­ erance and respect, the foundations will be laid for the construction of a more humane and just world.

Notes 1 J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995), 12–36. 2 Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977), 107. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (1781; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 201–266. 4 Jean Piaget, La Naissance de l’Intelligence chez l’Enfant (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1936), 8–24.

Bibliography Cela, Camilo J. and Francisco J. Ayala. Human Evolution: Trails from the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kurtz, Paul. The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992. Pennington, Donald C. Social Cognition. London: Routledge, 2000. Piaget, Jean. La Naissance de l’Intelligence chez l’Enfant. Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1936. Wickens, Andrew P. A History of the Brain: From Stone Age Surgery to Modern Neuroscience. New York: Psychology Press, 2015.

9 THE LESSONS OF CULTURAL HUMILITY From a Struggle of Universalities to the Sublation of Existing Systems Ignacio López-Calvo

Within the fields of healthcare and the medical humanities, the concept of “cultural humility” has been gaining currency since 1998, when it was intro­ duced.1 The basic idea is that it is not enough for physicians to have cultural competence (for an African American medical practitioner to be familiar with the cultural norms of Latinxs in the US, for example); in order to carry out effective medical interventions, they also need to be open to cultural humility, to consider the potential benefits of learning from other communities’ cultural values. In a contemporary world in which we are increasingly engaged in interactions across cultures, it is simply not enough to “be aware” of cultural differences, to have more knowledge about other cultures. As Shamaila Khan points out, this would suggest “that there is categorical knowledge a person could attain about a group of people, which leads to stereotyping and bias, and it denotes that there is an endpoint to becoming fully culturally competent.”2 Breaking up this type of traditional, hierarchical knowledge “about” other cul­ tures and choosing instead to work “with” them, to be more sensitive toward their dynamic worldviews with a predisposition to lifelong learning leads to increased success for medical providers and equity in the medical field. It stems from the idea that self-reflection and acknowledgment of one’s own limitations have their benefits. Carefully listening to a patient’s lived experiences, with cultural humility, decreases the tendency to stereotyping, leading instead to a realization of the heterogeneity within ethnic groups, to the idea that a patient may have multiple, evolving identities. From this perspective, I propose to extend this type of personal critique in the medical field to other fields, including philosophy and politics. For example, acknowledging, without falling into homogenizing or idealization, the importance of the ancestral knowledges of Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups throughout the world can lead to more sustainable agriculture, more ethical treatment of DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-10

54 Ignacio López-Calvo

animals, healthier lives, and, ultimately, to saving the planet from the ravages of unchecked, insatiable, neoliberal policies and practices. The same can be said about cross-cultural exchanges between the Global North and the Global South, or between Eastern and Western knowledges and cultural politics (see Hung-chiung Li’s essay in this volume), including learning from the East within the West, such as communities of Asian ancestry in the Americas. A first step is to acknowledge the potential existence of blind spots or implicit biases in our perhaps fixed, static way of seeing the world – these may include ethnocentrism, our inability to learn from the past, or our unawareness of the persistence of coloniality, structural racism, or Orientalist stereotypes. The following step involves being open to learning from other communities’ experiences both in the present and in the past, to conceive of evolving cultural alternatives, be they from the East, from “the East within the West,” from Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups, from other genders, intersectional approaches, etc. Through cultural humility and sensitivity, we may become aware of our own potential limitations, including historical privilege. This may lead to a predisposi­ tion to cross-cultural dialogue, which improves our chances of understanding our perceived antagonists’ claims and cultural codes. Again, competence in other cul­ tures, demonstrating that we are familiar with their history or cultural codes and values, is not enough; a predisposition to cultural humility is the doorway to edu­ cating and training ourselves to be able to listen to and consider, with empathy and respect, the potential sociopolitical and economic benefits of alternative cultural values from both the past and the present. This should facilitate reaching common ground, as well as peaceful dialogue and collaboration at personal, institutional, national, and international levels. Again moving from healthcare to the worlds of politics and economics, perhaps rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, blindly following universalistic ideological dogma, or pursuing dangerous socioeconomic and political experiments, we should consider listening carefully, with cultural humility, to the past and present of functional economic and political systems that benefit or have benefitted the largest part of society, that contribute less to damaging the natural world, that lead to social harmony and that are less prone to becoming a sort of passageway to undemocratic, dystopian types of government and economics. If we choose to look back toward the past – hopefully without romanticizing it – we would, of course, have to modify these socioeconomic and political systems to adapt them to the specific circumstances of today’s world, perhaps involving a sublation process. In other words, there is nothing wrong with dreaming of or looking for utopian outcomes (isn’t that an intrinsic part of being young or even a good person, anyway?), or with resorting to imagination or to innovation, provided that we do not forget that we can and should learn from what it is already working properly (it will never work perfectly) in our times or has properly worked in other eras of history. This would represent a sort of sublation (Aufhebung, to use Hegel’s dialectical term, in the sense of simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and elevation) by

The Lessons of Cultural Humility 55

which we humbly acknowledge the value of existing socioeconomic and/or poli­ tical systems from the past and present, or certain aspects of them, but may attempt to appropriate, actualize, raise, or supersede them to higher levels of sociopolitical and economic efficacy. This approach does not necessarily refer to a slow, reformist process, since the urgency of saving our planet before the negative effects of unchecked extractivist neoliberalism on the natural environment are irreversible – if they are not already – is undeniable. With cultural humility, one must carefully listen to and acknowledge the lived experiences of others, especially when they come from societies that are very different to and distant from ours, suspending our ethnocentrism and withholding the compulsion to claim superior knowledge or expertise. We must then avoid trying too hard to demonstrate cultural competence, while con­ comitantly exhibiting a lack of cultural humility by trying to impose our views on them or lecture them on how to solve their own social problems. On the other hand, just as it would be absurd to consider all non-Western ideas infer­ ior or to consider European thinking equivalent to universal thinking, would it be wise to reject every idea coming from Europe as a reaction to Europe’s long history of colonialism and imperialism? After all, as Luciana Cadahia and Valeria Coronel point out, “just as it is necessary to continue criticizing Eurocentrism and detecting its simulations, it is also important to learn to critically assume European legacies as one more tool in the fight for emancipation.”3 And as they also propose, if there is a problem with Eurocentrism, there must also be a problem with the fact that tenets of the decolonial turn producing knowl­ edge about the Global South, for example, stem mostly from elite and cor­ porative universities in the United States. It is wiser, instead, to keep an open mind and try to rescue the best of any epistemologies, including European ones, even after considering the epistemic violence and zero-point hubris brought to the Americas by Europe, to use Santiago Castro-Gómez’s take in Zero-Point Hubris?4 It is, after all, a European, Hegel, who teaches us about the spec­ ulative nature of language through the ambiguous German word “aufheben,” in whose contradictory meanings he finds the essence of dialectic philosophy. As stated, meaning to sublate, it simultaneously includes in its essence the positive and negative meanings of elevating, preserving, and doing away with, thus transcending “either/or” thinking. In Hegel’s own words, This ambiguity in linguistic usage, through which the same word has a negative and a positive meaning, cannot be regarded as an accident nor yet as a reason to reproach language as if it were a source of confusion. We ought rather to recognise here the speculative spirit of our language, which transcends the “either-or” of mere understanding.5 This brings us back to the cultural humility mandate of self-critique regarding our worldview and of listening without the obstinate compulsion to become defensive. It is a lack of cultural humility, often supported by ideological fanaticism, which

56 Ignacio López-Calvo

prevents many people from accepting the undeniable reality of climate change as confirmed by scientists or that politicized wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic and accepting drowning refugees through the borders of the European Union. It is, ultimately, a lack of cultural humility, a refusal to unlearn inherited ideological or religious knowledge that prevents positive social transformation in the world. Following this speculative or dialectical mindset, only if we accept radical alterity, avoiding the impulse to control, domesticate and dominate the Other, can we aspire to supersede the old “either/or,” thus leaving behind the “either” mentality (one tight-fitting vision of the world) and comprehending the “or,” that is, the new, the Other’s epistemology.

Notes 1 See Dalia Magaña, Christina Lux, and Ignacio López-Calvo, eds., Medical Humanities, Cultural Humility, and Social Justice (UC Health Humanities Press, 2023). I would also like to thank Christina Lux for her generous feedback while writing this essay. 2 Shamaila Khan, “Cultural Humility vs. Cultural Competence – and Why Providers Need Both,” Health City, March 9, 2021, https://healthcity.bmc.org/policy-and-indus try/cultural-humility-vs-cultural-competence-providers-need-both. 3 The original quote in Spanish: “así como es necesario seguir criticando el eurocentrismo y detectando sus simulaciones, también es importante aprender a asumir críticamente los legados europeos como una herramienta más en la lucha por la emancipación.” 4 Santiago Castro-Gómez, Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Latin America, trans. George Ciccariello-Maher and Don T. Deere (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). 5 Georg W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), 154.

Bibliography Cadahia, Luciana and Valeria Coronel. “The Department of Decolonialism.” April 16, 2023. https://jacobinlat.com/2023/04/16/the-department-of-decolonialism/?fbclid=IwAR2 6UB5SIOoOXZ-aixcriAjlfThpEhooaKSe7RBda6P-DCfqS0T_BMB2e_U. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Latin America. Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher and Don T. Deere. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. Hegel, Georg W.F. The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting, and H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991. Khan, Shamaila. “Cultural Humility vs. Cultural Competence – and Why Providers Need Both.” Health City, March 9, 2021. https://healthcity.bmc.org/policy-and-indus try/cultural-humility-vs-cultural-competence-providers-need-both. Magaña, Dalia, Christina Lux, and Ignacio López-Calvo, eds. Medical Humanities, Cultural Humility, and Social Justice. San Francisco: University of California Health Humanities Press, 2023.

PART II

Philosophical Footprints of the Present to Build a Here-and-Now

10 UNITED BY TOUCH AND BREATH For a Co-Ontological Revolution Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

In the long weeks of lockdown brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, we experienced the nostalgia of bodies. We learned that the spontaneity of tactile gestures, that subtle – often inadvertent – shock of “skin-to-skin” (perhaps a slim form of “body-to-body”) can suddenly be excluded by the wide and varied spec­ trum of human relationships. We have learned that when touching is missing, we feel acute regret and an ancient nostalgia for it, we experience the excruciating pang of a lack that is not only the flow of an old and worn-out habit, to which we pay little and fleeting attention in everyday life, but the urgency of contact, the melancholic and remote grip of distant and absent bodies. This occurs because, as Luce Irigaray points out in her essay on “touching,” the touch, in participating “in all our sensory perceptions, all our living relationships,” is also the sense most closely intertwined with eros, indeed it is its “light,” and, in particular, the caress is “a means of expressing desire while giving back to the other the contours of his or her body, restoring them in this way to their own individuation.”1 Touching, touching each other to identify each other, to recognize each other, to feel, to palpate the common humanity, to feel it with one’s skin in the act/at the same time in which the skin of others perceives it too: an epistemol­ ogy of con-tact is coming forward, a critique of tactile reason that restores and declares “the importance of touch in the constitution of our own individuation and our relationships with the other(s),”2 whose background is rationality and a cultural attitude alternative to those of naturalism and traditional rationalism that have “retained of the touch above all the means of grasping and of appropriating.”3 Touching the other person is not about taking possession of him/her, phagocytising him/her, imprinting on him/her one’s own proprietary brand, but about rediscovering in the “skin-to-skin” the enormous power of touch as an energy of “individuation” and “the most personal core of oneself [that] constitutes the most irreducible part of ourselves.”4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-12

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When Irigaray states that touch “is concerned with the god Eros, and our erotic life”5 we can hear echoing the precious words of Audre Lorde – “I am a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”6 – with which she names, bringing it into existence, the “erotic power.”7 The erotic is that “source of power” that modi­ fies, through interpersonal relationships, the individual and collective awareness of those who experience it, since as inexhaustible vital energy, which derives from the intimate exchange – from the relationship (including, but not limited to, sexual) with the other, continuously transforms the hypseity through the contact with the otherness of the other. On the more avowedly sexual side, in which the pure energy of “erotic power” is unleashed, it is what makes Nancy say that “we can and must be able to think of sex with the value of an exis­ tential – of a disposition inherent to the very exercise of existing,” therefore as an experience of transformation of existence, as a sexistence. 8 When Derrida brings Nancy’s philosophizing back to its root, as “thought about touching – or thought as an obsession of touching,”9 he anticipates some of the later out­ comes of his philosophy precisely as an evolution of reflection around the touch, that branches out and deepens in the direction of the body and sex, towards an original convergence between corporeal co-ontology and sexistence. Nancy and Irigaray help us to rethink human relationships through “touch­ ing,” that is, through an inter-human intimacy that is always renewed and that disposes of the subject a drawing of the exteriority, of the outside-of-self as an outlet, for the former, towards the co[from the Latin cum]-mmunity, the “con­ being” (being-with), for the latter as an experience of discovery of “our living identity.” Two positions that, in the apparent division between community instances on the one hand, and the unveiling of identity on the other, actually share the intent of a firm philosophical grip on the living body of reality and the relationships between people through touch. A philosophy that is nourished, in fact, not only by mere attention to corporeality but rather by a real “obsession of touching,” to quote Derrida, which translates the tactile one into a holistic experience that invests every sphere of human action, from language to the elaboration of a haptic ontology. The sense of “touching” is the ineluctability with which it creates relationships, it generates approaches and connections, it connects the one to the other, the ones to the others; that same inescapability with which, through extroversions of the ego, it establishes those interconnections between us that make us human, both when it establishes knowledge of the other and community, and when it implies, after going outside oneself, the return centered around a confirmed and enriched identity: the tactile event is an ontological, existential experience. For this reason, in the course of the COVID-19 global epidemic, which has exponentially and unnaturally expanded the physical distance between bodies, improperly defined, or – as it would be better to say – with unconscious appropriateness concerning the consequences that it has entailed, “social distancing,” we have experienced a real impoverishment of sociability, an unprecedented, radical – and painful – questioning of the spontaneity with which our bodies seek and generate contact in

United by Touch and Breath 61

the common space that we all frequent. The relational being of each individual human experience founds not only the politics as it is elaborated and assimi­ lated by the shared paradigms of rationality (in fact, it is a canonical theme that runs through the entire Western philosophical history at least since Aristotle, with his definition of man as physei politikón Zóon [φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον] “social-political being,” until the Arendtian definition of “plurality as nomos of the earth” and politics as “space of the in-fra”) but also our way of conceiving ourselves as socially constituted. Therefore, the body is political by its very nature – the “singular plural” body in the sense that Nancy attributes to this syntagma – since it cultivates its own relational-social vocation within the space of the polis [πόλις], within the area of con-division, of life-in-common, of “being-with,” in a dimension that is a priori com[cum]-unitarian. Just as the risk of impending contagion has concretely deprived us of any free individual choice regarding the extent of possible detachment and/or contiguity of our bodies with those of others, the unprecedented situation of induced physical distance has strongly limited just this political posture inherent to the relational body. On a concrete level, the result has been the weakening of the political performance of bodies, but above all, and with much more serious consequences and costs, a dramatic and realistic “social distancing” that has increased the poverty and discomfort of those who were already positioned on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, between those who live in privilege and those in need. Experiencing, as a consequence of the physical distancing, a growing class distancing, we have seen the gap between the classes widen, the scissors of status open wide its blades, creating new “pariahs,” new outcasts, a last caste of “untouchables” touched – or even overwhelmed – only by poverty, who are added to those already pushed to the margins of society by exploitative advanced capitalism that seems able to regenerate continuously, more and more ferocious. Thus, with socio-economic distancing, what risks expanding is a frightening chasm of class, conditions, and possibilities, with unpredictable consequences. The virus has, so to speak, distanced us from ourselves, or rather it has, for several months, made on our behalf the choices that, with a lesser or greater degree of awareness, we make regarding the space of our actions and our freedoms, and it has changed, with our perimeters and our dynamics, our habits, our community life, the expressive and participatory possibilities of our political body. If we admit with Foucault that the living body, and therefore mortal, is the subject and object of politics and that this is therefore always “politics of bodies” (from which it follows that power is nothing but the government of life and death of popula­ tions – interchangeability and complementarity of biopolitics and thanatopolitics), the pandemic is offering much material for reflection to reason about that biolo­ gical fatality of which Lévinas speaks in his illuminating essay of 1934 on the “philosophy of Hitlerism,”10 when he observes with acute intuition, a few months after the seizure of power by the Nazi tyrant, that the exaltation of racism that connotes his theories is intermingled with the logic of a consubstantial être rivé

62 Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

(“being bound”) of human beings in relation to their own corporeality: “Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself.” “Man’s essence no longer lies in freedom, but in a kind of bondage [enchaînement] … aware of the ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all accepting this chaining.”11 We were thus, through viral power, atrociously returned to the “biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails,”12 deprived of free and spontaneous movement, artificially distanced from each other and ourselves in the loss of vital relationships and contact with the affections, increasingly “chained” to our purely bodily nature, animal, with all its vulnerability, overexposure to danger, disease, and death. A bondage [enchaînement] that is the other face, the dark one, of self-care, of the conatus essendi, of the pure perseverance with all means in one’s own being and in the being-as-is of all that allows its mere continuation, returned to the “elementary feelings” inherent in the zero degrees of survival. Perhaps it is because of this instinct, atavistic, and resurgent, that now could be the right time, as suggested by the philosopher Achille Mbembe in an article published during the pandemic, to promote “a politics of the living” able to encourage and support that “universal right to breath”13 that the global health crisis from COVID-19 has manifested with icy concreteness, but that climate change had anticipated through an endless sequence of recurrent extreme events: fires, floods, tidal waves, droughts, famines as if the dyspnea of the people who contracted the coronavirus corresponded concretely in fact with the respiratory insufficiency and oxygen starvation long manifested by the entire planet. Breathing, just like touching, is not a merely physiological matter, nor an unreflective automatism, but belongs to the conditions of existence, to the ontological nature of the living beings, to their being what they are. Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation. If war there must be, it cannot so much be against a specific virus as against everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing, everything that fundamentally attacks the respiratory tract, everything that, in the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression. To come through this constriction would mean that we conceive of breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead, as that which we hold in-common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation. By which I mean, the universal right to breath. Already for Nietzsche “to be” is equivalent to “to breath” – as he expresses himself, luminously, in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Once again it is a philosophy to enhance our understanding of the facts of the world, to provide the appropriate hermeneutic key to grasp the deep meaning of what happens through insights that explain things much more than countless treaties: threatening the breath of anyone or any being is equivalent to threatening its existence. From this perspective, it is worth asking ourselves some questions: is it just a coincidence that all the latest epidemics (SARS, COVID, etc.) have

United by Touch and Breath 63

affected the human respiratory system by aggravating the lungs, just as we are destroying delicate plant ecosystems everywhere on the globe, even going so far as to threaten the “lungs of the planet” with wicked deforestation policies such as those implemented by Bolsonaro in Brazil against the Amazon forests? Or has the time not simply come to read the correlation between air pollution and lung infections as the definitive signal of that interdependence between humanity and the biosphere that we can no longer ignore, illuminated by the pandemic with unprecedented power? If this traumatic event, the epochal passage that it marks in our lives, must leave an inheritance, it can only be the safeguarding of the living species that for Mbembe represents the only alternative to the reign of capitalistic brutality, the “brutalism” as he calls it, that causes the alteration of humanity and the biosphere into mere matter and energy by the ruthless extractive and predatory neoliberal capitalism, the contemporary sum of every possible reification – a reduction to res, “thing,” of the living being in its totality. The sudden, unexpected discovery of the common and shared vulnerability of humans, animals, plants, and the planetary environment in its enormous biodiversity, should serve as a warning about the incontrovertible fact that “humankind and biosphere are one,” and that this interconnection can no longer be ignored, on pain of the catastrophic end of the Anthropocene by its own means. On May 25, 2020, the “right to breathe” evoked here by Mbembe was definitively denied to George Floyd, an African American killed in Minnea­ polis by suffocation while the white policeman who was arresting him held him down by pushing his knee on his neck and while he murmured: “I can’t breathe.” This phrase becomes, since the next day, the slogan of countless anti-racist protests that inflame North American cities for weeks, imposing on the political agenda the urgency of the returning racial issue, in the US and in many other places in the world, especially in so-called multiethnic societies. That the theme of “breathing” seems to impose in every sphere is no mere coincidence, then, reinforcing Mbembe’s thesis when he speaks of the struggle for the “right to breathe” of the living, humanity, and the biosphere at the same time, of anyone who is defrauded of the most basic of rights, that of existence. “I can’t breathe” appeared, under the circumstances of the pan­ demic, not just as the lament of a racialized man dying at the hands of another man convinced of his own racial superiority, but the cry of pain of an overwhelmed humanity inhabiting an overwhelmed planet. Ferdinand, the author of Une écologie décoloniale, proposes to contrast the notion of Anthropocene with that of “Negrocene,” equivalent to the “mentality of appropriation and hierarchization,” which is also found in “colonial living,” a basic element of capitalist exploitation. Recently he clarified the focal point of his thesis: the current ecological crises cannot be dissociated from the relationships of racial domination, because at the bottom of both, there is the same attitude to dominate the Earth by the white man and to arrogate himself the (il)legitimate right to impose himself on all the other living beings. White supremacy is the

64 Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

synecdoche for all forms of dominion and oppression and is closely intertwined with the most extreme exploitative capitalism.14 Thus, the apocalyptic thought of Günther Anders, the theorist of the so-called “occasional philosophy” comes back to the forefront: what better occasion than a pandemic to philosophize? His criticism of the Prometheanism induced by the dominance of technology, or rather of the techno-world as he defined it, tells a lot about our near and remote future. Anders spoke of a “Promethean gap” between us and our products, the objects we produce, to the point that the very high technology we master – and never as during the pandemic has it become a mass experience – generates that “Promethean shame” that we feel before the enormity of these tools, to their infinite surpassing of ourselves who make use of them without controlling them. The fact that massive digitalization is literally changing our way to share the world with other living beings is exemplary of that. It seems as if we are experiencing a sort of new power that we at the same time exercise and suffer blindly, without knowledge or dominion, but to which we banally entrust ourselves with the fatality of a magical thought, of an irra­ tionality that transcends us and reality. To the point that the atomic bomb (the example used in Anders’s work), which threatens to permanently destroy humanity and the globe, appears instead as an extraordinary scientific and tech­ nological invention, a vision in which the apocalypse towards which humanity seems to be unconsciously and blindly launched remains out of sight. This is why it is still necessary to go back to Anders to make that great ethical and philoso­ phical effort that feeds our “moral imagination,” as he defined it, to translate it into a fervid, but necessary, political imagination our future.15 The German sociologist Rosa, who has based his analyses about the present time on the fatal nexus between acceleration and alienation that characterizes the dominant economic system, proposes to “slow down” and points to the exercise of “resonance,” the urgent need to reconnect us with the whole that surrounds ourselves, perhaps the last chance to relink a thread of inter­ dependence between humanity and the biosphere that can give back to the bodies their breath, placing them in the wide space of their co-habitation.16 The main characteristic of the COVID-19 viral epidemic is, as is well known, inter-human transmission, and it is precisely in this sensitive area of the “in-common,” in this constitutive interaction as a founding and ontolo­ gically relevant relationship for each and all, that we intervened by forcing the “distancing,” inhibiting contacts, making us all untouched and “untouchable,” reversing behaviors that humans have always considered genuine and spontaneous manifestations of the human community. Butler calls this experience of the “bodies in alliance,” the performative encounter that from street demonstrations comes to think of changing the world and sometimes even transforming it for real. Together we must change deeply this oppressive world: united through touch and breath, in public space, fighting for a co-ontological revolution.17

United by Touch and Breath 65

We must measure ourselves with a future that is up to the unprecedented chal­ lenge that must be faced, so that the world-to-come imagined, for the younger generations and for many of those that follow, will be worthy of our humanity. We have no pre-packaged solutions, just a short list of guiding ideas – perception of a shared vulnerability in the biosphere as generalized and holistic fragility, care of the world and humanity, interdependence as the reversal of profit- and utility-based priorities and hierarchies, co-responsibility as mutual attention to the world-in­ common – that pivot on the material physicality of our political-bodies-in-contact. From the haptic ontology we have imagined, it will be necessary to germinate an awareness of tactile reason embodied in the “singular plural” and always a political body of each and all. Claiming the “right to breathe” for the living and the planet is the only way that opens to a future worthy of all humanity. Perhaps from here, we can begin to imagine an authentic revolution-to-come.

Notes 1 Luce Irigaray, “Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us,” SubStance 40, no. 3 (2011): 130–40. 2 Irigaray, 138. 3 Irigaray, 138–39. 4 Irigaray, 138. 5 Irigaray, 139. 6 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1982). 7 Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984). 8 Jean-Luc Nancy, Sexistence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021). 9 Jacques Derrida, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 10 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (1990): 62–71. 11 Levinas, 69–70. 12 Levinas, 69. 13 Achille Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe, trans. Carolyn Shread, April 13, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe. 14 Malcolm Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). 15 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (München: Beck, 1956, 1980). 16 Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016). 17 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

Bibliography Anders, Günther. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Band I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der Zweiten Industriellen Revolution. München: Beck, 1956. Anders, Günther. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Band II: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der Dritten Industriellen Revolution. München: Beck, 1980. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

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Derrida, Jacques. On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ferdinand, Malcolm. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. Irigaray, Luce. “Perhaps Cultivating Touch Can Still Save Us.” SubStance 40, no. 3 (2011): 130–140. Levinas. Emmanuel. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” Translated by Hand Seán. Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (1990): 62–71. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1982. Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Translated by Carolyn Shread. April 13, 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Sexistence. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Nevada City: Gateway Books, 1996. Recchia Luciani, Francesca R. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984. Rosa, Hartmut. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016.

11

VOLCANIC LAKES AND HALLUCINATORY VEGETATION A Disaster to Think About the Future Celia Irina González

As a woman artist, born in a totalitarian system in the ’80s, four years before the fall of the socialist bloc, I recognize fear as part of my life, a fear shaped by decades, so much so that the reference points are now lost, the cause of it forgotten, yet that feeling still persists. The fear, the wariness, the waiting, works in response to trauma have been on the Nicaraguan and Cuban art scene for decades. Revolutions in both countries have been bolstered by his­ tories of terror. What do we artist-heirs of this terror do through our work in the face of totalizing discourses? Here I am interested in addressing two works that aim to relocate narrations, feelings, and concepts: Mary y los Hombres Lagartos (Mary and the Lizard Men) by Cuban artist Camila Lobón and Piedra Dulce (Sweet Stone) by Nicaraguan artist Darling López. Two young women artists – both born post-Cold War – determined to respond to the authority of totalitarian states, will be the focus of this essay. I attempt to discuss the nation – Cuba and Nicaragua – and the totalizing concepts that sustain it through the methodologies proposed by these works – speculative fabulation and assemblage – as possibilities to think about the future, looking sideways more than ahead.

Speculative Fabulations: Villa Laguna and the Lizard Men In the last three years Camila Lobón has focused on writing and illustrating stories and designing her own storybooks. At the start they might seem to be fables for children, stories about animals with a moral at the end. This is the case, in part, but Camila has dedicated her books to her family, first to her brother and then to her grandmother. It has been the way the artist has found to explain the future to her little brother and to process the political and affec­ tive past of her grandmother. Conjuring stories to contend with the history and DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-13

68 Celia Irina González

future of a nationalized family, intrinsically linked to the history of the state, has been Camila’s work and the possibility of escaping from totalitarian fiction produced for decades until turning into truth. Mary y los Hombres Lagartos is a fabulated family story featuring the grandmother as the protagonist. Camila is ten years my junior and she understood earlier than I that the family has been shaped by the revolutionary process. Mary was living in Villa del Lago, where the magical flowers growing there made all the inhabitants happy: “In the town by the lake there grew magical flowers, whose nectar gave its inhabitants an uncontainable joy and made them dance, sing, and declaim beautiful poems.”1 Mary’s best friend was Cloud Head, who made it rain, helping flowers grow. However, the Turtle Lords forced the rest of the townspeople to surrender their flowers for they had become so enthralled with eating them, but many inhabitants were discontent with their reign. One day the lizard men arrived to save the people of Villa del Lago from the Turtle Lords. The lizard men banished the Turtle Lords and Mary went to tell everyone; years of joy would begin. The lizard men promised a future of justice and safety for all the people; they would not let the Turtle Lords return. Mary joined the lizard men’s project to contribute to the future everyone had dreamt of; she taught the inhabitants of Villa del Lago to read so the deeds of the lizard men would be known to all. Soon she fell in love with a lizard man, who became her husband. One day the lizard men prohibited the people from planting magical flowers; their justification was that the flowers were a temp­ tation that would make the Turtle Lords return and besides, dancing and entertainment were a distraction for the townspeople of Villa del Lago. They were living times of surveillance and gravity; they had to tend to security, so they could not allow the lack of concentration induced by the flowers. From that moment on, the flowers would be controlled by the lizard men and the inhabitants would devote their energies to guarding against any possible enemy attacks. Cloud Head moved away after the deforestation and Villa del Lago became a dry, swampy place. Mary had two children, but her lizard man husband was sent to war to take justice to other faraway lands. He returned from war very ill and died whilst, at the same time, a long famine began in Villa del Lago. Without magical flowers and rain, the soil became sterile, and many townspeople decided to leave Villa in small boats. Those who dared to protest were rubbed out by the lizard men. One day Mary grew tired of the situation and decided to go where the flowers were stockpiled to ask the lizard men for explanations; she discovered they had been eating the flowers turned over by the townspeople and she deci­ ded to tell everyone. No one listened to her; they were too busy watching out for possible enemies. Mary decided to return to her old childhood home with her children to keep them safe and sound, and she begged Cloud Head to return and to bring her rain; the flowers began to grow again with the rain brought by her friend, but they were never again magical. “From that time on, Mary stayed

Volcanic Lakes and Hallucinatory Vegetation 69

there. And she grew old, telling her grandchildren about the times of magic and hope that were once lived in Villa del Lago.”2 Fabulating history, speculating on the future of totalitarianism, which is what Camila Lobón does in Mary y los hombres lagartos. Lobón approaches vegetation, a magical entity, to refer to that which is deeply yearned for but lost, in contrast to solemnity vs. entertainment/dance/laughter; sacrifice vs. self-care, care for the other; heroic patriarchy vs. member of the family; nation vs. affect; war vs. home; promised future vs. harmonious present. Fabulating is a strategy for thinking about the history of the nation through a more important history, family history, which is told in the intimacy of the home, by the grandmother; it is a domestic story, heard countless times in the kitchen, where women gather to speak. There, where those who uphold the home dare to remember what must not leak into the public sphere. Because women are those responsible for safeguarding the family’s shameful histories, they are the ones who provide the opportunity to avert strictness, authoritar­ ianism, in pursuit of an unblemished moral coherence, demanded in the public sphere, in the case of totalitarianism, by the state. The lizard man and Mary – María del Carmen Galdós, the grandmother of the story and of Camila – were accomplices and victims of the terror instituted in Villa del Lago. They were asked to sacrifice, to be heroes, to be martyrs, to be vigilant, thinking of the other as the enemy, accusing, repressing, being intransigent in the face of dissent, indoctrinators. At the same time, Mary endured the migration of those who did not fit in with the political project: Cloud Head, fearing for her children, lost her partner, distrusted everyone, and they distrusted her. Those of us who have experienced totalitarianism have been forced to be victimizers at the same time as victims; that demand for conformity from the new man: sacrifice and intransigence.3 Why use the fable as a narrative strategy to tell of the totalitarian experience? The fable offers a possibility of thinking from the perspective of the future and, from the distance offered by non-human characters, to retell what has already perhaps been untiringly described, making use of resources that produce effects of “realism,” without it being enough to achieve empathy. The fable also makes it possible to think from the present, not the promised future through sacrifice, not in the terrifying past brought about by the state. Camila proposes to us that we think of ourselves today in the here and now. It is the regeneration of the plant world, albeit permanently damaged, that signals a future with a degree of hope in Camila’s speculative fable. It is the incapacity to sustain a reciprocal relationship with nature that led Mary and the rest of the inhabitants of Villa del Lago to collapse. The magic was produced in that assemblage with vegetation and water; it was the desire for total control that shattered those harmonious intersections. Camila proposes a future of coexistence with other species in response to the effects of terror. Colombian anthropologist Fals Borda described the turtle men (hombres-hicotea) of El San Jorge, on the Colombian Caribbean coast, as also being in ecological

70 Celia Irina González

coexistence. The amphibious man does not fit into the nation’s project of progress, the effects of which he resists using the techniques of the turtle: “Like the turtles when they inflate their water bladder and bury themselves in the bogs and under the clods of the dry beaches to pass the summer.”4 However, the way of life of the amphibian man is destined to disappear along with the ecology of El San Jorge, one dependent on the other. That is the case of the Villa del Lago and its essential dependence on the blossoming flowers.

Assemblages: Volcanic Lakes and Urban Fossils Piedra Dulce, an assemblage piece of 2018, was produced by Darling López with a fossilized paving stone and contaminated water from Lake Xolotlán. Several milliliters of contaminated water occupied the space of one of the fossilized holes in the paving stone. Revolutions are like volcanic lakes – as Darling López would have it – first there is a long-lasting containment, and then they explode without warning: I make a simile between the formation process of volcanic lakes and revolutionary processes. Crater lakes are formed by a process of many years, the hollow remains from an explosion of a volcano, and the lake is formed after many years of rain because there is no filtration and they are practically like puddles, like stagnant water, and when the water comes, it grows vegetation, fauna, and they become extremely beautiful places.5 A lake of volcanic origin polluted by political decisions, Xolotlán has become one of the ever-unfulfilled promises of Nicaraguan presidential campaigns. For decades, Lake Xolotlán has been part of a political power struggle, interrupting its ecological life with strategies of administrative discourses. In all likelihood, the body of Sandino, just as that of others who had to be disappeared, had been tossed into the lake. The paving stones, in turn, unlike the lake, were deliberately produced and placed on the streets of Managua by President Somoza, also as a political strat­ egy. Then, during the Sandinista revolution, they were turned into projectiles and pieces of barricades, leaving paving stones on the Sandino side of the national discourse. Nevertheless, civic expressions that begun in Nicaragua in April 2018 decentered state symbols, and paving stones were used as projectiles against the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN; Sandinista National Liberation Front).6 Darling López decided to collect those loose paving stones after they were part of a civil clash in a simultaneously effective and symbolic way. Some were eroded and resembled fossils more than industrial objects, and they began to look like volcanic stones. The architectural, economic, and social ruin has produced strange encoun­ ters. In Piedra Dulce Darling López takes on the assemblage as a possibility in the face of the vulnerability provoked by social and ecological disasters: the

Volcanic Lakes and Hallucinatory Vegetation 71

events of April 2018 and the water of Lake Xolotlán polluted for decades. The assemblage concept is useful for Anna Tsing, a US anthropologist, in thinking about the formation of ecological communities. It refers not merely to the organisms gathered in a space, instead and more importantly, to the forms of life that emerge from the very assemblage: “For living things, species identities are a place to begin, but they are not enough: ways of being are emergent effects of encounters.”7 The assemblage becomes a method to revitalize the intersection between political economics and environmental studies, thinking about the juxtapositions prompted by capitalism between non-human entities. Those possibilities of intersection position the assemblage as a conceptual path to be explored more deeply to reflect on nation-building in Nicaragua. The Sandinista revolution coming from the past refuses to be restored; it is the incurable image of the nation. Here I am thinking of a revolution as an image of thoughts, not as a historical event and not like any image, instead as an image that refuses to be cured, remedied. Piedra Dulce proposes to conceptualize that image as an archaeological find from the future that simultaneously invokes and struggles with the oddity of national history: “There is, indeed, no point in flogging a dead horse: today, nationalism’s alleged doubles, cosmopolitanism and its ethno-politan avatars, are no longer useful conceptual points of departure.”8 The task of the artists addressed here coincides with this vision; it is the quest for new conceptual starting points given the incurable-images formed under nationalist, cultural, or political budgets that long ago ceased to be useful in thinking about the future. Thinking of the incurable-image as: “[The] intensive sites of repetition where borders have historically been erected where encounters ought instead to have been cultivated.”9 Piedra Dulce is an attempt at turbulence from the incurable-images that constitute the conceptual constellation of Nicaraguan identity. If the incurableimages are cultural, historical, and political sediments of the nation, then Piedra Dulce is a symptom of the future presented in fossil form, fossilized from its very inception. The fossilized future contains the legitimacy of an archaeological discovery and the potentiality of what has not yet happened.

Disaster as Starting Point For Darling López and Camila Lobón, natural disasters and social disasters are not only similar, but they go hand in hand; polluted lake and 2018 protests, 1959 revolution and deforestation – fictionalized or real – both types of dis­ asters appear connected in a continuum of effects that make it impossible to speak of ecology in the absence of social event. “The most convincing Anthro­ pocene timeline begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies.”10 Ana Tsing incites us to position ourselves in the place of precarity more than in that of progress to think of ourselves as vulnerable

72 Celia Irina González

beings that need the collaboration of other species for survival. That, looking sideways more than ahead, stepping away from the linear logic of the history of modern progress. Ecologies begin to form part of the social history of the nation; they become actively political springboards for imagining conceptual starting points. Earth’s history and human history, speculative fabulations and speculative realisms must be told together to think about a conceptual reformulation aimed at the future: “Actual players, articulating with varied allies of all ontological sorts (molecules, colleagues, and much more), must compose and sustain what is and will be.”11 State relations are upheld by the demand for sacrifice and intransigence for the formation of the “new man,” the ideal human being, a historical entity; capable of correcting the weaknesses produced by nature through scientism. “Terror is not an optional feature but a basic and integral part of totalitarian societies”12 and it is under normalized terror that speculative fabulations and assemblages as methods, processes, and practices are produced. Camila Lobón and Darling López turn to fossilized objects, volcanic lakes, hallucinatory blooming, as useful conceptual departure points to think about futures; at the same time, they criticize and learn from the incurable-images produced by the social sciences, national history, and cultural politics. By crossing forms and emotions, the social event and earthly history sustain a narration beyond the totalizing discourse imposed both by the state, and by the production of knowledge that demands neatly delimited plots and deny the possibility of the “assemblage” between fields. Totalizing narratives are patriarchal, vertical; they are walls of histories, returning to Elhaik. The incurable-images live in the shadows of those walls of history. The mud is the place where they give rise to multispecies, feminine, speculative narrations, according to Haraway, ruins and displacements that promote strange encounters, following Tsing, zones of turbulence, assemblages, images of thoughts, but what can be done when those small useful turbulences to decenter totalizing discourses, incurable-images, are produced under the terror in Central America and the Caribbean? How can they be made effective, active, in inhospitable territories, where the artwork has lost any possibility of public life beyond state control?

Notes 1 Camila Lobón, Mary y los Hombres Lagartos, artist’s book, 2019.

2 Lobón, Mary y los Hombres Lagartos.

3 Tzvetan Todorov, El Triunfo del Artista: La Revolución y los Artistas Rusos: 1917–1941,

trans. Noemí Sobregués (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2017), 21. 4 Fals Borda, Resistencia en El San Jorge: Historia Doble de la Costa 3 (Bogota: Colombia University, 2002), 27a.

5 Darling López, interview by the author, August 25, 2020.

Volcanic Lakes and Hallucinatory Vegetation 73

6 In April 2018, in Nicaragua public protests broke out throughout the country stemming from reforms in the Social Security system. The autoconvocados (self-summoned), as the protesters were known given the spontaneity of the acts, were harshly put down. There are no exact figures on the number of dead and missing; to date more than 300 victims have been identified. 7 Ana Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23. 8 Tarek Elhaik, The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 169. 9 Elhaik, The Incurable-Image, 12. 10 Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. 11 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 42. 12 Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 34.

Bibliography Borda, Fals. Resistencia en El San Jorge: Historia Doble de la Costa 3. Bogota: Colombia University, 2002. Elhaik, Tarek. The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Groys, Boris, Max Hollein, and Manuel Fontán del Jundo, eds. Art 1960–1990. Berlin: HatjeCantz, 2008. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Lobón, Camila. Mary y los Hombres Lagartos. Artist’s book, 2019. Todorov, Tzvetan. El Triunfo del Artista: La Revolucion y los Artistas Rusos: 1917–1941. Translated by Noemí Sobregués. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2017. Todorov, Tzvetan. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

12 EPIDEMIC REFRACTION A Critical Outlook Echoing Universal Explications Through Microcosmic Mayhem Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen

2021, an ennoble era of cybernetics, post-humanism, tetrastructures, artificial intelligence, and political incarceration, stands at the zenith of worldwide con­ stituency. The degradation of the political equation while recovering from state emergencies is not a surprising countdown; rather the chaotic nuisances of inter and intra political turmoil and their related affairs are still the emblem of global flux. From the last one-and-a-half years various situations around the world have halted the tenure of normalcy; it’s been a sensitive situation due to the outbreak of the pandemic, COVID-19. The venomous aftermath of the aforesaid epidemic not only thrashed human lives but the global economy as well leading to high rates of unemployment, rising deaths, climatic tensions, global scandals among the countries including India. The pandemic, in reality, reflected the arenas of categorizations that critical theories, man-made geographical audacity and aca­ demic research have refracted for so long. The outbreak of the pandemic in itself was a boon and a curse, simultaneously rather a complimentary phenomenon in the world that scanned human actions in terms of ethics and aesthetics. The anthropocentric constructions that received attention were an outcome of human conflicts which eventually led to the combustion of situations. Hence, human intention and negligence planted the seed of vulnerability that ultimately led to global chaos and misinterpretation of the developing calculations. Even the semantic dislocation of humanitarian zones was proactive, the values of human morality and ethics, such as benevolence, admiration, empathy, and distinctions between acceptable and disagreeable intentions have all been devoured by capi­ talist and phenomenological sabotages, leading to chaotic tantrums and a trau­ matic instability around the world. Few months back, a possibility of third World War between certain well-known nations could have been predicted due to unauthentic political clashes during the episode of pandemic. War, violence, racism, feminist issues, climate threats, and religious unrest received a new DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-14

Epidemic Refraction 75

structure from the perspective of a post pandemic viewpoint. The clash of “haves” and “have-nots” was a logocentric issue of catastrophic eruptions in the global political scenario. Thinking straight in an anthropocentric world is quite a challenging task, as the semantic barriers have tumultuous effects in commu­ nication patterns as well, since communication and its median are an integral part and language is an important tool of interaction and reciprocation. But with the technical updates of time, the semantic notion of language and the develop­ ment in pedagogic edges, the linguistic vitality reflects various specters of new locutions reflecting political connotation, sexual infliction, and psychological prompts, leading to molestation of the aesthetic and ethical-aural, ultimately leaving a negation over the decency of discourses. Protracting from the context of a developing country, India is no exception to severe political cliches being well known for ancient cultural heritage and rich traditions, India was never exempted from political incarcerations. Being a democratic secular country, it has mirrored its own limitations and extensions as the socio-political and socio-economic zones of the country have either been mutilated with political interventions, futile promises, or development as a facade. The current scenario echoes the Victorian age of England, the compli­ cated “ideological control” through political authority of the post pandemic situation. As in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Peter Barry says “a distinctly Victorian mixture of class guilt about social inequalities, a genuine desire to improve things for everybody …and a self-interest desire to maintain social stability.”1 These political strife or multi-party clashes restricted the smooth functioning of the country and delayed the containment of COVID-19 which eventually left volatile voltages for the innocent lives in society as they suffered the worst. Being a secular country, no doubt that the class categorization and religious conflicts have always been the country’s glaring issues. The poor, marginalized, middle class were targeted the most during the pandemic. Public and private ownership are two fanatic terms respect to medical, community, salary, and infrastructure, standing upon a demarcation line between heaven and hell in regards of difference in facil­ ities of services. Here lies the class difference of affordability in terms of medical health and prolonged harassment while waiting for availing services for both poor people or the middle class who were the worst victims during the pandemic situa­ tion in India and the entire global picture was a witness to such detriments. During the prevalence of this transmittable malady, repeated economical landslides were documented. As per administrative affirmation, lockdown and quarantine were vital and unavoidable for consolidated physical health but three significant changes in the Agricultural Reform Bill, which were introduced in June 2020 and was passed at the end of September 2020 by the Indian Central Government, ultimately thwarted the concept of physical distancing. Farmers started mass protests against the new reform bills. Political activities by the farmers in opposition to the estab­ lished bureaucratic procedures were not new in India but such duration of direct conflict and activities, especially by disregarding the lockdown act during

76 Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen

pandemic, hasn’t been recorded hitherto. Farmers’ suicide is unfortunately a common phenomenon and where agriculture contributes near about 17–18% of country’s GDP, the citizens had anticipated how the protest sites could become the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak. Contrarily, activists claim that this cata­ strophic calamity could bargain their actions against the authorities to put an end to their struggle for economic justice as Curtis states the comment of Rakesh Tikait, one prominent leader of the largest farmers’ union, told Reuters, “The government would increasingly try to use the pandemic as a ruse to break the protest but the farmers would not leave the protest sites.”2 Throughout the devastating second wave, Delhi’s three borders, Tikri, Singhu, and Ghazipur remained shut by the farmers from Punjab, Haryana, West Bengal, and much of the countryside. Much political pressure and criticism was imposed upon the protesters for their gathering during the pandemic. But on 4th April, the Kumbh Mela (a mega religious fair in India), considered as an exclusively holy festival and pilgrimage of Hindus, began in Haridwar where thousands of people were spotted without masks, improper sanitization, and physical dis­ tancing. They gathered along the bank of Ganges, dipped themselves in water for the sake of rituals, making it a frustrating hot spot for the virus to transmit. The Government called for no cancellation of the religious fair which later on turned into a supreme spreader event and by the middle of following month, India’s health infrastructure almost collapsed. Following this event, another event of similar virus transmission threat could be decoded, which The New York Times phrased it as “largest viral vector in Southeast Asia” known as Tablighi Jamat, an episcopal Muslim gathering held in Malaysia and near about five hundred were tested positive who attended the meeting. In Delhi, there’s a similar branch of the same organization holding a large gathering at Nizamuddin markaz were also tested positive and it was reported that people from other countries have also attended the occasion. Later, they were evac­ uated and carried to a nearby hospital and quarantined but the health minister took it casually and declared the following virus was not threatening enough.3 On the other hand, WHO had already declared COVID-19 as an epidemic. This was another example of political callousness that allowed the virus to brew its venomous aftermath that was evidently witnessed in the second wave. Population is another meta-narrative issue of India since the denominator has always been higher than the numerator, i.e., the population is dis­ proportionately greater than the available infrastructure. India stands second in terms of most populated countries all over the world, after China. Pandemic posted a transparent picture of the global epidemic versus the population as some of the developing countries like India and others, and even developed countries like US and UK were met with tensions in providing sufficient medical support to COVID patients. Human lives cannot be calculated in terms of neglect and jeopardized medical conveniences, the pandemic is also a reminder for substantial population control which must be one of the primary initiatives of the government, as countries with unstable infrastructure will knit huge life

Epidemic Refraction 77

risks for its people in the near future. Shortage of beds, oxygen plants, unavailability of sufficient vaccine doses along with interruptions of government elections not only delayed the process of curbing the pandemic but also discovered new threats of transmission of the virus. Similar arguments favor the growth of employment rates as well because a huge number of people were left unemployed at the harsh time which not only damaged mental health of the individuals but also crashed the global economy. The backbone of societal development arises with nurturing and the expansion of the intellectual horizon which is acquired through education. Unfortunately, the education pattern and the entire pedagogic system rests with a prescriptive and conditional form of learning which evacuates equal and neutral opportunities for the emerging minds. Ever increasing class distinction, reservations of seats and extremist notions reveal one must either accumulate power and wealth or must have an extraordinary merit to cross the hurdles of formalities of education. And the pandemic revealed the lack of availability of education for a certain class of the society and the ambiguity of virtual learning was an uncomfortable introduction as the administrative couldn’t find an overall solution for the learners. Student protests and political boomerangs in Universities were not new issues. The beginning of student movement in India could be traced to nearly 200 years back with the establishment of the Academic Association (1828) in the Hindu college of unabated Bengal under the steerage of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, an innovator pedagogue and an indispensable part of Bengal’s renaissance throughout the 19th century.4 Participating in the freedom struggle across the country, protests against “Hindi” by the students of Tamil Nadu in 1965 and against the imposition of Emergency in 1975, in more recent times, the “Hok Kolorob” movement in Jadavpur University in 2014 and now upsurges against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) are specific instances of student movements in India. During the protest against the CAA, NRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, one of the reputed scholarly institutions of India, experienced the forcible entry of the police using batons against students, tear gas inside the library to smear the protesters.5 On the 5th of January of 2020, when China was almost thrashed by the deadly storm of COVID but didn’t declare it as pandemic, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was similarly attacked by hooligans with arms and material vulnerabilities. Many students and faculty members were seriously injured and JNU students rebelled against fees rise which made it the obvious expensive Central University in the country. A sequel of this event broke out at the end of February when North-East Delhi witnessed a carnage for religious intolerance. The government promptly distinguished this as an ordinary violence, but the fact lies here when India’s public health sector became severely impacted during the second wave, students set benchmarks by serving society. They were open for all 24/7 and consistently without questioning. Leftw­ ing volunteers and supporters have made a mark in Bengal in this crisis. They have served almost across the country at the peak of the epidemic.6 Why would students and Universities be targeted as the hot spot of warfare where the seed of discipline, punctuality, knowledge, and learning are sowed by emerging aspirants? COVID

78 Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen

was another witness to such havoc situations where students were triggered to join political arenas rather than online classes and this is how political stimulus degra­ ded the educational sophistication and ended up being a catastrophe at the time of uncertainty. The complications and struggles of nations are to be found in the micro­ cosmic context of the macro-cosmic world as anything that happens at the centre spreads around the global context. Political ambiguity not only revolves around decoding political vulnerability, it also extends its interconnections with critical theories such as critical race theory, Eco-criticism, Eco-feminism and psychoanalysis, and each one of them has their critical outlook from the per­ spective of the epidemic frame, postulating a syntagmatic theory of relations, which highlights the ethical and aesthetic in-authenticity. COVID-19 spot­ lighted the fact that all critical theories are a massively interconnected together as a whole, especially from Indian context echoing the global spectrum. The concept of race has been a paramount issue of humankind since the pre pan­ demic period, an emblem of insensitivity triggering the connotation of the “other,” Indigenous or Non-European and this pandemic reveals some of the vulnerable exposures of racism. The sufferers mostly belong to ethnic minorities of African and Asian descent, which reflects the fundamental threats to basic human rights leading to severe verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and other forms of violence in public areas. It was an initiation that curbed the possible results of the Global Sustainable Goal 10 and increased the risk factors of social inequality in the time of uncertainty.7 The global outrage of George Floyd’s insensitive murder was another high-degree example of racial discrimination during the peak of the pandemic, Floyd’s lawyer Benjamin Crump addressed this incident as “the pandemic of racial discrimination.” It resounds the idea of the virus as a metaphorical meaning where the epidemic of inhumanity and categorization have imprisoned the souls of human beings, resulting in the malfunctioning of power, knowledge, and humanitarian values. In India, racism revealed its gestures via class consciousness and as per the post pandemic research women, farmers, Dalits, migration workers, were the worst victims of racism in terms of caste discrimination and more prone to epidemic disasters which not only raised death rates but also highlighted the lines of demarcation in gender inequality including cyber bullying across internet and social media sites. The migrant workers were scattered across the country for their daily living, and they couldn’t find a way out when the lockdown was declared by the central government and hardly any immediate initiative was taken on their behalf. Transportation like railways, public buses, private cars were resting in the garage, the workers took shelter on roads, walked long miles hungry and some also lost lives on their way home. This was an extreme harassment and pathetic circumstance because they were necessitous, helpless, and had sup­ pressed voices. “Racism” is an extreme class distinction that has drawn a line separating the educated elites from the illiterate poor. Blurring the class dis­ tinction in a capitalist totalitarian world is another political vulnerability and

Epidemic Refraction 79

concerns severe power politics that ultimately nullifies the concept of universality, as racism is a curse over universal thinking for national or international peace and unity. On the contrary Eco-criticism or the critical study of nature has a similarly significant impact during the post pandemic period. The entire world went through the duration of lockdown since the virus had a fatal aftermath of trans­ mission only through mass gatherings. According to Carla Guerreio, “health and sustainability in post pandemic economic crisis,” the lockdown was a time of “anthropause” that healed and replenished the natural environment. As per these studies, carbon footprint declined and the ozone layer witnessed a smaller hole for least release of greenhouse gases.8 It’s an acceptable fact that nature is agitated with anthropocentric interference, as nature was healing and simultaneously revealed its fury. Nature is not restricted to flora and fauna: it affects the climate with similar intensity. The metropolitan cities of the country and its adjacent states witnessed occasional brewing of severe cyclones that devastated vegetation, houses, public properties, and even human lives. As per meteorological research, it is reported that the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea area are being constantly trig­ gered with low pressure zones leading to unpredictable rainfall and extreme weather conditions that eventually tempted the virus further and strength-ed with decreasing temperature. Climate protection is equally important with ecology, where nature, an antonym for human society, so serene, calm, containing aesthetic glory is facing severe Eco-genocide for rising industrial pollution and callous human morals. Nature reverted back with natural calamities like earthquakes, landslides, flash floods, volcanic eruptions, and forest fires not only in India but around the world. The climate is in serious threat, it’s definitely an individual initiative, as one starts the other follow, changing our lifestyles to sustainable development, using renewable resources, less exploitation of natural assets, extreme afforestation will restore the ecological warnings that will ultimately let planet earth to reconsider the normalcy of green volition and temperature. It must be realized that nature is an inescapable god-gifted entity, human interference will manifest destructive outcomes and it’s the time zone we are running through. Psychoanalytically, ecology or greenery is a natural therapy for our mental health but pandemic restricted human mobility that affected people psychologically as shutting one’s self within the four walls gave rise to severe mental claustrophobic complications like sexual anxieties, domestic violence, suicide, depression and the only companion was technology along with social media accounts that evolved an era of virtual relationships, screen erotica, dating apps, plastic love, extreme meme makings to trigger a subconscious sense of belonging and mutual zones of humor to balm over the insecurities and lonesomeness. Every individual was mentally struggling, especially students, the youth, women who were extreme victims of domestic violence, the rise of cyber-crimes, murders were evident cases during the epidemic. Pandemic has given birth to “Reverse Psychoanalysis”9 as with the advent of a virtual and hypermedia world, the mind is overloaded with uncoun­ table information exchanges throughout the day which ultimately is devouring the significance of human lives from the microcosmic point of self-entity, purpose, and

80 Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen

finally in the macro-cosmic format the human entity. Therapists believe only creativity or art can save and re-instigate the essence of human lives and will allow us to balance between the updated world with the strokes of human passions. Challenges and emergencies are part and parcel of the global struggle. Government and citizens of the respective countries have complementary responsibilities though we witnessed inefficient political functioning, loosened international harmony. Nationalism turned in a way too jingoistic as the essence of human values, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarian qualities will be reacting in a paradigm of uncertainty. The pandemic is not a new issue; the world has witnessed grievous situations and the scars of previous epidemics, civil wars, World-wars are still vivid in the heart of the World. We have uni­ versal struggles of sheer categorizations and acute competitiveness where the essence of humanity has faded away and the universal solution must be the eradication of material categorization because the essence of humanitarian qualities cannot be judged in terms of caste, creed, gender, colour, and nationality. It’s a matter of individual realization which can’t be replaced with pedagogic research, AI and other interventions. We all are part of the same world that generates the universal law of global empathy, humanitarian ser­ vices, and definitely moral teachings of philosophies. The anti-feminist senti­ ment still persists with patriarchal ideological forms. Instead of ideologies, we should inculcate faith and philosophies to stimulate human values and it’s a civic sense that technology must not overpower humans. The technicality of critical thinking and the art of lateral discourses like creativity, philosophy, imagination, ethics are mantras of thinking straight for a compassionate and charitable world. As T.S. Eliot’s last few words in The Waste Land must echo our seraphic grandeur of universality: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih.”10

Notes 1 Peter Barry, “Theory Before ‘Theory’ – Liberal Humanism,” in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester Uni­ versity Press, 1995), 18. 2 John Curtis, Farmers’ Protests in India and Agricultural Reforms (United Kingdom: House of Commons Library, 2020). 3 “What Are Delhi Riots 2020?” Business Standard, 2020, https://www.business-standa rd.com/about/what-is-delhi-riots-2020. 4 “A Brief History of Student Protest in India,” Hindustan Times, December 18, 2019, http://surl.li/goxdv. 5 See note 4. 6 “2020 Jawaharlal Nehru University attack,” Wikipedia, last modified February 7, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2020_Jawaharlal_Nehru_University_attack& oldid=1138071013. 7 “Racial Discrimination in the Context of the Covid-19 Crisis,” in United Nations Human Rights (Geneva: UNDP 2020), 1–2. 8 Carla Guerrerio, Andy Haines, and Marco Pagano, “Health and Sustainability in Post Pandemic Economic Crisis,” Nature Sustainability 3 (2020): 494–6.

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9 Daniel Chechick, “Reverse Psychoanalysis,” philosophy fix, October 2, 2020, https:// www.instagram.com/p/CUh7QfCMUy2. 10 T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland (Glasgow: Good Press Publisher, 2019), 105.

Bibliography Barry, Peter. “Theory Before ‘Theory’ – Liberal Humanism.” In Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Business Standard. “What Are Delhi Riots 2020?”, 2020. https://www.business-standard. com/about/what-is-delhi-riots-2020. Chechick, Daniel. “Reverse Psychoanalysis.” philosophy_fix, October 2, 2020. https:// www.instagram.com/p/CUh7QfCMUy2. Curtis, John. Farmers’ Protests in India and Agricultural Reforms. United Kingdom: House of Commons Library, 2020. Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland. Glasgow: Good Press Publisher, 2019. Guerrerio, Carla, Andy Haines, and Marco Pagano. “Health and Sustainability in Post Pandemic Economic Crisis.” Nature Sustainability 3 (2020): 494–496. Hindustan Times. “A Brief History of Student Protest in India.” December 18, 2019. http://surl.li/goxdv. United Nations Human Rights. “Racial Discrimination in the Context of the Covid-19 Crisis.” In United Nations Human Rights. Geneva: UNDP, 2020.

13 READING | LOVE | WRITING | ART Jeremy Fernando

I. To start with Hélène Cixous: “With writing, I paint – what? / the people of thoughts and visions, the passages, / not the steps.”1 Giorgio Agamben continues to remind us that keeping alive is not quite the same as living. And whilst he has since been widely derided for equating the novel coronavirus to a common flu, his point that there is a difference between being alive and merely staying alive should not be cast aside.2 For, even as the con­ tagiousness of the coronavirus means that our lives have had to radically change in order to potentially survive, the fact that social distancing has become the order of the day and we have had to give up, in fact reverse, many of our social rituals suggests that – since our habitus is shaped by, continually formed out of, our habits – it might well be changing, re-shaping, what it means to be human. So, even as Slavoj Žižek seems to be critiquing Agamben – “not to shake hands and to go into isolation when needed IS today’s form of solidarity”3 – it would be an error to read it as an antonymous claim. For, we should also bear in mind Jean-Luc Nancy’s beautiful reminder that, “it is space that is first needed for touch.”4 Not too far, but also not too close: and where perhaps what is needed is for us to create the right space between ourselves. As Anne Dufourmantelle continues to teach us, “being completely alive is a task, it’s not at all a given thing. It’s not just about being present to the world, it’s being present to yourself, reaching an intensity that is in itself a way of being reborn.”5 Where, the self is itself always in creation, recreating itself, through a relation, even if with no other except itself. And where, what is called for is for us to bring forth a relation between ourselves and the world, ourselves and each other, and ourselves to our very selves: in other words, where being in the world is nothing other than the constant creation of relations. DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-15

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Where perhaps, the very task at hand is to discover how to maintain the social – bring forth the “us” – whilst remaining physically distant. Where the task might well be to maintain a proper distance, as Slavoj Žižek might say. Which also means that it is a matter of sight, of seeing, of being at the right distance, having the requisite space, to see: for, as Saleem Sinai shows us, if you stand too close to the screen all you will see is a blur; and it is only by keeping slightly away – and perhaps more importantly, maintaining your distance, the space proper to yourself – that one can see the film that is being screened.6 That cinema might be well about the movement of images through time, but in order for it to become a film – that is, seen as moving pictures – it always also involves the gap between the viewer and the screen. And if one listens carefully, the question of space, of distance, resounds with echoes of art, and more specifically, of “how art lies in the gap between the frame and the viewer.”7 Which means that not only is there always a space, a certain distance, between the work of art and ourselves – in particular, the gap of utility, where one is never able to directly use a work of art – perhaps more importantly, art is precisely that gap, space, distance. For, one should try not to forget that art itself is fundamentally useless. Which is precisely why those in power have always been fearful of it. Here one should try not to forget that the first to be shot are almost always poets, painters, writers. Not because they actually do anything, but that pre­ cisely by doing nothing they give – allowing all echoes of gift to resound here – they open, the space for us to imagine something else, something other. And by entwining art with use, all that is done is to tie it down to, to enchain it with, the state. For, we should try not to forget that we are in a relationship with what we read, what we see, what we stand before. And, even before this encounter happens – prior to the moment of encountering – one has to open oneself to the possibility of the encounter, open oneself to the work. Without necessarily knowing what encountering a work of art even is, let alone means. Thus, to claim that art has a use is to diminish it, to enchain it to value, production, logic, ratio, reason. It is to do nothing other than to attempt to erase art. And the gamble that is taken each time one picks up a book, looks at a painting, watches a film, stands before something that is made, created, brought forth – even perhaps a manifesto – the risk one runs in attempting to attend to a text, is the possibility of seeing the world – as Alain Badiou posits, as part of a conversation with Nicolas Truong – of being in the world, “no longer from the perspective of the One but from the perspective of Two.”8 That is, of falling, along with all the potential disasters this entails, in love. Thus, the stake in art one’s very self. “The event is in this sense always catastrophic, like the loop of smoke which begins straight before initiating its

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fine loop: it arrives at the exact spot where the trajectory breaks” as said by Anne Dufourmantelle.9 Which might be why Milan Kundera calls it the unbearable lightness of being: for, it is the refusal to be grounded, to be pinned down, to be known, that is unbearable, that continually provokes us, challenges us, quite possibly even tears us apart. It is perhaps symptomatic that there is often a “crisis” in art whenever states are obsessed about, caught-up with, concocting an identity. For, if art is about an openness to the unknown, is about possibilities, it is of the order of difference rather than identification, sameness. In other words, art is always anti-stasis, anti-state.10 More than that, it is always also a challenge to the self, to ourselves: it is a call to attend to the possibility of another, of something that is more important than us. Like any call, it might well lead us to dash ourselves on rocks. Herein lies its danger. And its beauty.

II. Here, it might be worthwhile to take a little detour, a tiny breather even, and consider the fact that what you are reading is a manifesto of sorts, that what we have been encountering throughout this book are texts that call themselves manifestos. Being named as such always already brings with it the question, what is the effect of a manifesto? alongside its compendium, how does one read a manifesto? For a manifesto is a text and, like every text, comes with its particularities, its inherent specificities: and, in its case, foregrounds the fact that it manifests itself, shows itself, stages (theoria) itself. Puts itself on a stage whilst fully aware of the fact that it is staging itself. By doing so, calls for a reading (lit) that is aware of itself as reading, that – by foregrounding its form, its making – quite possibly undoes itself as one is reading, is potentially under erasure (sous rature) while being read. In other words, as literature. And what else is literature but the reading of stories. Which is not to say that stories are only found in books. However, what is crucial is the love for stories: and this is learned, developed, through an attention towards – alongside a love of and for – books. Here, one should not forget the echoes of both book and learning in literature (from the Old English, boccræft). And once we open the register of learning, we should also bear in mind the dossiers of mimesis, repetition, habit, and habitus. Or, as my old friend Neil Murphy might say, “show me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are.”11

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For, literature lies in letters (littera); and like all writing, is of the order of death. Which means that, to love literature is to be in love with the dead. Necrophilia. If writing is of the order of death, reading is an openness to the possibility of resurrection. Not only to future possibilities that have not-yet-happened, but to futures that did not happen. Hauntology. Which means that, one of the questions we will have to be asking is, what stories have we been told, have we been telling ourselves? Alongside, quite possibly more interestingly, what stories are awaiting to be told, or even what stories have been written into our bodies that are awaiting reading.

III. Sometimes, I wonder if thinkers who posit that beauty and truth are one and the same thing, or at least can be found in the same realms, were wondering if moments of truth (or even glimpses of truth) come to us not just through but as moments of beauty. That glimpses of truth come to us at the very moment when we are moved beyond ourselves, when we are, at least momentarily, no longer quite ourselves, that truth is a moment that comes to, as Berlin would sing, “take my breath away.”12 For Alain Badiou, “Love is an encounter with the other, but an encounter is not an experience, it is an event that remains quite opaque and only finds reality in its multiple resonances within the real world.”13 Which also means that it might well be a moment that escapes one – not because one did not experience it, nor that this experience did not register with one, but that it is quite possibly an instance which writes itself into one in the very instant it is scratched out of one. Where what remains are traces … to be read. Much like art, which “lies in the gap between the frame and the viewer,” as Slavoj Žižek says. Bearing in mind – even if this remains a burden on one – that works of art are important not because they provide us with comfort, solace, or a distraction, from life; or even worse, provide “meaning to our existences” (such cheap illusions are enframed in the realms of advertising, political slogans, ideologies, religions, and so forth). Encounters with works of art, instead, open us to the fact that life itself is fundamentally meaningless; where we are at the mercy of the caprices of genetics, chance of birth, material conditions, sheer blind luck. And, where the very gesture of art (artem) lies in crafting, creating, bringing forth, the very possibilities, our own possibilities, of living: of continually engaging – not as an idea, but encountering with our bodies itself – what in life is worth living.

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Notes 1 Hélène Cixous et Cécile Wajsbrot, Une Autobiographie Allemande (Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 2016), 30. Translation from the French into the English is mine. 2 Giorgio Agamben, “Lo Stato d’Eccezione Provocato da un’Emergenza Immotivata Coronavirus,” in Il Manifesto, February 26, 2020, https://ilmanifesto.it/lo-stato-dec cezione-provocato-da-unemergenza-immotivata. 3 Slavoj Žižek, “Monitor and Punish? Yes Please,” in The Philosophical Salon: Los Angeles Review of Books, March 16, 2020, http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/moni tor-and-punish-yes-please. 4 A thought that Jean-Luc Nancy developed as part of his seminar, Art, Community, and Freedom, at The European Graduate School, Saas Fee, in June 2006. 5 Anne Dufourmantelle, “The Ideology of Security,” public lecture at The European Graduate School, Saas Fee, August 2011. 6 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). 7 Slavoj Žižek, back cover blurb to Jeremy Fernando, Nine Rings Around a Pit (London: Pendant Publishing, 2019). The full blurb reads: “in his manifesto of sorts, Jeremy Fernando stages how art lies in the gap between the frame and the viewer.” 8 Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 29. 9 Anne Dufourmantelle, Éloge du Risque (Paris: Éditions Payot & Rivages, 2011), 185. Translation from the French into the English is mine. 10 This in no way, shape, or form, diminishes the role works of art have played – even more so, the status as art has played – in establishing and legitimizing monarchies, authoritarians, different forms of totalitarianism, state-sponsored terrorisms, unfettered capitalism, fascism; all manners of attempts to diminish, reduce, destroy, people, humanity, encounters of differences. In short, the intimate relationship the so-called art-world – in particular the legitimized, highly-visible, state-sanctioned, grant-funded, museum-approved, echelons of that “world” – shares with power. However, I would contend that these kinds of relationships to the works, that these ways of approaching works, are attempts to utilize, stabilize, establish accepted-readings, even weaponize, them: to transform, form, deform, works into information, mere communication, make them into les communiques, as Gilles Deleuze continues to teach us in his essay “Having an Idea in Cinema.” Where what has been destroyed is precisely the space, gap, open­ ness – the very unknowability – that is first needed for encounters, for the possibilities that I am calling art. So perhaps, what I am attempting to conceive is the possibilities of a minor art. 11 This line was uttered in a conversation about literature and reading – probably at a bar – with my old friend, Neil Murphy, in June 2006. During the course of the evening, Neil also reminded me that, “reading literature with your head is always a mistake.” 12 Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock, “Take My Breath Away” in Berlin, Radar Radio, B-side (New York: Columbia Records, 1986). 13 Badiou and Truong, In Praise of Love, 24.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “Lo Stato d’Eccezione Provocato da un’Emergenza Immotivata Coronavirus.” Il Manifesto, February 26, 2020. https://ilmanifesto.it/lo-stato-decce zione-provocato-da-unemergenza-immotivata. Badiou, Alain and Truong, Nicolas. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012. Cixous, Hélène et Wajsbrot, Cécile. Une Autobiographie Allemande. Paris: Christian Bourgois Éditeur, 2016.

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Deleuze, Gilles. “Having an Idea in Cinema [On the Cinema of Straub-Huillet].” Translated by Eleanor Kaufman. In Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture. Edited by Eleanor Kaufmann and Kevin Jon Heller. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998. Dufourmantelle, Anne. Éloge du Risque. Paris: Éditions Payot and Rivages, 2011. Dufourmantelle, Anne. “The Ideology of Security.” Public lecture at The European Graduate School, Saas Fee, August 2011. Fernando, Jeremy. The Feather of Ma’at. Artworks by Yanyun Chen, Sara Chong, Gabriela Golder, Mariela Yeregui, Alfredo Jaar, Olivia Joret, Isabel Löfgren, Ruben Pang, Lucía Sbardella, and Ashley YK Yeo. Singapore: Delere Press, 2022. Fernando, Jeremy. Nine Rings Around a Pit – an Art Manifesto of Sorts. Portraits by Yanyun Chen, Sara Chong, and John Phillips. London: Pendant Publishing, 2019. Fernando, Jeremy. Writing Skin. Paintings by Pan Huiting, installation art by Gaspar Acebo and Marcos Mangani, charcoal drawings by Yanyun Chen. Singapore: Delere Press, 2020. Moroder, Giorgio and Whitlock, Tom. “Take My Breath Away.” Berlin, Radar Radio, B-side. New York: Columbia Records, 1986. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. Žižek, Slavoj. “Monitor and Punish? Yes Please.” The Philosophical Salon: Los Angeles Review of Books, March 16, 2020. http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/monitor-and-p unish-yes-please.

14 BEYOND THE PERMANENT CRISIS Jordi Riba

In times of crisis such as the present, the form of a state of permanent crisis is becoming more and more apparent. This crisis makes it possible, in the spaces of “non-renunciation,” to build emerging alternative models from the orphaned fraternity. For this very reason, it is worth asking ourselves about the return and renewal of fraternity on the basis of the crisis of modernity as described by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, which, in contrast to those described by other contemporary authors, is closer to the current crisis. Guyau associates the effect of the crisis, which he calls the “irreligiousness of the future,” with the advent of fraternity. The concept of fraternity that Guyau puts forward has nothing to do with a religious or enlightened fraternity. In any case, it is an orphan fraternity. From this orphanhood, exposed through the use of metaphor, a project of modernity is constructed, particularly sensitive to living together, which has as a fundamental element the lost claim of a human project that escapes the ravages of the present. It is therefore not surprising that fraternity, in a world experiencing an unpre­ cedented crisis, is making a comeback. Far from any religious proselytising, it leads us to a reflection on the unnecessary need to link everything to economic calcula­ tions. And despite his modest status as a “parente pauvre,” as in the republican motto,1 he invites us to become aware of the inadequacies of liberty and equality, which are staked on the individualistic register of subjective rights. If equality engenders an appeal to the social in terms of correctionredistribution, it does so in a comparative mode between individuals who remain external to each other. And once their rights have been satisfied, each one returns to his or her own shelter. Only fraternity can explain the moral and political dynamics of caring for others, both the help given to them and the common action towards acting in justice. Being anchored in the relationship, fraternity is the virtue of the between two, the soul of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-16

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social bond so often legally despised. Hence the call for adhesion in the French Revolution: “la fraternité ou la mort.”2 Even if the symptom from which the return of fraternity becomes evident belongs to political-economic parameters, it is no less true that the phenomenon of crisis goes further, both in terms of the essential approaches and in terms of time. In the period in which Guyau developed his work, the end of the 19th century, a series of evidence is confirmed, which lead us to think that the crisis of philosophical thought has different semblances with respect to previous crises, to the point of affirming that this crisis is characterised by a definitive nature. Guyau, a pioneer in the idea of a definitive crisis of modernity, was able to lucidly expose, and before others, the fact that philosophy and the action derived from it had entered into a permanent crisis. In line with the idea of unfinished modernity,3 which is configured on the basis of the permanent crisis, Revault d’Allonnes has raised again, affirming that “this rupture with tradition, which inaugurates a tradition of rupture, will affect the normative dimension of modernity.”4 Hence the doubt he conceives about what could be considered to belong only to times of crisis, which follow one after the other in the course of history, and which allow for the achievement of social changes, to end up becoming the recurrent way of explaining historical evolution, as in the cases, among others, of Charles Taylor in his work, L’Âge Séculier, or Marcel Gauchet in Le Désenchantement du Monde. 5 In contrast, and in clear oppo­ sition, Revault d’Allonnes, in his book La Crise sans Fin, states that: “the crisis without end is a work without end and not an end.”6 Revault’s words are forceful for the association of crisis with modernity: The crisis arising from a system of extreme unrest reveals the need for a new beginning. The world that has been lost, the world abandoned by God, becomes a task to be accomplished.7 One of these allegations is that developed by Guyau who, despite not having written any specifically political text, his writings reveal ways of approaching the political that bring him closer to the discourse of confrontation of the modern as a project with the real. This awareness of modernity in the process of definitive crisis gave rise to a pioneering discourse in our philosopher on the idea of the end of modernity as progress and of democracy without foundation. The intelligences freed from dogma will continue to associate to defend them­ selves against human adversities, to fight against setbacks. This association has its beginning in the consciousness of fraternity that nestles in consciences, which, despite having freed themselves from disturbing dogmas, remain aware of the vicissitudes in which their integrity finds itself. The idea of fraternity represents not only a stage in human evolution, but the very awareness of a condition which, free from the great dogmas, becomes aware of its state of essential solitude, shared with the rest of humanity.

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At the end of his book Esquisse D’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction, Guyau introduces a metaphor that anticipates and clarifies this idea linking irreligion with fraternity. Metaphor is, in Revault’s words, the capacity to produce a new meaning, but giving entry to an original, essential situation, both of existence and of language. Metaphorical expression has two characteristics of its own: it is an innovative and revealing discursive form of something that remains either hidden or outside the meaning of formal discourse. The metaphor expresses orientations in view of the observation of the world of life that cannot crystallize into pure concepts, but which provide a tacit dimension of intelligibility. This is certainly why Blumenberg recognises it as an essential figure of what he calls aconceptualisation.8 This way of proceeding is not really new, on the contrary, it has a long tradition. The metaphor par excellence that shows the vast problematic of existence is that of the navigation at sea, which Blumenberg explores in his book Naufragio con Espectador (Shipwreck with spectator). It is therefore all the more interesting to turn to Guyau to show his perspective on the link between the crisis of modernity and the human condition and the political link that firmly joins them together in a space that, despite its permanent uncertainty, bursts forth as an invitation to endless action.9 That a good metaphor clarifies the mind is a statement of Wittgenstein’s that should not be underestimated; and it is true that Guyau used a metaphor to represent his thought, probably for various reasons: in order to question the order of the modern, to confront it as a project with the order of the real. With the metaphor of the Leviathan, an old ship abandoned to its fate, Guyau was able to express the fragility of the link between the thought and the real.10 No hand is guiding us, no eye is watching over us, the rudder has been broken for a long time, or rather there never was one, we have to build it: it is a great task, and this is our task.11 If political modernity is represented by the idea of progress, it is politics without foundation. Guyau shows this in his metaphor: no storm threatens navigation, but it is the lack of a rudder that causes the ship to drift. But also, in Guyau’s metaphor, with or without a rudder, there is no chance of finding land or shelter. The Pascalian “we are embarked” becomes a perpetual state. This is significantly different from what Hegel argued: Here we can affirm that we are at home and that we can, like a sailor after a long voyage, cry out: land! Descartes is one of those men who have begun again at the beginning, and it is with him that culture, the thinking of modern times, makes its debut.12 Guyau thus provides a different vision of the metaphor of the shipwreck.13 Guyau’s political-irreligious discourse reveals the confusion of modernity in the

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face of the impossibility of realising the great narratives, of the crisis that plagues modernity as a whole. For this reason, and not so much to get out of it, but to adjust to this new reality, the crisis of reason and the end of the idea of progress are made to coincide with the advent of the philosophy of action. The sea is conceived by our philosopher, in the manner of Arendt,14 as the exterior of the Garden, and the little Socrates who observes it is the image of humanity con­ fronted with the great problem of the absence of referents represented in Guyau’s metaphor of the absence of a rudder to steer the ship. There is indeed no pre-established political discourse, nor can there be, just as there is no rudder to steer the ship. And in the face of this double non-existence, Guyau’s discourse is fruitful because at the same time as it presents the empty place from which to build the rudder, he affirms that it can only be built from individualities in solidarity. Guyau thus introduces action as an expression of vitality, which turns the spectator into an actor. His mission will no longer be technical: to steer the ship away from shipwreck, but political: to avoid the drifting into which humanity is plunged in the absence of guiding principles: The moral agent plays here the same role as the artist: he must project out the tendencies he feels in himself and construct a metaphysical poem with his love.15 There is in metaphor an obligatory invitation to permanent construction that is sheltered in anthropology. Humans are conceived as energy to be spent. Thanks to this vital expansion, Guyau’s own intuition, humans can and must fight against this state of original drift. Vital fertility replaces previous finalist and determinist discourses. It accepts what was already rejected in his time and is still denied by many: the profoundly nonsensical character of today’s world.16 We can safely say that Guyau’s discourse is not the discourse of tranquillity, of ataraxia. The only reality is the drift in the face of which only the option of struggle remains. All this, in the course of a few years, will be ratified and developed by Simmel, emphasising the fact that there is no guarantee of success in this project either.17 Later on, Revault d’Allonnes does not fail to consider this fact in his book on the basis of Foucault and Lefort, whom he points out had realised at the beginning of the 1980s (despite the differences that separated them) the change in the forms of contestation within the contemporary epoch. They noted their “dissemination,” their transversality, the diversity of their objects (the family, women, children, sexuality, justice, the situation of prisoners, the management of companies, the protection of nature, etc.).18 Indeed, a century after Guyau, as Revault points out, Lefort wrote with a similar aim to that proposed by Guyau, that it was necessary to elevate reflec­ tion to a practice that is not mute. In this way, the democratic experience is traversed by antagonistic experiences.19 For this reason, in this current crisis, which is experienced as permanent, the use of metaphor proves to be of great

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help in explaining it. Guyau, a precocious clairvoyant, describes in a complete way the essential fact in which humanity finds itself after the end of the great narratives: the irruption of the political and conflict with the hitherto finalist vision of history. The critical consequence of this metaphor emerges as the absence of a foundation, as in the impossible normativity capable of providing principles of action capable of going beyond the strict reality in which individuals move, united in their common life. Whereas the older systems represented only a tension in internal activity, in the present we are confronted with a term situated between uncertainty and categorical affirmation. This is a certainty that forms the basis of our freedom. We do not know what the future will bring us, but through action we operate, we work, we undertake.20 And in this regard, Guyau points out that the true commandment is the one we give ourselves, not in the name of some higher authority, but of a particular principle superior to any commandment.21 This principle therefore goes beyond the idea of discipline, law, and the state. The only valid rule is that which takes into account the facts, i.e., that beings are endowed with meaning and thought, and that this specificity is the reality and essence of our nature. Therefore, the question: How can we give meaning and form to uncertainty in order to create an open space of possibilities? The political model towards which Guyau sees humanity tending, in accordance with his idea of fraternity, is what he calls federated republican.22 He does not elaborate much on this form of government, but he states emphatically that it should allow for the coexistence of all kinds of religious individualities and any kind of association that these individualities might wish to form. Religious anomie is, according to Guyau, the one that best represents this state, since it has crucial effects on modern individuality, that is, the one that occurs in the process of secularization of the democratic becoming. Christ could have affirmed: I have not come to bring peace to thought, but the incessant struggle of ideas; nor repose, but the movement and progress of the spirit; nor the universality of dogmas, but the freedom of belief, which is the first condition of its final expansion.23 Expressed in another way, the essential truth of a democracy would be that in which political things burst forth with force. Claude Lefort took it upon himself to highlight this empty place of the political, showing once again the conflict between philosophy and politics, in particular in connection with Guyau’s ideas. This is precisely his main problem, the impossibility of simultaneously conforming to the double meaning that the concept of republic possesses, political things and politeia, in order to constitute a universal republic. To arrive at it, nothing better than to recall the words of Feuerbach in his book Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843): “the essence of man resides only in the community, in the unity of man with man, a unity which, however, rests only in the reality of the difference between the I and the You.”

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This irruption of the political allows the consolidation of the republicanism of political things, making more visible the secular conflict between politics and phi­ losophy that Arendt situates historically in the condemnation of Socrates by Athens. The singularity of this antagonism has allowed authors such as Miguel Abensour, Jacques Rancière, and others to develop their thinking. They have done no more than update the conflict under the premise of a singular epochal principle, which, configured under the premise of democracy, contains those elements that the progressive abandonment of theological referents leads it to become a thought without referents; and society to organise itself under this premise. Democracy should not be seen, under this conception associated with the fraternal principle, as a crystallised form, as an organisation of powers, but as an uninterrupted movement. A political action that opposes the established forms that prevent its realisation. Conflict becomes in this situation the major axis which, instead of impeding, underlines the specificity of living together. It is true that the limitations of philosophical writing highlight the very impossibility of establishing a permanent link between the factual and the real. Simmel called this gap between the ever-living action and its products a crisis of culture. Democracy can therefore be thought of as having no alternative but itself in its permanent realisation. And there is no historical time beyond the present. In short, the interpretative contribution of the Guyautist metaphor gives contemporary meaning to a situation which, seen with retrospective eyes, gives permanence to the revolutionary sentence of fraternity or death, undoubtedly intensely current, of the moment humanity is living. Lefortian democratic uncertainty takes on new impulses, not in the face of external dangers, but because of the very circumstances in which democracy is inscribed. And in the face of which, all that remains is the expression of that orphan fraternity that Guyau once brought to light and which, in the words of Hegel, takes the place of destiny, and therefore, it is an unending and persistent modernity that opens up like a breath to what Miguel Abensour has called the utopian impulse.24

Notes 1 Mona Ozouf, François Furet, eds., Dictionnaire de la Révolution Française (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 731. 2 Marcel David, Fraternité et Révolution Française (Paris: Aubier, 1987). 3 Jürgen Habermas, “La Modernidad, un Proyecto Inacabado,” in Ensayos Políticos (Barcelona: Península, 2002), 273. 4 Miryam Revault d’Allonnes, La Crise sans Fin: Essai sur l’Expérience Moderne du Temps (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 73. 5 Charles Taylor, L’Âge Seculier (Paris: Seuil, 2011); Marcel Gauchet, Le Desenchantement du Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 6 Revault d’Allonnes, La Crise sans Fin, 73. 7 Revault d’Allonnes, La Crise sans Fin, 73. 8 Hans Blumenberg, “Aproximación a una Teoría de la Onconceptualidad,” in Naufragio con Espectador (Madrid: Visor, 1995), 97. 9 Etienne Tassin, Le Maléfice de la Vie à Plusieurs (Paris: Fayard, 2012).

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10 See what Paul Ricoeur points out in this respect in Essais d’Herméneutique, vol 2: Du Texte à l’Action (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 275: “What happens to us is always different from what is expected.” 11 Jean-Marie Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction (Paris: Payot, 2012), 222. 12 Georg W.F. Hegel, Leçons sur l’Histoire de la Philosophie (Paris: Vrin, 1985), 1379. 13 Hans Blumenberg, Naufragio con Espectador. 14 See the “thought” of Pascal that Hannah Arendt uses repeatedly in her writings to establish the distinction between two particular ways of conceiving philosophical work. 15 Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale, 161. 16 Jean-François Mugnier-Pollet, “Pour une Éthique Probabilitaire d’après Guyau,” Revue Universitaire de Science Morale (Genève, 1966), 41. 17 Georges Simmel, El Conflicto (Madrid: Sequitur, 2010). 18 Revault d’Allonnes, La Crise sans Fin, 142. 19 Claude Lefort, L’Invention de la Démocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1981). 20 Revault d’Allonnes, La Crise sans Fin, 134. 21 See Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le Commandement? (Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2013). 22 Jean-Marie Guyau, L’Irréligion de l’Avenir (Paris: Felix Alcan,1887), xviii. 23 Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale, xix. 24 Miguel Abensour, Utopiques II (Paris: Sens et Tonka, 2011).

Bibliography Abensour, Miguel. Utopiques II. Paris: Sens et Tonka, 2011. Agamben, Giorgi. Qu’est-ce que le Commandement? Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2013. AA. VV. Dictionnaire Critique de la République. Paris: Flammarion, 2002. Blumenberg, Hans. “Perspectivas para una Teoría de la Aconceptualización.” In Naufragio con Espectador. Madrid: Visor, 1995. David, Marcel. Fraternité et Révolution Française. Paris: Aubier, 1987. Duvignaud, Jean. La Solidaridad. México: FCE, 1990. Gauchet, Marcel. Le Desenchantement du Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Guyau, Jean-Marie. Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction. Paris: Payot, 2012. Guyau, Jean-Marie. L’Irréligion de l’Avenir. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1887. Habermas, Jürgen. “La Modernidad, un Proyecto Inacabado.” In Ensayos Politicos. Barcelona: Península, 2002. Hegel, Georg W. F. Leçons sur l’Histoire de la Philosophie. Paris: Vrin, 1985. Lefort, Claude. L’Invention Démocratique. Paris: Fayard, 1981. Ozouf, Mona, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” In Lieux de Mémoire. Edited by Pierre Nora. Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 1989, 3. Ozouf, Mona, and François Furet, eds. Dictionnaire de la Révolution Française. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. Revault d’Allonnes, Miryam. La Crise sans Fin: Essai sur l’Expérience Moderne du Temps. Paris: Seuil, 2012. Ricœur, Paul. Moi-Même Comme un Autre. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Ricoeur, Paul. La Métaphore Vivante. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Tassin, Etienne. Le Maléfice de la Vie à Plusieurs. Paris: Fayard, 2012. Taylor, Charles. L’Âge Seculier. Paris: Seuil, 2011.

15

MANIFESTO FOR A NEW GRAMMAR OF LIBERATION Esteban Beltrán Ulate

Difficult Dialogue The socialism of the 20th century and the Socialism of the 21st century will be a truncated project if it does not understand that all political projects must be intercultural. The overcoming of the notion of socialism is necessary if one aspires to consolidate a planetary political project. The foregoing does not imply a neglect of the social justice theses and the sources of socialism, rather, we are on the verge of building a new grammar, necessarily intercultural, for a new era. What cannot be spoken about cannot be thought, that is why we must build a new speech for a new thinking. In recent decades, a series of events have been revealed that manifest a transition of time: techno-scientific development – the dependence on the internet, natural catastrophes because of human endeavor – with global implications – and the space race, to mention a few facts. The State-Nation scheme continues to reveal terrible problems2 that derive in constant warlike frictions, and the development of economic projects based on the universalization of markets, based on a regionalization of the planet that goes beyond the traditional land borders, feed social gaps and economic inequalities. Today, humanity is in a phase of transition from modernity to a new era. However, the future is not clear (it never has been), the future is glimpsed with each step, so that no matter how insignificant it may seem, each event in the present can be the necessary milestone for the configuration of the society of tomorrow. Every progressive project that has learned from history, must be humble enough to be pessimistic and hopeful, this means that every threat of revolution that is raised as a possible milestone for the transformation of tomorrow must be a gesture that caresses a hope that will not be full. Since again, as humanity “we will fail,” this proemial “mea culpa” will be DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-17

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fundamental, to advance, along a path that does not feed the voices of the peoples with false promises. This Common House, as it has been characterized by Pope Francisco,3 demands a common responsibility too. The new epoch will be more and more plural, more and more diverse, as the nuances of humanity will be amplified with technological advance and new forms of communication, the Planet will be more and more a great community of communities with the possibility of dialogue, (but also to block); as expressed by Pannikar4 when tell us as that dialogue is not always possible, because it requires both sides with attention and devotion, but also it is not impossible if one part always keeps the open doors. Common responsibility is no impossible if someone resist and fight for a humanitarian home for all. In this planetary conception, both challenges and responses must be global, the dare faced could be classified as “Difficult Dialogue,” this implies in the first instance a recognition of the Other as Other, in a second moment implies a necessity to develop an ability to translate the cultural meaning or the diverse message. Just, when we assume an understanding of challenge and we could joint that task in community, and shared project of Dialogue as a way.5

Beyond Modernity Modernity is an epoch and social phenomenon of multiple characterizations, it is formed by a globalization of the capitalist conception of the market, which feeds on territorial and cultural colonization, coupled with a deepening of the patriarchal forms of violence. It is necessary to start from the pessi­ mistic fact that some characteristics of modernity will not totally disappear with the advent of a new era, but in the hands of a progressive movement with a global conception it is possible to win the pulse in certain areas and manage to attenuate and control these forms of modernity that threaten the common welfare. Modernity is colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist,6 but beyond these categories there are other categories that must be placed under a magnifying glass and provide maps for transformation. The new era can be a sequel to Modernity or another possible world. In this sense, the anti-modernist, anti­ capitalist, anti-patriarchal forces, as well as all emerging movements (not yet characterized) must weave a common route, a map for the transition to the new era. In recent times, the denomination “progressive” has been consolidated as a “path of commons,” perhaps as an option that goes beyond the dichotomous language of “left-right” that feeds Western fears of the Cold War. With the above, I want to say that the left may not be the future, but without them no progressive movement will be able to achieve a future of modest well-being for the community of communities, in the new era.

Manifesto for a New Grammar of Liberation 97

Demopedia and a Grammar for Transition The period of transition must consider a new grammar since a political demopedia, this means taking advantage of the richness of language to promote a break with the cognitive empire of the Global North,7 this expansion of language will therefore be an expansion of possible worlds. However, it must be provided from an articulation of social voices, the task of the progressive project is the reproduction of these voices, for this reason the reference to demopedia is fundamental. Words of liberation as pedagogical instrument, result of dialogue. Through the practice of an education of liberation8 “from and with” the peoples it is possible the construction of new social fibers that allow the con­ stitution of an ark to cross the turbulent waters of this transition. The new grammar will be the expansion of language and therefore of the world; the end of history was only the myth that modernity built to prevent people from looking at the horizon of events that attests to a dark future, but future at last. The progressive project must not be only a conglomerate of the “Anti,” it must also consolidate a mutual “regional and internationalist” cooperation map, a transmodern progressive route. From the pains of modernity must emerge the new grammar with which the route for the new time will be written “Ubuntu, Ayni, Common Time, New Pangea.” This new era is in the seed, in progressive communities that assume intercultural dialogue to the consolidation of an ecology of knowledge and a common care with the other species of this Common House.

How to Develop a New Grammar? The new grammar is in the seeds of communities, progressive movements must be listening the weaving the voices of alternative from the local and with regional communication, participating in the existing cultural relations, designing new cultural forms that are integrated into the framework of cur­ rent communal relations. On the other hand, through the establishment of bridges that allow overcoming the rhetoric of fear, this implies overcoming ideological and discursive dogmatisms so that, through accessible language, spaces of trust can be stimulated for the construction of local transformation projects. It is essential, locally and nationally, to interact with existing media, to position alternative discourses, which are collective constructions, so that reflections that are built in community and not from the individual are pro­ jected and socialized. On the other hand, it is also necessary to create new spaces for dissemination, through newspapers, podcasts, radio, television, as well as by other means to disseminate alternative discourses. The reproduction of the new meaning, the new grammar, emerges from the encounter and is embodied in action. There are no recipes but guidelines, which are constituted from the relationship with otherness in the communities, thus a new democracy is constituted. Only in dialogue with the community can we

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discover the doors that we can go through to dialogue in safe spaces and lan­ guages, the alternatives for building the future of well-being. The reflection on the reproduction of the meaning that goes beyond neoliberal common sense must continue to be cultivated in each community of our country, letting dia­ logue be the way.

Final Invitation The new era will bring with it shadows of the past but lights of hope for the new that is to come, there is alternative in those words that are built in “difficult dialogue” through intercultural action. The new grammar is built on the foun­ dations of intercultural translation, and it becomes flesh, in local and regional actions that understand that our only homeland is our common home and our only right and duty is the responsibility for the Other. ¡Humanity of the entire world, united in a difficult dialogue, to listen to the common challenge and face the new era with common responsibility!

Notes 1 Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022).

2 Isvan Mészáros, Beyond Leviathan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022).

3 Pope Francisco, Laudato si’, Carta Encíclica del Sumo Pontífice Francisco: A los

Obispos, a los Presbíteros y a los Diáconos, a las Personas Consagradas y a Todos los Fieles Laicos sobre el Cuidado de la Casa Común (Lima: Paulinas, 2015). 4 Raimon Panikkar, Paz e Interculturalidad: Una Reflexión Filosófica (España: Herder, 2006). 5 Martin Buber, La Vie en Dialogue (París: Aubier, 1959). 6 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Una Epistemología del Sur (Argentina: Clacso, 2009). 7 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, El Fin del Imperio Cognitivo (España: Trotta, 2019). 8 Paulo Freire, Pedagogía del Oprimido (Argentina: Siglo XXI, 2005).

Bibliography Buber, Martin. La Vie en Dialogue. París: Aubier, 1959. Pope Francisco. Laudato si’, Carta Encíclica del Sumo Pontífice Francisco: A los Obispos, a los Presbíteros y a Los Diáconos, a las Personas Consagradas y a Todos los Fieles Laicos sobre el Cuidado de la Casa Común. Lima: Paulinas, 2015. Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism. London: Verso, 2022.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogía del Oprimido. Argentina: Siglo XXI, 2005.

Mészáros, Isvan. Beyond Leviathan. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022.

Panikkar, Raimon. Paz e Interculturalidad: Una Reflexión Filosófica. España: Herder, 2006.

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. Una Epistemología del Sur. Argentina: Clacso, 2009.

de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. El Fin del Imperio Cognitivo. España: Trotta, 2019.

16 THE ROAD TO THE SCAFFOLD The Struggle of Nicolas de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges for Gender Equality Olga Vinogradova

In 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and rejected Condorcet’s draft declaration that the French philosopher referred to as the Declaration of Rights as he was likely to emphasize the equal value and significance of the document for all French citizens, regardless of gender or social status. The newly enacted Declaration prohibited discrimination against the French citizens on the grounds of class and religion, but completely ignored the rights of women. Later, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen became part of the first French Constitution of 1791, which enshrined the so-called status of “passive citizens” (deprived of the right to vote and to be elected) towards women. During this period, French philosopher and scientist, Nicolas de Condorcet was the sole male politician who publicly criticized the enacted 1789 Declaration for it did not contain any reference to women’s rights:1 the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme can be translated from French as either Declaration of Human Rights or Declaration of the Rights of Men. This caused the thinker to avoid such a biased approach and opt for a universal title for his own declaration (Declaration of the Rights). However, Condorcet was not the only public person who was concerned about the issue of equality of rights between men and women. In 1791, the notable female journalist, writer and first French feminist2 Olympe de Gouges published her own draft Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, according to which she demanded that women enjoyed the same status of active citizens as men, proclaiming equality of natural rights and freedoms for all members of society, regardless of sex. Although the Church’s influence on society was declining due to the development of the Enlightenment’s ideas, secular pseudoscientific misogynistic ideas blossomed. Not only were women’s civil rights questioned, but also their DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-18

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intellectual and physical ability in comparison with men. From a political point of view, women were considered inferior to men in terms of status and did not have any political rights. Later, The Napoleonic Civil Code reinforced this injustice by disenfranchising married women, putting them into the same category as minors, criminals, and insane persons3 in terms of rights. When getting married, a woman was forced to waive all her legal rights. She could not choose her place of residence or acquire, pledge, or dispose of property without the written consent of her husband, and she owed obedience to him unconditionally. Married women were also under the obligation to commit to their marital duties (i.e., engaging in a sexual intercourse regardless of whether they consented to it) and violence from their husbands (including sexual violence) was not officially considered as a crime. A wife’s adultery was punished more severely than a husband’s adultery because she could give birth to an illegitimate child (“bastard”).4 And even after the death of her husband, the wife was not reinstated in her rights: she could be neither an inheritor, nor a legal representative and she could not manage an estate. Her legal (and political) disability was irreversible and absolute.5 Olympe de Gouges was one of the few women who fought against such practices and laws. She alleged that “ignorance, neglect, or contempt for the rights of women are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption.”6 Her Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and of the Female Citizen became a kind of manifesto that proclaims feminism as the basic principle of political governance and the guarantee of State prosperity: As long as nothing is done to uplift the souls of women, as long as they do not help make themselves more useful, more consistent, until the men are old enough to take care of their true glory seriously, the state cannot prosper.7 By addressing her work, first of all, to women, not only did she aim at informing them about the rights and injustices, raising uncomfortable and pro­ blematic questions for the patriarchal society, but she also wanted to encourage them to take active actions to change the unjust societal order and way of life: women, isn’t it time for a Revolution to take place among us too? Will women always be isolated from each other and never become one with society, unless they speak badly about their sex and feel sorry for each other? …It was time for us to react vigorously against the men (who) claim that we are only fit to run a household.8 De Gouges points out the hypocrisy of the revolutionary policy of the State, as it does not lead to the true equality that it claims to reach. In light of this rea­ lity, the French polemist proclaimed its well-known statement: “a woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must also have the right to mount the speaker’s rostrum.”9 She deplores that while women are denied rights, they are still liable to punishment should not they obey the law.

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Both Olympe de Gouges and Nicolas de Condorcet argue that it is unfair that women are subject to rules that were adopted by men for such rules disregard the needs, desires, and opinions of women. Condorcet points out that laws are written by men and for men; and yet, the interests of men and women “differ significantly,”10 causing these laws to discriminate against women.11 Condorcet, within the framework of all his political activities, strove to end this injustice and addressed gender equality in many of his works, including Fragment on the New Atlantis (one of the parts of the Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Advances of the Human Mind), Five Memoirs on Public Instruction, Letters from a Freeman of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia (1847)12 and On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790).13 In the very first lines of Letters from a Freeman of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia, Condorcet regarded the concept of “natural rights” as absolute for every rational human being. In Condorcet’s opinion, women are rational human beings as well. They have rights from birth and should not be deprived of these rights under any circumstances: these rights are called natural because they derive from the nature of man; because it is a clear and necessary consequence of the very fact that if a sentient being capable of reason and moral ideas exists, then he must enjoy these rights and could not justly be deprived of them.14 Condorcet’s civil rights result directly from natural rights. In this respect, the philosopher claims that a State engineering the deprivation of the rights of “half of humanity”15 (namely 12 million women16) can definitely not be considered as free or just: “a State in which some of the inhabitants, or at least some of the landowners, are deprived of these rights ceases to be free… It is no longer a true republic [and] having said this, it is also true to say that no true republic has ever existed.”17 A real republic, according to the philosopher, should be based on the principles of reason, equality, and justice; in this respect, there is no reason to deny women the realisation of their rights. Condorcet asserts that gender equality derives from the existence of reason and morality in every individual: If we agree that men have rights simply by virtue of being capable of reason and moral ideas, then women should have precisely the same rights. Yet never in any so-called free constitution have women had the right of citizenship.18 Put another way, both women and men are sensible beings and moral agents with reason and moral ideas. In this regard, they equally have natural rights, and by extension, civil and political rights (and not only by birth right).

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According to Condorcet, introducing the concept of women’s incapacity into French law is oppressive and increases injustice and inequality in society: “either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.”19 Using sarcasm, Condorcet wonders why the idea of a female monarch is so familiar to his contemporaries while the idea of a female citizen is so unacceptable to them. He uses the example of great women rulers, not only as exceptional representatives of the human race, but rather as great women: finally, will one say that there are in the mind or in the heart of women some features that should preclude them from enjoying their natural rights? We should first examine the facts. Elizabeth of England, Maria Theresa, the two Catherines of Russia, proved that women lacked neither fortitude nor strength of mind.20 Thereby, not only does Condorcet stand up for women’s active electoral rights, but also passive electoral rights, namely the right to be elected and to hold public positions, like men. Through all his work, Condorcet addresses the purported female “inferiority,” i.e., the inability to make decisions and participate in political (and economic21) life due to particular features of the female body or motherhood’s consequences such as pregnancy, bearing and breastfeeding. In Letters from a Freeman of New Haven, Condorcet consistently rejects this argument, stating that: the female constitution means that they would make unsuitable soldiers and, for some of their lives, debars them from posts which require hard work on a daily basis. Pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding would prevent them from fulfilling these functions. But I believe all other differences between men and women are simply the result of education.22 Therefore, the main hindrance to achieve gender equality as to civil rights would not stem from a physical or a mental disability of women (as many believed at that time), but from the lack of proper education! And that is why all people, regardless of gender, should have access to a full-fledged education as it is the only way to enable people to become real citizens: “the educational equality that we can hope to attain, and that ought to be sufficient, is that which excludes all dependence, whether forced or voluntary.”23 Equal access to education for both men and women is one of the most prominent natural rights listed in the Condorcet’s Declaration of Rights. Its adoption, according to the philosopher, is another step on the path of humanity to progress through education since only the setting-up of a fair legislative system together with a non-biased general education will allow

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citizens developing their knowledge, exercising their rights, and assessing the consequences of these rights. And this should inevitably lead to the progress of society. At the start of his Declaration, the author lists natural human rights that, according to him, cannot be alienated or violated: security and liberty of the person, security and liberty of property, and natural equality.24 These rights cannot be subject to interference by law or government, unless the interference is agreed upon by all members of society. The idea of freedom (for both men and women) becomes, undoubtedly, the central and most democratic idea of Condorcet’s Declaration. It does not boil down to political freedom, but also includes the freedom of man and citizen as freedom of entrepreneurship, freedom of movement, freedom of religious beliefs, etc. The main objectives of the Declaration of Rights are as follows: first, restrict State’s nuisance in relation to the rights and freedoms of citizens; second, identify the possible threats to these rights and freedoms; and third, combined with other works (Ideas about Despotism, Draft Constitution), create a robust legal structure. This should become the basis of the entire system of constitutional law and foster the framework of an advanced social and State system, defining the foundations of a new legal order on the way to the general progress of society. The objectives of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen of Olympe de Gouges are less ambitious and fundamental, but not less important. In accordance with this document, all women living in France are equal in their absence of right in relation to men. Therefore, the French feminist elected to fight against it, relying on the principle of full civil equality between genders, as well as the “laws of nature and reason.”25 According to de Gouges, “natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of a woman are the following: liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression,”26 as well as freedom of speech and control over one’s own life. The basis of national sovereignty should be the union of a man and a woman, created in accordance with the laws of nature and reason, as the laws of reason are wise, and the laws of nature are divine. So, eventually, this union receives the blessing of both the “Supreme Being”27 and the State. Yet, by “union,” de Gouges does not mean to allude to the traditional patriarchal marriage, that she refers to as “the tomb of confidence and love.”28 Rejecting the traditional form of marriage, she proposes a Social Contract between a Man and a Woman,29 which will become the prototype of the civil solidarity pact between two adults for organizing their shared life (PACS) in France. This social contract includes the joint management of the partners’ common property, mutual custody of the children, the obligation to provide for them, as well as sanctions in case of refusal to recognize their own child. Another key aspect of her program was to require the end of forced marriages, the legitimisation of divorces, the recognition of the rights of illegitimate children and the fight against their stigmatisation.

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In her Declaration, de Gouges supports equality in terms of electoral rights of citizens (direct or indirect): both women and men “must be equally admissible to all public honours, positions, and employments, according to their abilities and without other distinctions than those of their virtues and their talents.”30 When requiring civil and political rights for women, de Gouges also addresses issues of legal responsibility (for example, tax and civil). Not only does she demand the same distribution of taxes regardless of gender,31 but she also intro­ duces the concept of impôt volontaire (self-taxation for women) the purpose of which being to reduce the budget deficit and contribute to the national income.32 She also urges not to make exceptions for women in criminal law matters: like men, women obey this rigorous Law (art. 7)33 and if found guilty, every woman [must be punished with] all severity prescribed by the Law (art. 9).34 Like Condorcet, she requires access to free public education for girls and women as the main factor in their intellectual enhancement and enlightenment, so the State guarantees that an educated woman “has the same share in the distribution of positions, employments, offices, honours, and jobs.”35 For Nicolas de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges, the natural rights of women and their perfectibility were beyond any doubt. These French thinkers were the first in their time to develop the idea that society should see a woman in a new way – as a free, reasonable, educated person, and not as a second-class being, whose main tasks would be to give birth, do housekeeping and satisfy sexual needs of men. Therefore, both of them can rightly be called pioneers, visionaries, and heroes who were ahead of their time and were discriminated against due to their beliefs. Despite all their efforts, the idea of equality between men and women in France disregarded for almost two centuries. Adopted in 1804, the Napoleonic Code exa­ cerbated and consolidated for a long time the inequality and subordination of women. The rights for which Condorcet and de Gouges fought at the end of the 19th century were granted to French women much later than many other European women. The right to vote and participate in elections was granted to them in 1944, the right to work without the consent of their husband in 1965, the right to have an abortion by her own volition in 1975. In addition, in 1975, marital unfaithfulness was decriminalized and a husband committing sexual assault on her wife has been liable to prosecution since 1990. In 1999, PACS (civil solidarity pact between part­ ners) was introduced into French law; and quite recently, more than two centuries after the death of Olympe de Gouges on the guillotine, the distinction between “illegal (illegitimate)” and “legal” child (filiation légitime and filiation naturelle) was removed from French law.36

Notes 1 Benoîte Groult, Le Féminisme au Masculin (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1980), 53. 2 We use this word in quotation marks, since the term “feminism” did not exist in the 1790s; it was introduced by Charles Fourier in 1837.

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3 Code civil de Napoléon of 1804, art. 1124, cited by Benoîte Groult, Le Féminisme au Masculin, 65. 4 Sophie Mousset, Olympe de Gouges et les Droits de la Femme (Paris: Editions du Félin, 2007), 123. 5 Mousset, Olympe de Gouges, 124. 6 Benoîte Groult, Ainsi Soit Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2013), 156, our translation is from French. 7 Œuvres de la Citoyenne de Gouges, Dédiées à Philippe, 1793, 4, cited by Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Syros/Alternatives, 1989), 191, our translation is from French. 8 Cited by Olivier Blanc, Olympe de Gouges, 191. 9 Olympe de Gouges, Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, afterword by Emanuèle Gaulier (Paris: Éditions Nille et une Nuits, 2003), 51, our translation is from French. 10 Nicolas de Condorcet, Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven à un Citoyen de Virginie, sur l’Inutilité de Partager le Pouvoir Législatif entre Plusieurs Corps (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, impr. de L’Institut, 1847), 15, our translation is from French. 11 Condorcet, Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven, 15. 12 Condorcet, Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven, 3–93. 13 Nicolas de Condorcet, “Sur l’Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cité,” in Paris: Journal de la Société de 1789, Tome 10 (Didot, 1847), 121–30. 14 Cited by Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt, eds., Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1994), 297. 15 Condorcet, Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven, 20. 16 Condorcet, “Sur l’Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cité.” 17 Cited by McLean and Hewitt, eds., Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, 297. 18 Cited by McLean and Hewitt, eds., Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, 297. 19 Cited by McLean and Hewitt, eds., Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, 335. 20 Condorcet, “Sur l’Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cité.” 21 Condorcet, “Sur l’Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cité,” 12. 22 Cited by McLean and Hewitt, eds., Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, 299. 23 Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Advances of the Human Mind, 99, accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.earlymoderntexts. com/assets/pdfs/condorcet1795_3.pdf. 24 Nicolas de Condorcet, Déclaration des Droits, Traduite de l’Anglois, avec l’Original à Côté (London, 1789), 11. 25 John Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Woman (Art. 4) (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 119. 26 Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby, 117. 27 Groult, Ainsi Soit Olympe de Gouges, 157. 28 Groult, Ainsi Soit Olympe de Gouges, 170. 29 Groult, Ainsi Soit Olympe de Gouges, 171. 30 Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby, 120. 31 Cole, 133. 32 Gouges, Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, 46. 33 Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby, 121. 34 Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby, 123. 35 Cole, Between the Queen and the Cabby, 132–33. 36 Law n˚ 2002–305 of March 4, 2002, relating to parental authority; Law No. 2009–61 of January 16, 2009, ratifying Ordinance No. 2005–759 of July 4, 2005, reforming parentage and amending or repealing various provisions relating to parentage.

106 Olga Vinogradova

Bibliography Blanc, Olivier. Olympe de Gouges. Paris: Syros/Alternatives, 1989. Cole, John. Between the Queen and the Cabby: Olympe de Gouges’s Rights of Woman, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. de Condorcet, Nicolas. Déclaration des Droits, Traduite de l’Anglois, avec l’Original à Côté. London, 1789. de Condorcet, Nicolas. Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven à un Citoyen de Virginie, sur l’Inutilité de Partager le Pouvoir Législatif entre Plusieurs Corps. Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, impr. de L’institut, 1847. de Condorcet, Nicolas. “Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Advances of the Human Mind.” Accessed November 15, 2021. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/ condorcet1795_3.pdf. de Condorcet, Nicolas, “Sur l’Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cité,” in Paris: Journal de la Société de 1789, Tome 10 (Didot, 1847), 121–130. de Gouges, Olympe. Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne. Afterword by Emanuèle Gaulier. Paris: Éditions Mille et une Nuits, 2003. Groult, Benoîte. Ainsi Soit Olympe de Gouges. Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2013. Groult, Benoîte. Le Féminisme au Masculin. Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1980. Law No. 2002–305 of March 4, 2002. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORF TEXT000000 776352. Law No. 2009–61 of January 16, 2009, ratifying Ordinance No. 2005–2759 of July 4, 2005, reforming parentage and amending or repealing various provisions relating to parentage, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000020104273. McLean, Iain, and Fiona Hewitt, eds. Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory. Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1994. Mousset, Sophie. Olympe de Gouges et les Droits de la Femme. Paris: Editions du Félin, 2007.

17

THE POLITICAL CHALLENGES OF OUR CENTURY IN EDUCATION J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja

To face the question of what political challenges does education confront, or better, institutionalized educational systems, we should also understand what are the challenges that our societies, our coexistence, economy, institutions, and environment, for example, face. This is so because education cannot be understood apart from what happens in other sectors of our world to which it is indelibly linked. For the same reason, when we talk about or write about education, we also do so about our societies, about our world, about the interests and specific policies in which we find ourselves. Taking the latter into account, we cannot here, and unfortunately, detail each and every one of the challenges that both our world and education face. Doing so would take us further and take up more space than we have. Perhaps the appropriate approach is to focus on showing what is currently happening in education; what policies are dominating education. To do this, we could start with what Pasi Sahlberg calls the Global Educational Reform Movement, (GERM). A, if we may allow the analogy, pathogenic germ that circulates both through the educational policies that different countries are applying (regardless of the degree of development of their educational systems), and through those that are promoting, directly and indirectly, supranational organizations such as the World Bank and the OECD, among others.1 Sahlberg notes: Since the late 1980s, centrally prescribed curricula, with detailed performance targets… frequent student and teacher assessments and evidence-based accountability, they have characterized a homogenization of educational policies around the world, promising standardized solutions at an ever-lower cost for those who wish to improve the quality and effectiveness of schools.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-19

108 J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja

Although Sahlberg’s views are correct, we would like to adopt a slightly broader framework here. A framework that allows us to understand the reason for these educational policies that threaten education itself as an ethical-political platform of society and that underlie the discourse not only of great politics, but also in subjectivities, daily life and that are entwined in the supposed convictions of teachers, middle managers, directors, managers, psychologists (especially), fathers and mothers. In our opinion, this framework emerges from a neoliberal normative reason that, masked by the well-worn concept of quality, is translated into aligned and emerging pedagogical policies and practices of a rationality that produces subjects and reproduces societies through practices of gerencialization, financiarization, learnification, and simplification. This means that neoliberalism penetrates the subjective layers and social relations, which affect and impact the ways of understanding and acting in educational spaces to think about education itself, canceling its own meaning. The practice of Gerencialization is translated in the school by emphasizing the mechanisms of control and management. This desire is inscribed in the first approaches that at the beginning of the 20th century set out to organize educa­ tional systems and pedagogical practice. A large part of the options that are currently proposed to our schools are based on the search for the most efficient management to increase student learning, which is to say, increase the scores measured in standardized tests.3 It is believed that once we are clear about the quasi-causal relationships between what teachers and schools have to do to achieve the desired results or achievements, we will be able to solve the learning needs of students. We find here an enormously techno-bureaucratic vision in which technical thinking is perfectly adapted to the bureaucratic needs of the system.4 Gerencialization is situated as the fundamental concern of the organiza­ tion of the system, of the schools and of the teaching practice. Education translates into management, that is, in a procedure that seeks to order, standardize teaching action and, a fortiori, pedagogy.5 With Gerencialization, we stop talking about education, we hide it under compliance with the performance standards and, therefore, we set aside any type of reflection on the meaning of education, on the subject and the society that the school forms for the strengthening of a good and just, equitable, inclusive, and supportive life. The realization of Financiarization in the school, accounts for the constant economic pressure on education and the form that neoliberalism has currently adopted in general and especially in its incidence in daily life.6 Financiarization, also understood as commodification, has invaded and turned into commodities, sources of profit and earnings, areas that are linked to human rights and care, as is the case of education.7 The great paradox here is that in addition to attributing exchange value or capitalizing education, through the idea of human capital, for example, we intend to justify the goodness of education by its economic value, by its repercussion on the economy of the subject (their aspirations in the market) and in the development of the – supposed – productive wealth of the country.

The Political Challenges of Our Century in Education 109

Two notorious examples are found in the James Heckman equation8 and in the widely extended concept of human capital.9 The investment itself in education is justified only because it is a resource for the future, a “good for the future” as if it were an investment, or a set of shares of stock, but not because it is a right of every citizen.10 Education is reduced, as Biesta11 points out, to being an instru­ ment for external ends and purposes; in this case economic. By imposing that education is a form of negotiable and economically quantifiable capital, such as a commodity,12 it is enough to recognize the degree to which having an education generates profit (both for individuals and companies) and therefore becomes an investment privileged and profitable. It has become a custom in education to reduce its complexity to the concept of Learnification.13 Just listen to politicians, technocrats, school managers and parents concerned about the future of their children. The word that emanates from these various actors is always the same: the students’ learning and their “concern” for their improvement and increase. But this reduction is absolutely negative and biases and diminishes our vision of what pedagogy is and distorts the meaning of education. As Biesta14 has pointed out, the language of educa­ tion has been replaced by the language of learning: a silent explosion.15 We talk about learning environments, learning communities, learning opportunities, learning experiences and lifelong learning, as well as assurance of learning, performance, and learning standards, among others. When we accept learnifi­ cation, we refer to something of an individual and individualistic nature16, which in turn serves to understand learning as part of the productive mechanics and economic transaction, highly desirable for neoliberal societies like ours. Schools are expected to be the institutions in which money (vouchers, grants, tuition, etc.) is converted into (market) value for the learner,17 with which we reposition ourselves and reiterate the financiarization that we analyzed before. From this logic, the interest on the learning needs is transformed into an eco­ nomic transaction in which to satisfy the learner’s consumption needs efficiently and at low cost. Let us bear in mind that a better education entails deep learning; but we can learn without being able to educate ourselves as human beings. Therefore, asking ourselves what we want to become as subjects or what we want for the new generations through education, confronts us with a much broader and more complex panorama. Talking about education invokes values, worldviews, experiences, diverse practices. Education, therefore, connects us – as Deleuze and Guattari would say – with the richness of the plane of consistency or immanence, which the mere mention of learning could not account for.18 Perhaps the most generalized forms of neoliberal penetration of the school have been its strategy of standardization and quantification. The standards become “the ways in which we order ourselves, other people, things, processes, numbers, and even language itself.”19 Through them we build objective reality, i.e., we objectify the world, we ensure its stability and permanence; as Busch indicates, they are recipes that by

110 J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja

the mere act of repetition “creates a reality that is ordered, regular, and stable.”20 Standards are not only applied to goods but also to people. There is an enormous symmetry between the standards designed for people and for goods, as they are essentially alike and they also function to keep the world of goods and the world of people together and interwoven.21 Standards as political devices, have infected politics itself and educational thinking, regarded as devi­ ces of the neoliberal economic policies.22 Standards Based Reforms, Quality Assurance initiatives, audits and accountability regulations are examples of the use of standardization and represent an assault on education through the spread of standardized tests, reinforcing homogeneity and the measurable and evalu­ able sense of achievement (assessment by testing).23 It is about homogenizing the heterogeneous reality of education.24 Quantification is the other pillar on which simplification rests, which, in turn, is developed from standardization. When we standardize, we leave the ground clear for quantification through the measurement of compliance or achievement of the established standard. Let us remember that the standards must be measured, tested, and examined. They not only have enormous quantitative functionality, but they act as rules that we should or should live by. Quantification as well as stan­ dardization has many possibilities, but especially both in international metrics such as most of the LISA (Large International Scale Assessment) tests, among which the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests stand out, as well as in national metrics through the so called High-Stakes Testing (like SIMCE).25 These metrics quantify, classify educational systems, schools, students. By classi­ fying and legitimizing, the hierarchical lists of results and products hide the his­ torical, social, cultural and biographical contexts. The individuation that quantification produces annuls any sense of the common and of the social.26 With quantification we are faced with what Brown27 has pointed out as the dismantling of the social and is part of what Foucault28 has called population biopolitics, that is, the calculating management of life, the organization of power over life. Beyond the simplification itself, quantification controls, or seeks to control life, thereby removing the meaning of life itself.29 In conclusion, gerencialization, financiariza­ tion, learnification and standardization with its consequent quantification operate as determining devices of current educational policies and practices and have caused a simplification of the ethical-political support that education supposes for societies.30 This is a process of simplification and, therefore, reduction and nar­ rowing down of what is implied by the complexity of education understood as life and social justice. It is about the reduction of a field, the impoverishment of a perspective, the epistemic atrophy to understand life, and the foreclosure of com­ plex and holistic thinking, in such a way that our societies and our lives can be easily controlled. What to do? What can we do, how and with what to face these educational challenges. It would be pretentious on our part to show the correct path to travel. On the contrary, we would like to point out some more ideas that we hope will serve

The Political Challenges of Our Century in Education 111

us so that in practice itself, in the educational practice, we can make decisions and guide our actions. 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

We have to assume that education is inevitably a political (and not a technical) act, because in and with it we model a subject and by extension we prefigure a society. The curriculum that we accept configure, a nor­ mative order and an evaluative scale that will translate into the ways that we will have to coexist in the common space. At this point, the issue of “awareness” (concientization) of teachers on is a relevant issue versus the false slogan of the political right about the neutrality of educational prac­ tice and its defense of a non-ideologized education.31 Education as politics always supposes placing oneself on a horizon of ideological sense, but also rejecting others. Wondering where we are? And what worldviews do we possess? Are peremptory and urgent questions. Aiming for neutrality is not only fooling ourselves, but blurring the meaning of education itself. Institutionalized education must insist on being the public space of com­ pulsory associativity that allows citizens to gather together in a common, secular and republican territory in which they all meet through the culture of dialogue and the development of social justice.32 The school must put life and its care at the center.33 The pedagogy of care and life are fundamental axes to confront neoliberalism that destroys life by commercializing it, measuring it, and comparing it. The school as a space for citizenship is an inclusive space that assumes difference as the power of a real democratic coexistence, which encourages self-government in the student body and the notion of constituent power versus instituted power. The school is the axis of cultural transformation that has a territory to recreate, empower and unite around a particular story and for social justice. A justice that is also expressed, and with increasing urgency, both as ecological justice in caring for the environment and in caring for another who lives in the common space, as affective justice that promotes diversity and true life.34 Our form of agitation is in a radical pedagogy, which not only allows us to understand class relations and injustices in our societies, but also emphasizes critical dialogue and dialectical analysis, as pointed out by Macrine, McLaren, and Hill (2010) of daily experiences.35

The future will tell us if this is possible.

Notes 1 José Félix Angulo Rasco, “Poner el Cuidado y el Afecto en el Centro de la Pedagogía,” Voces de la Educación (November 2021): 17–34. 2 Pasi Sahlberg, “The Global Educational Reform Movement and its Impact on Schooling,” in The Handbook of Global Education Policy, Karen Mundy, Andy

112 J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja

3

4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Green, Bob Lingard, and Antoni Verger, eds., 129–44 (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 130. A clear example is found in the relationship between the PISA tests and the OECD Universal Basic Skills, which in turn are related to the economic development of countries, as found in studies of Eric Hanushek & Ludger Woessmann, Education Quality and Economic Growth (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007), Eric Hanushek & Ludger Woessmann, The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). Here, it is being argued that systems have to be guided in their decision-making on educational poli­ cies by OECD experts. A clear example of technocracy. For the critique of Hanushek and Woessmann’s postulates, the accurate critiques of Hikaru Komatsu & Jeremy Rappleye, “A New Global Policy Regime Founded on Invalid Statistics? Hanushek, Woessmann, PISA, and Economic Growth.” Comparative Education (2017), and Jeremy Rappleye and Hikaru Komatsu, “Is Knowledge Capital Theory Degenerate? PIAAC, PISA, and Economic Growth,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, (2019), are recommended. William Davis, “The Neoliberal State: Power Against ‘Politics,’” in The SAGE Hand­ book of Neoliberalism, edited by D. Cahill et al. (London: SAGE, 2018), 273–83. As Boyte says, the technocratic politics, “It is largely a politics without a name, presenting itself as an objective set of truths, practices, and procedures. Technocratic politics turns groups of people into abstract categories. It decontextualizes “problems from the civic life of communities” (80), in Harry Boyte, “Public Work: Civic Popu­ lism versus Technocracy in Higher Education,” in Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey, edited by David Brown and Deborah Witte (Washington, DC: Kettering Foundation, 2007), 79–102. Something that Marx already knew under the name of the fetishistic character of the merchandise. See Karl Marx, El Capital, Tomo I (Madrid: Akal, 1976), 101–17. On financialization see Arlie Russell Hochschild, Mercantilización de la Vida Íntima: Apuntes de la Casa y el Trabajo (Buenos Aires, Katz, 2008) and Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018). Fernando Atria, Derechos Sociales y Educación: Un Nuevo Paradigma de lo Público (Santiago: LOM, 2014). James Heckman and Dimitryi V. Masterov, “The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children,” Review of Agricultural Economics 29, no. 3 (2007): 446–93. Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Fernando Atria, “Derechos Sociales y Educación,” passim. Gert Biesta, El Bello Riesgo de Educar: Cada Acto Educativo es Singular y Abierto a lo Imprevisto (Madrid: S.M., 2017). Rita Segato, Contra-Pedagogías de la Crueldad (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2018). The concept of “Learnification” has been proposed by Gert Biesta, “Against Learning: Reclaiming a Language for Education in an Age of Learning,” Nordisk Pedagogik 25 (2005): 54–66. Biesta, “Against Learning,” 58. John Field, Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2000). Biesta, “Against Learning,” 57. Biesta, “Against Learning,” 58. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ¿Qué es la Filosofía? (Madrid: Anagrama, 1993), 39. Lawrence Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 3. Busch, Standards, 74. Busch, Standards, 75.

The Political Challenges of Our Century in Education 113

22 José Félix Angulo Rasco, “Standardization in Education, Neoliberalism’s Device,” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 18, no. 2 (2020), http://www.jceps. com/archives/9265. 23 Angulo Rasco, “Standardization in Education,” passim. 24 Hans-Dieter Meyer et al. “Accountability: Antecedents, Power, and Processes,” Teacher College Record 116 (2014): 1–12. 25 SIMCE means Sistema de Medición de la Calidad en Educación (Quality Measure­ ment System in Education). See M.T. Flórez Petour, Análisis Crítico de la Validez del Sistema de Medición de Calidad (SIMCE) (Oxford: Oxford University Center for Educational Assessment, 2013); Daniel Pettersson et al., “On the Use of Educational Numbers: Comparative Constructions of Hierarchies by Means of Large-scale Assessments,” Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 3, no. 1 (2016): 177–202. 26 Silvia Redon Pantoja, José Félix Angulo Rasco, Natalia Vallejos, “El Sentido de lo Común como Experiencia de Construcción Democrática: Estudio de Casos en Escuelas en Contextos de Pobreza en Chile,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 23, no. 13 (2015). 27 Wendy Brown, En las Ruinas del Neoliberalismo: El Ascenso de las Políticas Anti­ democráticas en Occidente (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2020), 46. 28 Michel Foucault, Historia de la Sexualidad: La Voluntad de Saber (México: Siglo XXI, 1977). 29 Jon Hovland, “Numbers: Their Relation to Power and Organization,” in The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society, edited by A. Rudivow Saetnan et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 21–40. 30 Axel Honneth, “La Educación y el Espacio Público Democrático. Un Capítulo Des­ cuidado en la Filosofía Política,” Isegoría, no. 49 (2013): 377–95. 31 See Paulo Freire, Pedagogía del Oprimido (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971). 32 Silvia Redón Pantoja, “Escuela Pública y Ciudadanía,” AUFOP Revista Inter­ universitaria de Formación del Profesorado 19, no. 2 (2016). 33 José Félix Angulo Rasco, “Justicia Afectiva: Una Necesidad Educativa y Política Ina­ plazable,” HEMICICLO Revista de Estudios Parlamentarios, no. 24 (2022): 51–64. 34 Alain Badiou, La Verdadera Vida: Un Mensaje a los Jóvenes (Barcelona: Malpaso, 2017). 35 Sheila Macrine et al., “Introduction,” in Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Educating for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-liberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–13.

Bibliography Angulo Rasco, José Félix. “Justicia Afectiva: Una Necesidad Educativa y Política Ina­ plazable.” HEMICICLO Revista de Estudios Parlamentarios, no. 24 (2022): 51–64. Angulo Rasco, José Félix. “Poner el Cuidado y el Afecto en el Centro de la Pedagogía.” Voces de la Educación (2021): 17–34. Angulo Rasco, José Félix. “Standardization in Education, Neoliberalism’s Device.” Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 18, no. 2 (2020). Angulo Rasco, José Félix and Silvia Redon Pantoja. “La Educación Pública en la Encrucijada: La Pérdida del Sentido Público de la Escolaridad.” Estudios Pedagógicos 38 (2012): 27–46. Atria, Fernando. Derechos Sociales y Educación: Un Nuevo Paradigma de lo Público. Santiago: LOM, 2014. Badiou, Alain. La Verdadera Vida: Un Mensaje a los Jóvenes. Barcelona: Malpaso, 2017. Becker, Gary. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

114 J. Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja

Biesta, Gert. “Against Learning: Reclaiming a Language for Education in an Age of Learning.” Nordisk Pedagogik 25 (2005): 54–66. Biesta, Gert. El Bello Riesgo de Educar: Cada Acto Educativo es Singular y Abierto a lo Imprevisto. Madrid: S.M., 2017. Brown, Wendy. En las Ruinas del Neoliberalismo: El Ascenso de las Polítias Anti­ democráticas en Occidente. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2020. Busch, Lawrence. Standards: Recipes for Reality. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011. Davis, William. “The Neoliberal State: Power Against ‘Politics.’” In The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism. Edited by D. Cahill, et al. London: SAGE, 2018, 273–283. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. ¿Qué es la Filosofía? Madrid: Anagrama, 1993. Field, John. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2000. Flórez Petour, María Teresa. Análisis Crítico de la Validez del Sistema de Medición de Calidad (SIMCE). Oxford: Oxford University Center for Educational Assessment, 2013. Foucault, Michel. Historia de la Sexualidad: La Voluntad de Saber. México: Siglo XXI, 1977. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogía del Oprimido. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971. Hanushek, Eric, and Ludger Woessmann. Education Quality and Economic Growth. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007. Hanushek, Eric, and Ludger Woessmann. The Knowledge Capital of Nations: Education and the Economics of Growth. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015. Honneth, Axel. “La Educación y el Espacio Público Democrático. Un Capítulo Descui­ dado en la Filosofía Política.” Isegoría, no. 49 (2013): 377–395. Hovland, Jon. “Numbers: Their Relation to Power and Organization.” In The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society. Edited by A. Rudivow Saetnan, et al. London: Routledge, 2011, 21–40. Komatsu, Hikaru, and Jeremy Rappleye. “A New Global Policy Regime Founded on Invalid Statistics? Hanushek, Woessmann, PISA, and Economic Growth.” Comparative Education (2017): 1–26. Macrine, Sheila et al. “Introduction.” In Revolutionizing Pedagogy: Educating for Social Justice Within and Beyond Global Neo-liberalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 1–13. Marx, Karl. El Capital. Tomo I. Madrid: Akal, 1976. Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. New York: PublicAffairs, 2018. Meyer, Heinz-Dieter et al. “Accountability: Antecedents, Power, and Processes.” Teacher College Record 116 (2014): 1–12. Pettersson, Daniel et al. “On the Use of Educational Numbers: Comparative Constructions of Hierarchies by Means of Large-scale Assessments.” Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 3, no. 1 (2016): 177–202. Rappleye, Jeremy, and Hikaru Komatsu. “Is Knowledge Capital Theory Degenerate? PIAAC, PISA, and Economic Growth.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 51, no. 2 (2019): 1–19. Redón Pantoja, Silvia. “Una reflexión sobre la Escuela Pública y la Ciudadanía.” AUFOP Revista Interuniversitaria de Formación del Profesorado 19, no. 2 (2016): 25–36. Russell Hochschild, Arlie. Mercantilización de la Vida Íntima: Apuntes de la Casa y el Trabajo. Buenos Aires: Katz, 2008. Sahlberg, Pasi. “The Global Educational Reform Movement and its Impact on School­ ing.” In The Handbook of Global Education Policy. Edited by Karen Mundy, et al. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2016, 129–144. Segato, Rita. Contra-Pedagogías de la Crueldad. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2018.

PART III

Struggle of Universalities, Towards a Global Movement

18

CRISIS-IMPASSE, CENTRALITY OF PERIPHERY, AND THE NECESSITY OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION Fernando A.T. Ximenes

Long Depression: The Entanglement of Crisis and Impasse We live in a period of obscurantist reaction and restoration. Capitalism and its virtue of the accumulation, commodification, and privatization of everything by dispossession continues to haunt the majority of the working masses and frees the name of planetary extinction from its imprisonment of impossibility. The current conjuncture manifests a reversal move of the global capital endless voyage that it must “nestle,” “settle,” and “establish” everywhere. Its premise of rationality to overcome the “everlasting uncertainty” of the previous modes of production and social life is now the prime, fundamental character of its own and late ideological representation of our society.1 So the problem now is not only a crisis but also an impasse – an impasse in the point of departure and the return of capital in its normal function of accumulation, its social reproduction, and planetary expansion. Capital’s international voyage brought with it new norms of conformity, domination, and implacable division – as well as uniformity that is bellicose to difference. The generalized misery in which international capital has been founded does not lead to the formation and identification of a “generalized proletariat” as a universal class capable of organizing the global class struggle. On the contrary, misery has turned the great masses, including those from international migration, into a bliss of dysfunctional exclusion. For after the end of the socialist project such a promise of a global democratic cosmopoli­ tanism to come, a world more tolerant, solidary, and equal, has been met with its opposite, the real world of fascism, racism, patriarchal-chauvinism, and hyper-sensitive moralism, prompting nothing else but the further penetration of capitalism and a reinforced and legitimated structure of exploitation. Therefore, capitalism in its creative and destructive power may perversely DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-21

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socialize productions globally, but not conjure the changes that serve its own “grave-diggers” and the purpose of communist reconstruction and revolu­ tion – it reestablishes a new normative scandalous society of anti-collectivity and reactive automized individuals. Is this not proved that any progressive move under capitalist modernity always led to march backwards? – Hence, the world, as we know it, is shaped by the courageous political struggle that transforms the impasse and crisis into a generalized rupture and durable transformative changes. We need to overcome the current impasse of radical emancipatory politics. Thus, the impasse is a determinable point of our historical time. The tragic absurdity of the struggle and nihilism of our time was a peculiar ground and consequence of the impassable crisis of decaying globalized imperialist capit­ alism. The name for this constant tragic condition is impasse, and we found impasse, not a simple name or politico-grammatical expression, nor is it simply equivalent to economist word such as stagnation. It is not only a transition, regression, finalism of particular conjuncture, or epiphenomena of crisis – not an excrescence monstrosity, nor the negation or any shift in representation, but the existential normality in between the absence of eman­ cipatory politics and the globalized imperialist capitalism as such. Capitalism is a system of accumulated impasses, and its foundation establishes upon a contradiction, crisis, and antagonism. It is a generalized system of impasse that moves from contradiction to find a new contradiction, it condenses instability and overcomes its disequilibrium just to prolong, recreate, and renew it. Crisis and impasse are their essences. Hence, it is necessary to attribute impasse in a distinct articulation. For us, the name of impasse does not represent an extension, or an expression of the essence on the surface, that is impasse as the ultimate exposition of the democratic state and decaying of an “aging capitalism” as such. It is needed to frame the impasse properly: this has represented the elementary functions in the realm of production, the circulation to the increasingly state-oriented mode of production in the Global South. The qualitative changes, continuity and stability of capitalism were not essentially invented by the crisis but also the normal impassable functions since its beginning. The contemporary conjuncture of global capitalism shows the over-expanding crisis produced under the impassable crisis of the system as a whole, to the entire capitalist modernity. The crisis persists in its long downturn and decline because it is maintained through the prolonged crisis of impasse. Isn’t all current regression and absence of emancipatory politics, prolonged downturn, and stagnation of global capitalism reflecting the deepening, and expansion, of both entangled crisis and impasse in the normal function of capitalism as an impassable system and crisis prone contradictory system? Today we witnessed the merging of two structural fields that permits a deep impasse of a crisis, and a crisis of impasse. The current situations imply the need to move beyond the dominant univocal understanding of the disorder. The impasse now became the dominant axiomatic name of contemporary conjuncture, perhaps

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an uncanny real that we must accept and to transgress. The combined distinction with crisis conditioned the unity between both, reconstituted toward a new sub­ stance of the system and current representation. According to the necessity of understanding this combined disorder-obscured substance and representation that forced us to rethink and rediscover the contemporary conjuncture, to foment a new social imagination, and the experimentation of collective struggle and the capacities to mobilize the balance of forces on the international level that will lead us to transcend the global capitalism.

The Capitalism Historical Limits, Crisis of US Hegemony, and the Centrality of Periphery We have all agreed that the self-renewal capacity of the capitalist mode of pro­ duction has approached its terminal end, and is in decline. The role of the United States as the chief imperialist that organized the international capitalist order of accumulation was also in the tragic demise, a sign to the entire crisis of EuroAtlantic capitalist modernity marked with the long “fall in the absolute mass of profit.”2 In another, the contradiction between core and periphery is the inherent essence, and will remain a core aspect of global capitalism as a whole. That relations of domination between the capitalist center and periphery operated to maintain the continuity of impasse in the periphery: the condensation of pre- and non-capitalist relations (superstitious, reactionary autocrats, patriarchal and so on) immersed in the dominant social relations of the commodity. For this, the impasse is a permanent characteristic of periphery capitalism. Since the era of capitalist imperialism in the form of colonialism until the globalized neoliberal financialization, any possible solutions from the core capitalist were rooted in the international law of unequal and contradiction between divided regions. Since the 2008 financial (systemic) crisis manifested that, to rescuing national and international capital always ended up by rein­ forcing more contradictions and antagonism, deepening crisis and inequality in the national state and between core and periphery – it means having the plea­ sure to introduce more destructive policies and to get rid of aid (dismantling social rights and so on) to the stagnated popular-class on a national basis and to ensure a continuous economic austerity and wealth drained in the Global South in order to maintain the flow of value and valorization of money in the center. It is to subject this essence of impasse that necessitates the conditions for the smooth process of global capitalist integration based on domination of the capitalist center to periphery. This self-served process of inward progression of the center at the expense of mass super-exploitation and impasse of periphery that served as the strength but also the fragility of global capitalism and the need to rearticulate this as the strategic necessity of the dominated class and people of the Global South against the national and global capital. This all shows, the late globalized neoliberal financial capitalism is by other extended categories is the last collective class strategy of restoring and

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managing the permanent crisis and impasse of global capitalism – and the current prolongation of crisis and impasse has drowned our master and their spectator into the amorphous reality. The gaze upon our bourgeoisie transparent cosmopolitan world is now filled with the “absence of all vision and visibility.”3 For us, the question today is not how we see the light at the end of the tunnel that somehow might be a train that is quickly approaching us – the problem today is, we have enormous vision enough, but we are confused and blinded in the trans­ parent daylight world that every move led only to move nowhere. We need a con­ stant retrospective view of the past, to reappropriate strategic time and to reinterpret the present – it permits a praxis revolutionary to transgress current obscure and limitations of our past. The chain of global value or hegemony of the commodity is unable to overcome its essential contradictions. But it is not ethical to hold that the system was tasked to “destroy” itself without total interruption and rupture. Hence, it all presupposes a both exit and enter that no longer become a clear and viable road. The only formula for our ruling masters is to wage an intolerable class war against the workers and people of both regions, mostly the South. And the horizon of hopes and alternatives emancipatory politics will always emerge from the unseen, exclu­ ded world as it happens to the rise of European capitalism as periphery region in pre-capitalist world-system and the historico-political revolt of the Periphery against the Center as the dominant history of twenty-century. From this, a new possibility of generalized historical reawakening and prolonged political rupture of the Global South will offer to the refoundation of international communist and global struggle.

Toward a New Collective Struggle of International Organization We need to rearticulate the internationalized symptomatic appearance and deep essential cancer of the system into a generalized interruption and durable rupture. Lenin’s 1915 pamphlet Socialism and War, namely on the need to turn the “imperialist war into a civil war”4 necessarily means to us in the era of Generalized Monopoly Capital,5 that we shall transform it into a rupture of international spa­ tially generalized crisis of accumulation. This all required a prolonged, durable, and generalized strike and rupture politics in both regions. So, what we think of effective reinvention of Lenin’s missed opportunities6 is the reconstitution of a new international workers and people emancipatory organization. To mention a few, the existing World Social Forum with their horizontalism and pacifism and the Fourth International are deeply Eurocentric and nihilistic puritanism – we need more than these. The new international organization is capable of performing and reconstituting as the laboratory of permanent revolutionary praxis. It is not simply a laboratory of imagination, or simplistic discussion, but to channel the political struggle – that is, a central organization for coordinating the creative invention of collective revolutionary subject, or forming class-identity and collective capacities – for experimentation

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of politics, solidarity, mobilization and strategic actions that translate as an international political “class struggle.” Here are some historico-political encounters. The only belief on the revolutionary role of the proletarian in the advanced capitalist society is the product of failure politico-historical thought, inscribed in the continuing hier­ archical order and diffusion of global capitalism (throughout colonialism until nowadays positivist age) – our social chauvinist Western Leftist in the North is committed to this. And this legitimizes the ideas, reinforcing the historical authority and geographical centrality of proletarianism in the capitalist center while denying the strategic vitality of the working masses struggling in the periphery and opposing the national revolutionary project of the South. This Europeanism only sustains the inability to overcome the structural crisis of emancipatory politics, and shall be rejected and transgressed. A truly international form of international communist and political struggle shall be refunded on the vitality and correlation of class forces of both regions. Therefore, we need to break the chauvinism of workers-people in the backward and advanced capitalist states that only reinforces the fragility of struggle in the existing international division of labor. However, it is not simply a reconstruc­ tion of a new form of internationalism, but a possibility of universalism – a new multiple collectivity that conditioned by and for the reinvention of militant international and universal proletarian subjectivity emerged as a common his­ torical horizon in the epoch of decaying globalized imperialist capitalism. For this, we are also not advocating a stage and uniform tactic between people and workers of both regions. We are proposing a coordinated collective struggle of multiplicity. Hence, we propose a politics of international organization that correlates the strategic difference and vitality of the North–South to challenge and disrupt globalized financial capital, US hegemony, and its imperialist allies. For instance, some have concluded that, the South and their current authoritarianismlaced with capitalism only a temporal stage of regressive capitalism into the obsolete phase and replicate the old forgotten past of Europe, traversing from absolute to liberal democracy as the benign friends of capitalism. On the other, some said the gravity of global capital had shifted to emerging and rising powers such as China or Asia in general. However, our historical formations were always situated in the “polarized” structures and path functioning according to the necessity of global capitalism. Thus, the capitalist economy has moved into the global phase, but it is essentially fragmented, uneven. It entails various potent of political states to preserve and uprooted capitalism from without: repressive fundamentalist state, neoliberal dictatorial, welfare capitalist states, bourgeoisie developmental state, multiparty autocratic state, all is in the South. Therefore, to coordinate the global solidarity and actions is to recognize and map out the multiple and heterogeneous terrains. However, class-in-itself had become increasingly regressive and problematic – the first duty of political struggle today is to reevaluate and rethink these heated questions. Our decades demand us to rethink – the new dialectic suggests that

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there is no division between matter and idea – when some suggest dissolving the thinking told the non-thinking masses of “what is to be done” precisely forces us on the need to dissolve the division of act and think – it is necessary to rethink the thinkable act in a continuous creative praxis – this means thinkable act in politics, not only exception to history that now manifest impasse of emancipatory politics. Therefore, we need to translate the social crisis and impasse into a long and generalized rupture – this cannot be done with short and long riots or uprising, but a coordinated and organized rupture toward a durable political project of exiting globalized imperialist capitalism, combining all forms of praxis delinking and decolonizing projects, a general­ ized strike and people revolution, both in urban areas and the countryside, in the periphery and the center. And this is the necessary beginning for a new form of the collective laboratory of international struggle. What we need today is not an exceptional resurrection of history in the form of hor­ izontalism, anti-hierarchy militant but politics of organization – and this required the “return of strategy,”7 a dialectical move of politics within/outside an organization that is capable to mobilize a collective democratic demand, organizing a mass social intervention and rupture that in its immediate aims is to restore popular sovereignty and to construct popular national economy by “delinking” from the imperialist capitalism order, of the reconstruction of democratic planning and socialist management of the economy, of maintain­ ing the power of resistance and counter the aggression of capitalism and imperialism, not to mention the national political dominant class. After all, capitalism, since its inception, will remain a totalitarian system. The freedom of today’s “world market” is nothing but a centrally planned economy controlled and directed by the dictatorship of oligarchies in the center, freedom of few to freely exploit and control many. The progress and growth of capitalist modernity is constantly accompanied by absolute poverty and inequality and its continuous robbery on the majority super-exploited in both regions by the ruling class. The absolute mass concentration and centralization of capital in the center mean the socialization of mass poverty and the losers of happy globalization in the periphery. What we call development under capitalist modernity is a tumorous development and growth established through the pre­ datory destruction of ecology, women, and working people. Thus, it is a ghostly world-system that plunged us all into social turmoil and reduces us into a displeasure survivalist animal that the dominant ideology from our master, busiest politicians, conformist middle-class, pacifist liberal and reactionary evil obsessed with a nostalgic mythical past diffused with more than our wakeful existence and working hours in order universalize the dogmatic maxim of pri­ vate ownership and inequality in capitalism, or to valorize the extraction of mass surplus from the majority creators of value and wealth while depriving them into extreme poverty that selling their labor to parasitic non-producer in order to survive as a natural condition.

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Hence, we are all thoroughgoing between a spectacle of prehistoric illusion and postmodern absurdity and barbarity. Our innocent Fukuyama didn’t inau­ gurate the end of history in 1989, but celebrated a new beginning to capitalism’s long downturn historical march, to its absolute end. What is the official name of our temporal reverse and the exceptional “rebirth of history”8 following the false proclamation of the “end of history”? – It is resurrection and hope. In our long period of depression and cynicism: decaying, regression, demobilization, and obscurity must follow with the permanent radical critics and struggle. Our century ahead is dedicated to these courageous names of struggle, to the rebirth of prolonged and generalized historical intervention and militant politics – that is to say, to a prolonged and generalized rupture to transcend the hegemony of globalized imperialist capitalism. The long road of depressive capitalism is accompanied by a long courageous combative struggle toward world socialismcommunism. In this new beginning of the irreversible march on universal emancipation, the collective interventions and transformative struggle to trans­ cend global capitalism are vital to the reconstruction and strategic direction of international communist. Hence, modern historical inventions and their contradictions suggest to us that the modernity of twenty century until now dominantly associate with the capit­ alism and imperialism – What we really need is, the new alternative of moder­ nity. We struggle for the realization of a generic universal society not some regression to the idealist old glorious past or to wash capital dirty surfaces and manage its exploitative essence. What we strive for is to abolish the existing social order and construct a new society based on love-bonded associations of united individuals and collective civilization without private property, and that includes substituting the egotistical individual and identity with solidarity and difference – the name is communism. Hence, this is right to put in here that, “disorder” really occurred in the “heaven” while the revolution was still “on its passage through purgatory.”9 So, be courageous! International Workers and People, Unite!

Notes 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Vintage, 2018), 27. 2 Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi, “The Matrix Cannot Be Reloaded: A Lacano-Marxian Perspective on the Current Economic Crisis,” in States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Sce­ narios, edited by Heiko Feldner, Fabio Vighi, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Routledge, 2014), 19. 3 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 48. 4 See Vladimir Lenin, Lenin’s Collected Works (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970). 5 See Samir Amin, Three Essays of Marx’s Value Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013). 6 Slavoj Žižek “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Man­ ifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 13, nos. 3–4 (2001): 190–8.

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7 Daniel Bensaid, “The Return of Strategy,” In Movements of Movements: What Make us Move? (Part I), edited by Jai Sen (India: OpenWord, 2017). 8 See Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History (London and New York: Verso, 2012). 9 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel De Leon (Chicago: Dodo Press, 1907), 95.

Bibliography Amin, Samir. Three Essays of Marx’s Value Theory. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013. Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of History. New York: Verso, 2012. Bensaid, Daniel. “The Return of Strategy.” In Movements of Movements: What Make us Move? (Part I). Edited by Jai Sen. New Delhi: OpenWord, 2017. Feldner, Heiko and Fabio Vighi. “The Matrix Cannot Be Reloaded: A Lacano-Marxian Perspective on the Current Economic Crisis.” In States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist Scenarios. Edited by Heiko Feldner, Fabio Vighi, and Slavoj Žižek. New York: Routledge, 2014. Lenin, Vladimir. Lenin’s Collected Works. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Daniel De Leon. Chicago: Dodo Press, 1907. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. London: Vintage, 2018. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Fall of Sleep. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 13, nos. 3–4 (2001): 190–198.

19

EUROPE’S MALIGNANT SUPPLEMENTS, I KNOW. BUT NEVERTHELESS… Imanol Galfarsoro

Introduction Halfway through “My European Manifesto”1 Slavoj Žižek points to the If­ by-whiskey fallacy. Named after a famous speech by a Mississippi politician on whether upholding prohibition or legally restoring the consumption of alcohol, the dilemma translates into the European question as follows: If by Europe you understand the space of liberties and human rights, I am all for it; if by Europe you understand the fortress of white colonialist racism, I am absolutely against it. Establishing such a neat and comforting divide, of course, prevents any rational, or for that matter reasonable understanding of European and, by extension, Western civilization. Instead, Žižek’s Manifesto accounts for a line of reasoning, which is both consistent as well as it is committed. Consistent in that the core of his message can be traced back to his “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’”2 written some 20-odd years ago. Com­ mitted in that he does not dodge the difficult question of Europe’s irreducible ambivalence but confronts it heads on: To those liberal views upholding the inherent virtues of the European tradition he responds that the solution is not to imagine a European entity devoid of its malignant supplements; against those mounting an all-out decolonial critique of Eurocentrism, he responds that a distinct European legacy must be acknowledged, the radical kernel of which is still worth fighting for universally.

Universalism and Its Discontents The idea of emancipatory universalism emerges from within the European tra­ dition of the Enlightenment, Žižek contends relying on the radically ambivalent heritage that the word Europe conveys. Žižek’s plea for universality is, if not DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-22

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entirely pitted against, certainly at odds with the main intellectual and activist approaches of the Left worldwide. In fact, the main aim of critical approaches such as “decolonial thinking,” “intersectional theory” and “left populism,” is, precisely, to challenge the dominant Eurocentric paradigm of a Western civili­ zation claiming its own universality only from and for a particularly violent white-racist and male-patriarchal power position. My own contention is this: on the one hand, there is no denying that the politically transformative aim of these alternative knowledges resides on concretely situating economic inequality and the different forms of political violence exerted upon a multiplicity of subordinated or subaltern identities, cultural, sexual etc. On the other hand, however, denying subaltern identity politics of what Alain Badiou fittingly defends as the potential of universalism for radical innovation in every particular situation3 on the back that universality is always-already exclusive to a dominant Western particular, can hardly make the cut. The struggles for different oppressed identities are struggles for equality, not recognition. When we criticize the common Western notion of the universal for its particular male, white, bourgeois… bias, the duty of this critique should not be to replace universality with a dispersed array of unconnected alternative particularities but to visualize the distortions of this false Western universality and seeking for a true universality instead. In other words, when dealing with the issue of universality, or of how the universal is held to ransom by concrete oppressive particulars focused on the exclusion of subordinated Others, turning the equation upside down and placing emphasis solely on the particularity of subordinate differences is all too simply not good enough in political terms. For the issue is not to compute the fact that abstract universality represents a par­ ticular and specific form of domination organised around patriarchal and racist Western civilization. The issue is that to overcome the excesses of Western Eurocentrism, accepting the marginality of the Other as an inherent value also amounts to pure formalism – a point British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton underlined in his book on Ideology: “It is pure formalism to imagine that otherness, heterogeneity, and marginality are inherently political benefits regardless of their specific social content.”4 An additional shortcoming Žižek does not overlook is how for subaltern identity politics the local becomes the privileged location of political struggle and resistance failing to properly recognize, in the process, how the world constitutes now a wholly unified and homogeneous marketplace: “Capitalism is not just universal in itself, it is universal for itself, as the tremendous actual corrosive power which undermines all particular lifeworld, cultures and traditions, cutting across them, catching them at its vortex.”5 Žižek’s position against the culturalisation of politics is very much in tune, here, with Badiou’s take on the direct relation between globalized capitalism and the proliferation of local identitarian cultural politics.6 Both come to argue that the false universality of a globalized capitalism is devoid of any inherent cultural ideology and thus adapts to local particularities without any

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contradiction. In this context, verifying and ascertaining the distortion or partial particularity on which global capitalism relies, white, civilized, etc., the liberating response should be the struggle to replace this dominant and false uni­ versity by reconnecting and articulating diversity within the coordinates of true universality. A universality that does not dissolve all particulars but that all strug­ gling particularities share despite their differences. For Žižek then, the correct Leftist stance is: Bring out the hidden antagonisms of your own culture, link it to the antagonisms of other cultures, and then engage in a common struggle of those who fight here against the oppression and domination at work in our culture and those who do the same in other cultures.7 For Žižek, Europe’s radical emancipatory tradition is not about “a dialogue of cultures” but a “solidarity of struggles.” Hence, he is clear as to the generic contour that worldwide solidarity and collaboration among struggling parti­ cularities should take: What must be praised is not the struggle of a particular marginalised identity formation as such but also the struggle within that identity itself. Take the example of the nation. Certainly, what Žižek is saying can be traced back and directly related to the classic two-nations-thesis of generic communism in a traditional Marxist way. Along the same path, however, although from a neat anti-colonialist position, Fausto Reinaga also offered the theory of two Bolivias, the Mestizo Bolivia exploiting and erasing Indian Bolivia. This he did in his The Indian Revolution, 8 a book deeply influenced in its time by Fanon, Malcolm X and Black Power politics and remains, nowadays, a work of reference in decolonial studies. The point, here, being that the paragraph above alone forces, or anticipates, forms of strategic theoretical reconciliation between a renewed idea of com­ munism with decolonial and intersectional politics. A reconciliation that also encompasses other sources of knowledge that cannot be abandoned on the simple account of them being European or Western in origin. In this sense, moving from the power dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Latin America to the historiography of subaltern classes in India, in a once acclaimed work, Dipesh Chakrabarty also provided hints for Provincializing Europe. 9 without rejecting knowledge from Europe per se. From the specific postcolonial per­ spective of subaltern studies, Chakrabarty did not only remind us that academic disciplines, must be constantly interrogated and history, in his own case, is only one way among many of approaching the past. By attempting to provincialize history and democratise historiography, Chakrabarty also aimed to account for both the inadequacy yet indispensability of the European intellectual tradition – an approach that allows us to grasp the very Žižekian parallax view according to which, while many Eurocentric paradigms must be shaken from that sense of superiority informing their intellectual practice, there are clear instances, nevertheless, key intellectual players, political movements, historical events,

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institutions etc. that cannot be entirely discarded on the sole grounds of belonging to, or stemming from the European tradition. In short, despite Europe’s decline in the present geopolitical situation the issue of universalism must still be addressed without seeking refuge in the idealism of the obvious: We know, what seems like universality is just a particularly oppressive Eurocentric identity claiming itself to be universal. It is a false universality. But nevertheless, the radical legacy of the European Enlightenment that Žižek reclaims, is still a fundamental intellectual and political tool, not least, as will be shown in due course, to shape true universalism out of the most particular and localised of struggles. In this sense, Žižek’s nuanced plea for universalism remains relevant on the face post/decolonial critique privileging the particular within the overall con­ text of subaltern identity politics. In the same breath, Žižek’s position is far from the outright defense of the Enlightenment project in its centrist liberal form – a liberal defense, as we are to see next, which dwells on accounts of a human success history devoid of antagonism, of humanity without subjectivity. Instead, Žižek’s shared emphasis with Badiou on the subject over the human, rests on the centrality of universality as consubstantial with radical antagonist, emancipatory politics.

The Subject(ed) of Eurocentrism While pointing to all that is positive in the European or Western Enlightenment heritage, including secular liberal democracy, Žižek sustains that it can only be defended, preserved, and developed further by breaking away from old Europe and classical liberalism. With this Steven Pinker disagrees, claiming to himself a contemporary centrist liberal view between the political right and the political left. Here we leave aside the political right, not because the increasingly present and real danger of right-wing politics is to be dismissed. In fact, no means should be spared to combat religious intolerant fundamentalism and xeno­ phobic, anti-immigrant populist nationalism based on Western white supre­ macy. But because in addition to the strawman we all love to hate, the “political right” also works as a smoke screen diverting the debate away from the main overall decolonial critique, namely, that of the relation between the West and the Rest and how Eurocentrism and the Enlightenment project itself are complicit with slavery, colonialism, imperialism, world wars, genocide etc. Regarding the Rest, Pinker’s Enlightenment Now 10 or his most recent Rationality 11 refute this main critique outright: it is the other way around, the claim would be, the Enlightenment is the very way out to overcome the excesses of Eurocentrism. In regards of the West, likewise, Pinker shares none of the pessimism informing the main traditions of the humanities and the social sci­ ences on the (still ongoing) effects of progress and modernisation: inequality and alienation (Marx), stratification and bureaucratization (Weber), isolation and neurosis (Freud), anomie and suicide (Durkheim)… Look around now, Pinker rebukes, despite all the apparent gloom of our time, things are going well. In fact, they have never gone so well. If we look at the material reality,

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there is the evidence for all to see: the average life expectancy of human beings is longer, safer, healthier, richer, and happier than at any other time in history. And all this is thanks to the European Enlightenment: Science, Reason, Humanism, Progress… What is striking in Pinker’s approach is how both capitalist relations of production and political subjectivity vanish in favour of an antagonism-free objective reality speaking its own – as if science, reason, humanism, and progress grew unrelated to how, say, British Marxist social historian E.P. Thompson depicted the general conditions under which The Making of the English Working Class took place: “The commercial expansion, the enclosure movement, the first years of the industrial revolution, all took place within the shadow of the gallows.”12 A main shortcoming, then, of Pinker’s liberal approach lies in his defense of the European Enlightenment without any substantial sense of historicity, let alone of the political proper – a point that Žižek does not miss as he qualifies the extent of Western success: “For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the ‘civilized’ West was brought by exporting ruthless violence and destruction to the ‘barbarian’ Outside.”13 Hence, in contemporary terms, in addition to the still relevant Marxist critique of capitalist oppression and violence, the main postcolonial critique of Eurocentr­ ism also holds: the imperial Global North are the direct beneficiaries of a more prosperous civilization at the expense of the exploitation and suffering in the Global South. However, this is still not the whole truth either. Žižek’s own depiction of the barbarian outside requires further qualification – something Eagleton does in his Idea of Culture, with the Irish national question also in mind: If the science of anthropology marks the point where the West begins to convert other societies into legitimate objects of study, the real sign of political crisis is when it feels the need to do this to itself. For there are savages within Western society too, enigmatic, half-intelligible creatures ruled by ferocious passions and given to mutinous behaviour; and these too will need to become objects of disciplined knowledge.14 Eagleton’s figure of the “savage inside” allows us to shift the discussion to a political and intellectual terrain beyond the self-congratulatory liberal thinking that Pinker encapsulates. An admittedly muddy terrain, which, in turn, leftist thinking, or to be more precise, Western metropolitan leftist intellectuals and activists alike, also choose to grasp in rather unsoiled terms. In this respect, a couple of examples from my own end of the woods may assist to attenuate their excessive propensity to discern on behalf of everyone else what historical conditions, political situa­ tions, or intellectual traditions can or cannot be transferred over and articulated together based on one’s own presupposed first-hand access to the latest in true revolutionary political theory.

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Alain Badiou, renowned worldwide nowadays, features in our first example. Interesting, here, is how Bruno Bosteels, expert scholar and translator of his works into English, reminds us of the following on the reception of Badiou’s work at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. At that time, Bosteels points out when “Badiou’s work, which was barely being ‘discovered’ by English-language readers, had been a familiar reference for many radical intel­ lectuals and militants in Latin America and Spain – from the Basque country, where Theory of Contradiction was commonly used in the 1970s, all the way to Mexico and the Southern Cone.”15 One should also add that Basque was the first language into which Badiou’s Ethics was translated, neck and neck with Žižek’s Slovenian, of all languages, since both were published two years after the original in French. And I know, I hear you: this is just an anecdote. But nevertheless: For a recipient of standard narratives excelling in exoticising a given cultural and linguistic “exception” along Eagleton’s “enigmatic, half-intelligible creatures ruled by ferocious passions and given to mutinous behaviour” quip, this “anecdote” also speaks of a political “exception” within the context of the Western, certainly Anglophone, metropolitan left of the time that I prefer to underline for the sake of your own intellectual humility. The second example further complicates standard metropolitan leftist opinion as to how political struggles against colonialism should or should not converge. Put in contemporary terms, the classic divide would read like this: anti-colonial struggles of the Global South cannot be conveniently transferred into other situations in the Global North with vastly different historical conditions. Which leaves one wonder, then, why Irish and Basque representatives took part in the Guard of Honour carrying Nelson Mandela’s coffin shoulder to shoulder with representatives from Mozambique, Angola, Algeria, Palestine, and West Sahara. And I hear you again, I know: This does not invalidate American Marxist Fredric Jameson’s double take that, one: as we look closely to “the very entity called Europe… history dissolves into a microcosm of national rivalries, cultural envy, racisms and collective hatreds”;16 and that, two: the period of decolonisation led to a popular unity forged around the project of national liberation and the achievement of the Nation-state “which generally did not turn out so well.” But, nevertheless, one: your obvious attempts to conveniently collapsing national liberation and right to self-determination with right-wing xenophobic nationalism remains perverse beyond repair; and two: there are no boundaries, either geopolitical or conceptual, to internationalist comradeship built on solidar­ ity. Solidarity, that is, with political subjects as they are to themselves, not as we wish them to be to fit our own always-already self-righteous bill.

Conclusion: Žižek with Badiou The personal may be the political but politics is certainly not personal. This discussion review rests, first, on my own personal difficulty to imagine any political emancipatory project set against universalism. In this context, Jameson’s

Europe’s Malignant Supplements, I Know. But Nevertheless… 131

take remains relevant also that “Eurocentrism is an essentially ill-advised political slogan (which) becomes a wildly inaccurate target and a very impre­ cise way of sorting out friends and foes.”17 Second, it points to possible the­ oretical reconciliations, not least between subaltern identity politics and the generic idea of communism informing Žižek and, of course, Badiou, among many others. This may appear as an opportunistic academic exercise unworkable on questions of principle alone. Regardless, the various examples given along the way speak of this gap already being bridged in practice. For, surely, the outcome of contesting the structural, top-down oppressions and dominations that intersectional identity politics aims at, cannot then be hor­ izontal intra-subaltern fighting, as it is often the case, “gender critical” Fem­ inism on trans, Afro-Pessimism…. On the contrary, building militant complicities across lines and across the world requires finding convergences in the shared purpose of advancing the causes of political freedom and social equality beyond, also, well passed the date stifling discussions on revolution or reform, horizontal social movement or vertical organisation etc – so long, of course, the “impossible” of revolution informs the “possible” of reform that cannot become a managerial end in itself, and the antagonist demands of social movements prevail and command over the intrinsic tendency of orga­ nisations towards bureaucratization. In this sense, one cannot but adhere with Badiou on two accounts: his general theory of the subject understood as the operator of a singular truthevent and his notion of “communist invariance,” a kind of lowest common denominator that all struggles for political freedom, social justice, gender equality and/or against racism, homophobia, ecological disaster, etc. retain. In this way, communist invariance refers to various connections than can be established among diverse emancipatory politics, both diachronically and synchronically so to speak in old structuralist parlance. In other words, just as an obvious common denominator can be found between Spartacus’ slave revolt and Toussaint Louverture’s Haitian’s slave revolution, the same con­ nection can be established between both events and the struggle of your own political emancipatory movement. The point being that the context-specific dimension of any particular struggle draws from some universal invariants, freedom, equality, justice… that motivate and justify the correctness of that particular struggle lead by our conscious decision and the freedom of dis­ cipline, persistence and determination to press on. Let nobody be misled or mistaken though: identity is not subjectivity. Blending cultural identity and political subjectivity is misleading in that the fight against oppression and domination is not the fight for identity or culture. Recall Žižek here: Our engagement in common struggles also requires unearthing the hidden antagonisms within our own particular cultural iden­ tities. Furthermore, therefore, conflating the particularity of cultural identity with the singularity of collective political subjectivity is also a mistake. In this sense, Badiou’s general theory of the truth-event remains of great assistance to

132 Imanol Galfarsoro

militants willing to make the effort to navigate through this key distinction between identity as the claim to mere existence of cultural, sexual, racial dif­ ferences and subjectivity as the political art of forcing new things to happen, here and now, in the spirit of universal emancipation. Because of its own format limitations one can only extend an invitation to traverse such theoretical fight, although of immense heuristic power to inform and understand practice – whether of anti-colonial movements involving savage barbarians outside and inside or workers anti-capitalist organisations also involving nomadic proletarians. Another limitation of this exercise may be that the shallow rhetorical declarations of vague, generic political principles rest on privileging old, mostly white male knowledge at the expense of unforgivable omissions. If by privileging old, male knowledge you understand this implies either blindness to the new political concerns of younger generations or unawareness of the role of feminism in shaping contemporary political struggles, I am absolutely against it. If by privileging old, male knowledge you understand this does not stand in the way of your discipline-bound organisation deciding to be lead on feminist principles by feminist comrades, I am all for it.

Notes 1 Slavoj Žižek, “Mon Manifeste Européen,” Tribune, Le Monde, May 13, 2021. 2 Slavoj Žižek, “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” Critical Enquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 988–1009. 3 See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 4 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 128. 5 Slavoj Žižek, “Tolerence as an Ideological Category,” Critical Enquiry 34, no. 4 (2008), 672. 6 See Badiou, Saint Paul, 9–13. 7 Slavoj Žižek, “The ‘Remedies’ that Gates & Soros Use to Try to Offset Evils They’ve Caused Don’t Cure the Disease, but Prolong It,” rt.com, July 29, 2021, no longer available. 8 Fausto Reinaga, La Revolución India (La Paz: Ediciones PIB, 1969). 9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 10 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Penguin Books, 2018). 11 Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters (New York: Penguin Books, 2021). 12 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 61. 13 Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso, 2002), 132. 14 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 27. 15 Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics (Duran, NC: Duke University Press. 2011), xiii-iv. 16 Fredric Jameson, “Afterword: On Eurocentric Lacanians,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 13, no. 1 (2019), 167. 17 Jameson, “Afterword,” 166.

Europe’s Malignant Supplements, I Know. But Nevertheless… 133

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Translated by Ray Brassier. Redwood City, CA: Stamford University Press, 2003. Bosteels, Bruno. Badiou and Politics. Duran, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. “Afterword: On Eurocentric Lacanians.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 13, no. 1 (2019): 161–168. Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Penguin Books, 2018. Pinker, Steven. Rationality: What It Is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters. New York: Penguin Books, 2021. Reinaga, Fausto. La Revolución India. La Paz: Ediciones PIB, 1969. Thompson, Edward Palmer. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1966. Žižek, Slavoj “Leftist Plea for “Eurocentrism.”’ Critical Enquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 988–1009. Žižek, Slavoj, “Mon Manifeste Européen.” Tribune, Le Monde. May 13, 2021. Žižek, Slavoj, “The ‘Remedies’ that Gates & Soros Use to Try to Offset Evils They’ve Caused Don’t Cure the Disease, but Prolong It.” rt.com, July 29, 2021. Žižek, Slavoj, “Tolerence as an Ideological Category.” Critical Enquiry 34, no. 4 (2008): 660–682. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso, 2002.

20

IS LATIN AMERICAN A REFLECTION OF THE EUROPEAN AVANT-GARDE MODEL? Jorge Torres Vinueza and Veronica León-Ron

The article “My European Manifesto” published on May 13, 2021, by Slavoj Žižek in Le Monde, aroused doubts and suspicions in Latin American minds. It was said that: “it is a true ode to Europe’s supposedly emancipatory role for the world,”1 or “Why does it claim that idea, to what end and in function of which political project?”2 The answer may be more obvious than we think. Žižek’s proposal (understanding that it is possibly aimed at a mainly European public) is to rescue the idea of an integrating Europe; however, for Latin Americans, Europe may mean the opposite. As of 2019, we have witnessed citizen uprisings with a high ethnic-political component and whose main victims have been monuments that made reference to or represented European heritage.3 Both in the United States and in Europe, monuments and statues reminiscent of their slave-owning or colonial past were objects of violence. Thus, to speak of a European heritage, touches the chords not only of the former oppressed but also of the former oppressors. Europe, in this sense, has a negative symbolic charge for Latin Americans. It is not the articulating axis of civilized life, but the image of the implantation of a type of violence that came to undermine pre-existing civilizations in America. Whether it was an incorrect reading of history or a political propaganda by militant intellectuals, this image is part of the collective memory. Now, Žižek’s proposal is not so far-fetched if we analyze it carefully. In principle, Žižek intends to redefine the concept of Europe, taking into con­ sideration that “it is a complex concept, loaded with tensions.” He understands it rather as what Jacques Lacan called a “master signifier” and this is thought of as the rescue of the values that gave meaning to emancipating modernity. Precisely now that Europe is in decline and attacks on what it has built are multiplying, we must take their side. Because the main target of these attacks is not racist, questionable heritage, etc. of Europe, but that unparalleled DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-23

Is Latin American a Reflection of the European Avant-Garde Model? 135

emancipatory power that is the Europe of secular modernity, of the Enlightenment, of human rights and freedoms, of solidarity and social justice, of feminism.4 In other words, Žižek does not refer to colonialist, racist, ultra-nationalist Europe but to avant-garde Europe and proposes a split from old Europe to rescue the European heritage. In the Latin American context, the difference between old and avant-garde Europe, as we have said, is not so clear. But in a basic exercise of synthesis, we could place “old Europe” as our colonial heritage and “avant-garde Europe” as attempts at modernization: emancipation, progressivism, secularization, and so on. However, this could end up being a game of abstract models and it is not our intention to generate a binary debate between the good and the bad that could have been done in history. In this regard, it seems prudent to analyze, separately, two phenomena that, in theory, belong to the avant-garde European heritage. In the first place, modernity and its Latin American variant have been studied by authors such as Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo, Lander, and Lugones, but this study focuses on the interpretation made by Bolívar Echeverría, which allows access to the cultural dimension of mestizo identity; and, in second place, emancipation and the memory of collective struggles. In the end, we will do a re-reading of Žižek’s proposals regarding the global response of the left in contrast to the reality of South America.

Modernity and the Baroque Perhaps, one of the most decisive (and debatable) factors of Latin American identity in the global world is its deficit of modernity. Being called third world or not appearing (except Brazil) in economic blocs such as the G7 or the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are important indicators, but that is not the worst of evils. An incipient industry (which was identified with the Dependency Theory and, also, with the work of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) puts Latin America in the queue of the distribution of vaccines for COVID-19. However, it is worth noticing that, while there is talk of lack of modernity in the Latin American context, in Europe (especially in the critical tradition) there is rather qualms about the idea of modernity and the ideology of progress that accompanies it. Walter Benjamin, in his On the Concept of History, warns us of the terror of the ideology of progress with his “Angelus Novus.”5 This fire warning was given before the terrors of the Second World War: concentration camps, gas chambers, programmed bombings, nuclear weapons. Besides all this, humanity currently faces pollution, global warming and, to say the least, the concentration of wealth in specific geographic areas. It is also important to highlight that modernity has not been a homogeneous phenomenon and, in particular, the American continent is not an example of it. In this regard, Bolívar Echeverría would comment that there are two models of

136 Jorge Torres Vinueza and Veronica León-Ron

modernity in America. The Protestant model, which developed in the United States, and the Catholic model, which had a boom in South America. European modernity from the 16th to the 18th centuries, as well as its re­ construction in Latin America, is fundamentally a modernity of Southern Europe or the Mediterranean world, while “American” modernity, from the 17th century, rather derives from a northwestern European modernity. And, in this case, the geographical difference points to an identity order difference that had great importance in the consolidation of the capitalist mode of reproduction of social wealth. The first is a “Catholic” modernity, the second, a “Protestant” modernity, not so much in the theological sense of these qua­ lifiers as in their identity-political sense, that is, in which it concerns the degree of radicality of the Christianization of everyday life.6 The Andean civilizations, by force or by negotiation, generated a relativized Christian culture adapted to that reality. This can be seen in the way their symbolic universe represents modernity as a cultural hybridization; as an example, in El Alto, the “cholets” designed by the local architect Freddy Mamani or the La Mariscal neighborhood, in Quito, and its eclectic castles. In Latin American Independence, at the beginning of the 19th century, the symbols of freedom were intermingled with the Indigenous and religious Christian fig­ ures, far removed from the secular-atheistic sentiment that revolutionary France had. Even today, in the funeral, agrarian, social, and political rituals of the Indigenous communities and the mestizo population of Ecuador there is an important fusion between the Andean worldview and Christian religious rites. An alternative modernity was generated, which differed from the Northern European or the North American. Progressively, a specific type of civilization was established, with specific ways of working and adapting to reality. For Eche­ verría, this is an ethic that is different from that developed in classical antiquity or the industrialized Atlantic, who would formulate realistic and romantic ethics. The ethics of the Hispanic world and of Latin America, in particular, is the Baroque Ethos, a product of the Catholicism-Protestant conflict. This ethic “accepts the contradictions of capitalism, but its attitude is not passive towards it; it accepts that there is an impossibility to change reality, but despite this acceptance it seeks within the impossible, the possible.”7 It main­ tains a rebellious and conservative contradictory impulse that allows it to coexist with someone who has different ways of being, without demanding that person to become an equal in order to be recognized, it does not deny the right of the other to exist.8 There is an estrangement between the European Protestant ethos, which developed the bourgeois-capitalist lifestyle (understood as European modernity), and the Baroque Ethos that is an alternative vision of modernity which rehearses paths, routes, way outs, or counterattacks to European modernity. Through this, we find a first objection to Žižek’s argument about the “avant-garde European heritage”: in the first place, the Latin American cultural-geographical background is different, and this creates fissures around the universality of the

Is Latin American a Reflection of the European Avant-Garde Model? 137

European concept. And, secondly, the emancipatory modes, applications, and actions are not necessarily a copy of their European counterparts.

Rebellion and Chaos As mentioned previously, starting in 2019, the world witnessed uprisings, strikes, mobilizations and citizen interventions.9 In Latin America, the demon­ strations took a political path by questioning the regimes and producing, for example, the departure of the president in Bolivia or a constituent in Chile. This as a sign of reformism that seeks to challenge both globalization and, also, the idea of democracy that is supposedly inherited by Europe. Nevertheless, the uprisings in Latin America did not appear due to the influence of the French Revolution. In colonial times, the Indigenous peoples had already generated an uninterrupted tradition of uprisings and rebellions. “It is the 18th century that presents the most numerous and homogeneous group of Indigenous subversive movements, those that inaugurate a tradition of rebellion, which will extend beyond the republican era.”10 In this case, it could be argued that the enlightened doctrines and, later, European liberalism or socialism gave interpretive coherence to these phenomena. However, history has proven that subversive logics can provide with clues regarding emancipatory dynamics (profane illuminations, Benjamin would say). In this sense, the “Indigenous” rebellious practices did not have the rationalistic and metric aspect of European modernity. For example, it is known that the festival in the Andean world had not only recreational components but also political-strategic ones. In addition to festive functions and magical rituals, the “bebezonas” could be transformed into true assemblies of a political nature, which is proven in several uprisings, including the one led by the foreign Indians of the town of Riobamba, in 1764. There is no doubt that the “bebezonas” were the occasion to criticize the commissions of the Spanish authorities, discuss plans to defend Indigenous interests, forge political agreements and even elaborate the utopia of an Indigen­ ous government, a witness points out that after of the Riobamba uprising, during their meetings and drunkenness, the Indians still cheered Obando, one of their leaders.11 Therefore, in this case, politics does not acquire the Europeanized repre­ sentative form with its technicians and specialists, but rather includes a higher level of grassroots participation. The Indigenous people of the pre-republican world better understood the meaning of political participation by generating strategical dynamics in recreational spaces. Thus, the formal and instituted space of the colonial regime fades into a playful and instituting space of society itself. In the words of Stefan Gandler, “the coexistence and joy in the midst of chaos are highlighted, in La fiesta.”12 With this, we mark a distance both with the traditional heritage and, also, with the European avant-garde heritage. In other words, the Latin American

138 Jorge Torres Vinueza and Veronica León-Ron

heritage is both anti-colonial and anti-formalist; This is not necessarily an invitation to anarchy, but it is a call to think outside the schemes that seek to recreate Europe in other geographical spaces. That apparently is the tragic destiny of the North American nation that wants to recreate a formal democracy in places broken by contexts of regional dispute.

Towards a Proposal Without a Model At the beginning of this text, the interrogation of Pavón-Cuellar about which political project was Žižek referring to regarding the European heritage was mentioned. This can be found in the book The New Class Struggle where Žižek says “What must be recovered, then, is the class struggle, and the only way to do it is to insist on global solidarity with the exploited and oppressed.”13 This text does not argue against “global solidarity.” However, the Latin American experience has shown that emancipatory paths are not necessarily found in the formulas of the so-called “professional revolutionaries” but in the same social base that supports and adapts to the vicissitudes of global modernization. The idea of an avant-garde, liberating and revolutionary Europe is presented to us as an exemplary model to follow, but, in the end, it is an abstract model with universalistic pretensions. The reading and re-interpretation that Žižek makes of the European contributions should be seen, rather, as co-authorship of world emancipatory phenomena. The aim is to generate an alternative framework to explain the phenomena referring to our social history, the guidelines, and strategies within the global political field and, also, the vindication of the lost struggles of the past. Taking this into consideration will allow us to understand, on the one hand, the dia­ lectical relationship of European modernity with Latin American modernity and, on the other hand, the possibility of thinking about emancipation without the schematics of the Western tradition. Thus, not trying to build a perfect formal democracy but a possible happiness. This could not only lead to better days, but it could also mean the revindication the lost struggles of the past.

Notes 1 Andrés Kogan Valderrama, “Piel Blanca, Máscaras Rojas: El Manifiesto Euro­ céntrico de Slavoj Žižek,” Diario UChile, June 27, 2021, https://radio.uchile.cl/2021/ 06/27/piel-blanca-mascaras-rojas-el-manifiesto-eurocentrico-de-slavoj-zizek. 2 David Pavón-Cuellar, “¿Por qué Preocuparse por el Manifiesto Europeo de Slavoj Zizek?” Intervención y Coyuntura: Revista de Crítica Política, May 24, 2021, https:// intervencionycoyuntura.org/por-que-preocuparse-por-el-manifiesto-europeo-de-slavoj-zi zek/?print=pdf. 3 Enzo Traverso, “Derribar Estatuas No Borra la Historia, Nos Hace Verla con Más Clar­ idad,” Nueva Sociedad, June 2020, https://nuso.org/articulo/estatuas-historia-memoria. 4 Slavoj Žižek, “Mon Manifeste Européen,” Le Monde, May 13, 2021, https://www.lem onde.fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html.

Is Latin American a Reflection of the European Avant-Garde Model? 139

5 Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–401. 6 Bolívar Echeverría, “La Modernidad Americana: Claves para Su Comprensión,” FLACSO Andes, accessed July 1, 2021, https://www.flacsoandes.edu.ec/web/ima gesFTP/1262639834.La_modernidad_americana.pdf. 7 Carissa García Gutiérrez, “El Cuádruple Ethos de Bolívar Echeverría,” Analéctica: Revista de Filosofía Y Ciencias Sociales, no. 2 (March 2013): 1–8. 8 Stefan Gandler, “Bolívar Echeverría: Heidegger, Marx y el Che,” in Bolívar Eche­ verría: Modernidad y Resistencias, edited by Raquel Serur Smeke (México: Ediciones Era, 2015), 23. 9 Tevfik Durul, “El 2019, Año de las Protestas en el Mundo: Repaso por el Año que Termina Marcado por Diversas Manifestaciones que Dieron Lugar a Movimientos Populares a Gran Escala en 17 Países de Suramérica, Europa, Medio Oriente y Asia,” Anadolu Ajansi, December 23, 2019, https://www.aa.com.tr/es/mundo/el-2019-a% C3%B1o-de-las-protestas-en-el-mundo/1682091. 10 Segundo Moreno Yánez, Sublevaciones Indígenas en la Audiencia de Quito (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2014). 11 Segundo Moreno Yánez, Simbolismo y Ritual en las Sublevaciones Indígena (Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2017). 12 Stefan Gandler, “Curso sobre Filosofía y Estética- Sobre Bolívar Echeverría (FLACSO Ecuador) 3B,” YouTube video, 2012, 50:31, https://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=P1QwW2-u4_g, quoted in García Gutiérrez, “El cuádruple Ethos De Bolívar Echeverría,” 6. 13 Slavoj Žižek, La Nueva Lucha de Clases: Los Refugiados y el Terror (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2016), 144.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. Edited by Howard Jennings and Michael Eiland. Vol. 4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Durul, Tevfik. “El 2019, Año de las Protestas en el Mundo. Repaso por el Año que Termina Marcado por Diversas Manifestaciones que Dieron Lugar a Movimientos Populares a Gran Escala en 17 países de Suramérica, Europa, Medio Oriente y Asia.” Anadolu Ajansi. December 12, 2019. Echevería, Bolívar. “La Modernidad Americana. Claves para Su Comprensión.” FLACSO Ecuador. Accessed July 1, 2021https://flacsoandes.edu.ec/web/imagesFTP/ 1262639834.La_modernidad_americana.pdf. Gandler, Stefan. “Bolívar Echeverría: Heidegger, Marx y el Che.” In Bolívar Echeverría: Modernidad y Resistencias, edited by Raquel Serur Smeke, 19–26. México: Ediciones Era, 2015. García Gutiérrez, Carissa. “El Cuádruple Ethos de Bolívar Echeverría.” Analéctica: Revista De Filosofía Y Ciencias Sociales, no. 2 (March 2013): 1–8. Moreno Yánez, Segundo. Simbolismo y Ritual en las Sublevaciones Indígena. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2017. Moreno Yánez, Segundo. Sublevaciones indígenas en la Audiencia de Quito. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 2014. Pavón-Cuellar, David. “¿Por qué Preocuparse por el Manifiesto Europeo de Slavoj Zizek?” Diario U Chile. May 24, 2021. Traverso, Enzo. “Derribar Estatuas No Borra la Historia, Nos Hace Verla con Más Claridad.” Nueva Sociedad. June, 2020.

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Valderrama, Andrés Kogan. “Piel Blanca, Máscaras Rojas: El Manifiesto Eurocéntrico de Slavoj Žižek.” Diario U Chile. June 27, 2021. Žižek, Slavoj. La Nueva Lucha de Clases: Los Refugiados y el Terror. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2016. Žižek, Slavoj. “Mon Manifeste Européen.” Le Monde, May 13, 2021.

21 “BREXIT FOR ALL!” Why the Left Should (Urgently) Rediscover the Concept of Sovereignty Timothy Appleton

There is an apocryphal historical British newspaper headline that frequently gets quoted in jest: “Fog in channel! Continent cut off!” No Lacanian worth their salt can read this phrase without thinking of a dear theoretical figure: Lacan’s formulae of sexuation. According to those formulae, not only should the difference between the male and female subjective positions be thought of as irreducible, but it should also be thought of as so irreducible that the fact of the irreducible difference is itself experienced differently according to which side of it one finds oneself on! Another iteration of this type of difference might be the untranslatability of the left argument for Brexit – what Owen Jones dubbed Lexit – for a (radical) left European audience.1 In such situations, it is as if – to paraphrase Wittgenstein – the British activist were trying to explain their posi­ tion to a lion (or a lemming?). Perhaps this is partly a generational question. On the continent, traditional Communists appear to have much more sympathy with Brexit than young radical leftists. This raises a whole series of interesting questions. What is the nature of this generational difference? What precipitated it? Moreover, how should we understand the shift in the two groups’ respective attitudes towards nationalism? Yet there is another question that I think is more urgent than all of these, and which I shall try to deal with in this essay. It is this: why are the younger generations of leftists so comfortable with the total abolition of their democratic sovereignty? Might this way of formulating the question seem melodramatic? It shouldn’t, it’s incontestable. There is no democracy whatsoever in the EU and anyone who thinks there is has not been paying attention. Such a proposition is so obvious that it barely seems necessary to go into detail, although given the controversy surrounding it, I suppose we shall have to. First of all, people discuss the European Parliament as if it were an actual parliament. Given the name, this is probably an easy mistake to make. The only DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-24

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real connection between the two, however, is that something that we call “elections” are held in both cases, although once again, in the case of the Eur­ opean Parliament, they are nothing like what we would ordinarily understand by the term. As Wolfgang Streeck has pointed out, in the European Parliament, there is no executive to control, the chamber itself does not have the prerogative of generating legislation, and neither can it amend the European Constitution, since no such thing exists.2 In a word, there is no European “government” as such, just as there is no European “opposition.” Even when the EU kindly goes to the trouble of pretending that it has a democratically-elected President – I have in mind the pantomime of the Spitzenkandidat system – that person is at no point directly presented for public approval. One would find more demo­ cratic engagement in the Eurovision Song Contest. The simulacrous European President is actually the leader of the European Commission, which does indeed draft legislation, on the strict condition, of course, that the same body is not accountable in any way to the public. Next, we have the European Council, which decides the political direction of the bloc. It should be conceded that this body has an indirect relationship to actually-existing democracies, since it is made up of the elected leaders of member countries; nevertheless, it would be utterly incapable of responding to any truly popular demand, since all its deci­ sions are taken privately and unanimously, and it would certainly be rare to find a total radical-democratic consensus between European leaders. Now at this point, many Europhiles would proffer the retort that the blame for this democratic travesty does not lie with the European Union itself but rather with the nation states that allegedly comprise it. It will be said that if everyone were just a little bit more damn well pro-European, we could reform the bloc together and make it more like what we normally understand by a democratic polity. The problem with this argument is simple: it ignores the structural dimension of the topic. The whole point of the European Union is the suppression of national democracy. In a sense, it exists for no other reason. Even a casual look at either its history or its fundamental treaties will prove this. For example, the priority of the free market – i.e., the whip hand of capi­ tal – was enshrined in the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and has not at any point been changed since that date. But here one imagines another typical counter­ argument: “Everything you’ve said may be true, but the EU could be reformed nonetheless – anything can! – and wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Maybe it would, but that’s irrelevant. As will have been deduced from my previous comments, if there was ever an example of an unreformable political institu­ tion, it is the EU. To illustrate this point, let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that an entire country decided to break ranks with official EU strictures and demand a change of terms. Surely all other radical reformers on the Con­ tinent would lend it moral support, and the thirst for democratic change would grow and eventually become overwhelming. Well, no, in fact. How can I be so sure? I am sure because what we have described isn’t in fact a thought experi­ ment. It has already happened, in Greece. And when it occurred, no practical

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democratic solidarity whatsoever was extended to that country. When push came to shove, the reformist European left was nowhere to be seen, and the Greek people continue today to pay the terrible price for this lack of support. Earlier, I spoke of the abolition of “democratic sovereignty.” We have now discussed the democratic component of this phrase. What, then, of sovereignty? Here we reach a key point in our argument. It is well-known that etymologically, the word sovereignty has a “transcendental” connotation. It is traditionally understood to mean a minimally-infinite separation of the seat of power from the social body. However, what if it is instead interpreted in terms of, to coin a phrase, an “immanent transcendence,” this time of the subject in relation to itself? What I have in mind here is the apparent duplication – perhaps compac­ tation would be a better word – of such a subject in the moment that it takes a political decision. This formulation seems to lead us to the work of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s definition of politics in terms of the friend/enemy distinction – one which, with one or two nuances, I would myself completely accept – is wellknown, but one also should not ignore his definition of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”3 What is the connection between the two ideas? Once again, it is that of decision. As Schmitt himself says: “For as long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must, even if only in the most extreme case – and whether this point has been reached has to be decided by it – determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its political existence.”4 In other words, a sovereign people is one that decides how its friends and enemies will be distributed in a particular situation, to which one must add that such a situation – if it is political – will always be exceptional, not just in a temporal sense but also spatially, or structurally. Yet there is another, less obvious, aspect of Schmitt’s discussion that we should dis­ cuss. Sovereign is not just a people that decides, but one whose prerogative of decision is established in the same moment (even if only by themselves!). One could therefore say that sovereignty involves something like a decision to decide. This might put one in mind of Lacan’s discussion of “desire in the second degree” – the desire of desire – which would give the matter an ethical cast. Perhaps these formulations will seem rather abstract. Let’s therefore consider a concrete example. A nice case of the self-identified prerogative of the sovereign, I think, is the famous slogan of the former Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, Theresa May: “Brexit means Brexit.” This phrase produced a great deal of mirth among British liberals, due to its alleged conceptual emptiness. Not for the first time, I disagree with them. I believe that it was clear what May meant, when she employed this form of words: the Tories were going to go ahead with Britain’s exit from the European Union come what may (a promise that allowed them to form a government after the UK General Election of 2017, albeit without an absolute majority, and was even more decisive in the General Elec­ tion of 2019). More precisely, May was affirming not only the integrity of a decision that had already been made but also, in the same moment, the

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prerogative of the British people to make it. This “tautology of the decision,” then, is what I would call sovereignty. I also believe that it is the sine que non of politics, since without it, the very process of political decision-making would find itself fatally undermined. At this point, however, we reach a road bump in the argument. If the previous ideas are correct, then this means that all politics entails a sovereign moment, and not just geopolitics. On the other hand, we should acknowledge that this conclusion has a crucial correlate. It also means that geopolitics cannot be excluded from such a series. This, then, is the point at which we clearly part company from the contemporary European (or pro-Eur­ opean) left, who would rule out a priori the possibility of a national liberation movement today. They will say that any such thing would be identitarian by definition. They may even add – in neo-Marxist vein – that capitalism removes any possibility of national sovereignty. Let’s deal with these points in order. On the accusation of identitarianism, it may be useful to consider Alain Badiou’s theory of the Event.5 As in Schmitt, Badiou’s Event revolves around an antagonism in the midst of a social situation, but one should also remember that, according to Badiou, a key aspect of the constitution of such an Event is the procedure of its “efficient cause,” or agent, which he calls the Subject. In the same way, then, that an Event “revolutionises” a situation by breaking it into the Two of an antagonism, the Subject should be considered immanently revolutionary with respect to an identity that pre-exists it. This subjective split, finally, is what will guard us against identitarianism (which, I would concur, is a fundamental political problem). The question that must be asked next is logical. Is the nation an identity? It seems to me to be indisputable that this is the case. Indeed, it is an identity that most of us hold fairly dear. People who underplay its importance are usually being disingenuous, since at the drop of a hat, they will start talking about how wonderful the weather and the food is in the country that they are from. In other words, to presume – as much of today’s left does – that the nation is not a legitimate political subjectivity is also to say that neither is it a legitimate identity, which is clearly not true. Indeed, such things can never really be decided in theory. Identities are real, “found” elements (as it were), that cannot simply be wished away. Are they “finished,” or “eternal” elements? Of course not. But they currently exist, which is the key point. Indeed, one could contrast the national identity, at this level, with the European one. Nowadays, all European leftists that are anti-Brexit (at a rough guess, around 90% of them!) seem to believe that the proper terrain of political operation for any European leftist is Europe itself. But what on earth would be the basis for such a curious idea? There has never been a European demos, there is no “European politics” and there never has been, and what’s more, if the European Union has its way, there never will be. To be completely honest, I’m not really clear in what sense Europe can be said to exist at all, except (possibly!) geographically. More to the point, if it is true that politics proper involves a subjectivation of (actually-existing and contingent) identities (attached to situations), then there can be no European politics right now, for the simple reason that there is no European identity.

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What of the argument that there is no sovereignty under capitalism? This seems to me to be an exquisitely spurious contention. Apart from the fact that it ignores the singularity of political situations (global capitalism being only one of them, albeit an extremely important one), I would add that if it somehow happened to be true, then we may as well all go home and give up on politics completely, since, as I have already explained, without the sovereignty associated with a real political decision, such cannot exist. Fortunately, it is not true. To reiterate one of our key premises, there will always be a multiplicity of possibilities of resisting exploitation and injustice, up to and including (and occasionally privileging) national liberation projects. At this point, the “clever” leftist sophisticate usually changes tack and says “Ok, I will grant you the prerogative of resistance, but what good is sover­ eignty if you’re sharing powers, as you will inevitably have to do when dealing with the EU, or indeed any other country?” Another theoretical misunderstanding. Powers in the plural is not the same as power in the singular, whose other name is, again, sovereignty. In other words, it is always possible to cede certain decisionmaking powers to transnational bodies, but the singular power to decide to decide – the final word, as it were – should not be given away by national gov­ ernments, unless – once again – their real aim is to give up on politics altogether (as it so often is). Do these complaints from the contemporary leftist, then, con­ stitute a good, old-fashioned internationalist position? There is no plane of reality on which Europeanism and internationalism can feasibly be said to be synon­ ymous. The idea that they are connected because they both do the allegedly good work of undermining the nation seems to me to be fallacious. If the aim here is to make a Marxist point, I think it is also a failure. The EU doesn’t even have the minimal legitimacy and coherence that the Communist International may once have had (despite the latter’s well-documented ideological abstractionism). One could add that it is not even as democratic as the USSR was! I hope I have now made my initial position clear. I believe that, regardless of what the contemporary left says, national politics should be considered a legit­ imate political form. But in fact, I think one should go further than this. It is not just that national politics is legitimate, it is also that the concept of sovereignty is usually associated with geopolitics above all else. In other words, there is a stron­ ger connection between the two aspects than we had previously suggested. I think we should even acknowledge that geopolitics is the model of political sovereignty that most of us have in our minds. Now, I hope I have also clarified that I believe that every situation – including every political situation – is different (singular), and that I believe that these differences should be respected. Therefore, in empha­ sizing national sovereignty I am definitely not trying to subordinate one form of politics to another. I am certainly not arguing for an overdetermination of ele­ ments. What I am saying is that if we are to take the differences between situations seriously, then we should acknowledge that in certain cases, for certain people (or groups of people), one particular kind of politics may be decisive. One advantage of national politics is that it at least gives us some idea of the scale at which we are working, and the possible extension of the relevant subject that is in play.

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At this point I’d like to add a biographical note. I believe that the reason I have put forward the argument of this essay has to do with my personal political experience. During the last few years, I was active in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and for the first time, in 2017, we came very close to the radical left – a truly radical left, no if’s or but’s – taking power in a General Election in Britain. And this was clearly, in part, a geopolitical project. I must add that it was the most exhilarating, exciting, concrete, and “real” political project I have witnessed in my life. During the same period, I became very tired of crypto-philosophical leftists, from whatever country they hailed (but mainly in Europe), rejecting our approach because it didn’t fit their abstract idea of universalism. It remains inexplicable to me how pro-European, “radical” European philosophers could end up in the same camp, on this issue, as people like Tony Blair, and the most reactionary segment of British Labourism. What is more, and regardless of all the “philosophical” whinging, in 2017, we almost got this magnificent project into Downing Street. It is estimated that we were around 2,300 votes short. Soon afterwards (and, in part, before), however, the project began to be well and truly wrecked. Why? One reason dwarfs all others: the European issue. What effect did Europe have on our project? In the first place, its job was to remind Corbyn that he would not be able to do any of the things he wanted to do when coming to power due to European Commission directives. Then, when Corbyn failed at the first attempt to become Prime Minister, it sponsored ultra-liberal Europhiliac fifth columnists in Britain, who undermined the true British left (yes, I said “true” here in the sense of sovereignist) so much that its vote ended up collapsing (relatively speaking) in 2019. In a word, the Europhiles obliged us to commit political suicide. After all of this, I came to the conclusion that not only had we been right to reject the EU in 2016, but we should have done so even more vig­ orously. As so often happens, the British public was ahead of us on this. I should add – since I don’t want to be falsely accused of chauvinism – that I believe that every other European country that is under the yoke of the EU should exercise the same prerogative that the British did, perhaps – why not? – under the slogan of “Brexit for all!” I had even hoped that one of the many positive effects of Brexit would be to inspire them to do so, although this hope now seems to have sunk under a wave of negative propaganda. In truth, the British people – like many others across the continent – were never given the opportunity to decide whether they wanted to join the European Union or not. Sovereignty was simply robbed from them by generation after generation of corrupt politicians, who then acted in a performatively shocked manner when the public decided not to go on participating, on the day that they were finally asked if they had ever wanted to do so in the first place. The idea that sovereignty being undemocratically renounced is acceptable to today’s left is, to repeat, quite shock­ ing to me. I also feel that they have let “the people” down badly on this point. And this same people – who, as Jacques Rancière has explained, are ultimately more intelligent than any of their possible interpreters and representatives – have noticed this, and they don’t seem to like it. I would humbly suggest that this is a probable

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reason for the slump that the left is currently experiencing across the continent. During the Brexit vote, on the other hand, the people had the power, and the dis­ mayed reaction of the establishment was beautiful to behold. The powers-that-be could not believe the brass neck of the British, as they refused to do what they were told. I would even say that it was a political moment par excellence. Indeed, I think that Brexit is the most evidently political thing to have happened in Europe for decades. Of course, the British were subsequently insulted. They were called racists, imperialist nostalgists, every name under the sun. But it didn’t matter. For once, they had “decided to decide,” they had asserted their sovereignty. From that point on, right or wrong, their destiny would be in their own hands. The fact that this genuinely political moment produced so little sympathy on the part of the European left, who would ultimately be the beneficiaries of it, since it demon­ strated that in fact sovereignty, politics, and democracy were still possible in con­ ditions of late capitalism, I consider one of the great tragedies of the contemporary epoch, and the one attitude that must be urgently resisted today. “But what about the racism that has followed the Brexit vote?” it will finally, and pathetically, be pleaded. In honour of my country, I don’t believe such racism should be over­ stated in the contemporary British context. Nevertheless, it is true that Brexit has frequently taken a reactionary form. However, all Events – in the Badiouian sense – can be perverted. This does not mean we should not embark on them in the first place. Let us cite Badiou himself: “Meilleur vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre.”6

Notes 1 Owen Jones, “The Left Must Put Britian’s EU Withdrawal on the Agenda,” The Guardian, July 14, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/14/lef t-reject-eu-greece-eurosceptic. 2 Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2017), 156–7. 3 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 4 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 49. 5 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005). 6 “Better a disaster than non-being.”

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2005. Jones, Owen. “The Left Must Put Britian’s EU Withdrawal on the Agenda.” The Guardian, July 14, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/14/left-reject-eu­ greece-eurosceptic. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Streeck, Wolfgang. How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2017.

22 DECOLONIAL FEMINISM A Political Proposal from the Global South Isabela Boada Guglielmi

To speak of a “crisis,” after many years of deprivation and poverty for the majority of the world’s population, is an insult to human suffering when the main characteristic of the adverse conditions seems to be their permanence. Populations like that of Haiti, far from having periods of good living, con­ stantly face a context of extreme poverty and inequality, aggravated in the last few years by foreign intervention and the lack of minimal conditions to attend to natural and health emergencies. Haiti is perhaps the most visible symbol of human misfortune; however, it is not the only country in the region with structural and systemic problems. Eco­ nomic and political instability seems to be the norm in most of the countries that make up Abya Yala. 1 The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) points out that in 2020, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemics, the region went back more than 10 years in its poverty levels: more than 22 million persons were added to those living in precarious conditions as a direct consequence of dismantled or non-existent social protection.2 But we know that the pandemic has only made visible the effects of multiple oppressive systems, particularly the capitalist system, which interweaves with colonialism and patriarchy to structure a social order where most of the humankind is excluded and whose evident effect is the widening of economic and social gaps. Women and children are part of the demographic groups that have been most adversely affected by the Covid-19 pandemics. The paid jobs that are feminized have been the most affected by unemployment; likewise, un-paid jobs have expanded, particularly care work, as a direct consequence of the suspension of (in-person) school classes and of the higher number of ill relatives, fell directly on women, increasing their workload and obstructing their chances of earning a living or seeking a paid work. DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-25

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For children, the suspension of in-person classes has represented far more than a simple event or a change of modality. In poor social sectors (which are the majority), it has entailed interrupting their education without the material conditions to make another educational scheme possible, but it also has gener­ ated an increase in domestic violence, child labor, and social isolation, among other consequences yet to be known. The reality of Abya Yala is not different from those of the rest of the world, but it is replicated with other peculiarities and complexities. The 2021 Oxfam inequality report states that during 2020 (in nine months) the wealth of billionaires increased by $3.9 billion, whereas the number of people living in poverty (on less than $5.50 a day) increased from 200 to 500 million people in the same year.3 The sustained increase in both internal and international migration (increasingly as forced displacement) is another visible mark of global inequality. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) states that from 1990 to date there have been 153 million more international migrants, for a total sum of 281 million (70 million more than the total population of Brazil). And, though the percentage is small compared to the world’s population (3.6%), this “phenomenon” will continue to increase as a direct consequence of global coloniality, which manifests itself as wars and the deprivation of the lands and bodies of the inhabitants of the Global South.4 One side-effect of human movement toward so-called “high income” migra­ tion-receiving countries has been the worrying increase in discourses of hate and expressions of xenophobia, especially in Europe, where anti-immigrant, islamophobic and neo-Nazi groups are strongly re-occupying political spaces (just to mention a few: La Lega in Italy, Vox in Spain, Alternative for Germany in Germany, Fidesz in Hungary, Chega in Portugal, Rassemblement national in France, among other ultra-right political parties that are advancing in Europe).5 Indifference to human suffering has one of its most visceral expressions in the thousands of deaths occurring each year in the Mediterranean Sea, before the empty faces of the European authorities and a part of the same society, who act as dissociated spectators. In 2016 alone, more than five thousand migrants from Africa died.6 Such a complex context demands the construction of common political iden­ tities, recognizing diverse situations and histories that allow us to form strategic coalitions for emancipatory social transformation. It is in this sense that we will outline, from a critique of Eurocentric discourse, the propositions put forth by Decolonial Feminism, which, forged in the struggles and resistances of the racia­ lized bodies of Abya Yala, is a tool and a life option for confronting systems of oppression and, beyond that, the huge challenges confronting humankind.

The Coloniality of Power in Žižek The locus of enunciation and material and subjective circumstances determine the way people feel/think. Thus, Slavoj Žižek speaks in “My European Manifesto” of the

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unparalleled emancipating power that is the Europe of secular modernity, of the Illustration, of human rights and liberties, of solidarity and social justice, of feminism. We must defend the word “Europe,” not only because it contains more good things than bad, but above all because the European legacy provides the best instruments to analyze what is wrong in Europe.7 But we ask: does the “European legacy” truly provide the best instruments for facing Europe’s challenges and, in general, those of humankind? From Abya Yala, peoples organized expressions and production of knowl­ edge have questioned the “emancipating power” of the European legacy and, instead, have revealed the hidden faces of modernity (the dark side of moder­ nity? wondered Walter Mignolo),8 which are colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, as an integrated and indissoluble whole. Enrique Dussel speaks of the existence of two concepts of modernity. The first is Euro-centered [because it places this process in “intra-European phenomena”], provincial, regional. Modernity is an emancipation, an from immaturity by an effort of the reason as a critical project, which opens up to humanity, to a new development of the human being.9 This is the concept used by Žižek, which takes the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as referents; however, it does not show the “other face,” the second concept, the one that consolidated and globalized systems of oppression based on “differences.” Aníbal Quijano argues that during the colonization of Abya Yala the concept of “race” was invented based in phenotype differences. European colonists structured power and organized society by classifying people and putting them into a hierarchy. The resulting coloniality of power had its apex in the white European male, while other identities were positioned on the bottom – on the grounds of “biological inferiority” – comprising the dominated: black, indigen­ ous or mestizo men and women.10 In America, the idea of race was a way of bestowing legitimacy upon the dominance relationships imposed by the Conquest …conquered and domi­ nated peoples were situated in a natural position of inferiority and, in consequence, also their phenotypical features, along with their mental and cultural discoveries.11 The coloniality of power not only established racial differences, but per­ meated every area of human interaction, including the subjectivities and the generation of knowledge. The European legacy configured new, modern, colo­ nial, and Euro-centered forms of capital accumulation, which, far from “emancipating,” promoted and strengthened a racial division of labor through slavery, servitude, exploitation, and the deprivation of the conquered lands,

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which were pillars of the rising market and the global power. This is why the visible face of modernity and the boost of capitalist system of the 16th century would not have been possible without colonialism and all that it implies. Romantic ideas about the “European legacy” hardly recognize that modernity was (and still is, with its developmentalist discourses and its neo-colonial expressions) a justification for violence, the same one that, after 100 years of conquest and colonization, exterminated 90 percent of the indigenous men and women who inhabited Abya Yala. 12 The practices and imaginaries forged during colonization remain present in our everyday dynamics, both at a global level, with a Global North that reproduces mechanisms of control and dispossession of the Global South, and in national contexts, with a massive problem of racism: The invention of blackness and blackness as a race is directly linked to the condition of slavery and it seems difficult to transcend the bodily mark of domination that manifests itself in the references drawn by Western mod­ ernity and that continues to feed imaginaries about population hierarchies: black-slave; Indian-poor; white-civilized.13 The epistemic disobedience of the Global South not only questions this Euro-centered meta-narrative, but also reconstructs history, to make visible the hidden and essential “other face” [of] “Modernity”: the peripheric colonial world, the sacrificed Indian, the enslaved Negro, the oppressed woman, the alienated child and popular culture, etcetera… as victims of an irrational act (in contradiction with the rational ideal of the same Modernity).14 Thus, in questioning Modernity, we need to recognize that the constitution of the visible face of Europe has as a primary source the colonization of Abya Yala; that the generation of the material conditions allowing some people to live well and produce knowledge from their privileged position has been based in systems of oppression, generators of inequality, with a racial and sexual division of labor, enslaved workforce and total dispossession of the lands of the resisting peoples. [T]he great lie …is to make believe that modernity will surpass coloniality when, in fact, modernity needs coloniality to settle in, construct itself and subsist. There was, is and will be no modernity without coloniality.15

Decolonial Feminisms16 Today, the analysis of the material consequences of discrimination recognizes the existence of population groups that have been affected in different and often more profound ways. That is why it is necessary to find a basis in political

152 Isabela Boada Guglielmi

practices and the production of knowledge that allow for an integration and mobilization that considers those differences, questions their causes, and trans­ forms their material and subjective conditions to attain other forms of living. The Decolonial Feminism (henceforth DF) that emerged from the AfroCaribbean movement in Abya Yala have been established as a transformative political practice, that feeds on the above-mentioned decolonial thinking, and also on feminism, not the feminism that limits itself to questioning the patriarchal system without observing how the capitalist system globalizes poverty, but the feminism that sees an interweaving or intersection of systems of oppression: clas­ sism, sexism, racism, among others. DF presents itself clearly as anti-capitalist, and this marks a difference from the white feminist tradition. This is a decolonial political practice because it places the configuration of patriarchy – as we understand it today – as a process constituted alongside colonization/modernity and the apparatus of capitalist power. Let us remember that the definition and characteristics of the “fully human” from the perspective of the coloniality of power was reserved for white, Eur­ opean, heterosexual men, while the humanity of “other” men and women who did not and do not adjust themselves to that framework was questioned. In that sense, DF reveals that the prevailing structures of global coloniality configure neoliberalism; hence the importance of studying and understanding the current context in the light of the political practice and the decolonial epistemology produced from Abya Yala. Although DF has among its pillars the trends and contributions of the “decolonial option,” it criticizes their androcentric character. María Lugones stated that the Aníbal Quijano’s theories did not observe what she defined as “coloniality of gender,” replicating instead biological elements to explain the unequal relationships between women and men. Lugones questions that, within its framework, there exists a description of gender that is not put under a question mark and that is too narrow and hyper-biologized, for it takes for granted sexual dimorphism, heterosexuality, the patriarchal distribution of power and other assumptions of this kind.17 For DF, the decolonial process would be incomplete if it did not view racial articulation, sex, class and sexuality as integral parts of the coloniality of power (Curiel in Medina).18 Anthropological research, both on the American continent and in Africa, has confirmed other forms of social organization that existed prior to colonization, whose structure was not based in race or sex, where the undervalued category of “woman” did not exist and homosexuality and the third sex were recognized, without being the object of discrimination. Muxes in Mexico and Tidawinas in Venezuela are living expressions in the indigenous Zapoteca and Warao peoples that break the colonial dichotomy of man/woman.19 Colonial Manicheism

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included diverse oppositions beyond woman-man, such as white-black, dominated-dominator, we-others, civilization-barbarity, etc. María Lugones, quoting the research by Paula Gunn Allen (1986) – who demonstrates the existence of gynocratic societies – recalls that before coloni­ zation, indigenous polytheism represented certain deities as women, and that it was not until the arrival of Christianity that spiritual plurality was displaced by a male god.20 This element speaks of an egalitarian value, without derogatory distinctions against women, that existed in the social organization of indigenous peoples: [F]or Allen, the inferiorization of indigenous women is closely linked to the domination and transformation of tribal life. The destruction of the gynocracies is crucial to “decimate the populations through famines, ill­ nesses and the breaking down of all economic, spiritual and social structures.”21 The Nigerian Oyeˇ wùmí Oyèrónkẹ́ (1997) points out that the power structure in Yoruba society (Nigeria) was not determined by the Western gender system: The exclusion of women in the recently created colonial public sphere is a tradition that was exported to Africa during this period… The same process that categorized and reduced them from female to “women” disqualified them for leadership roles… One of the first achievements of the colonial State was the creation of ‘women’ as a category (in Lugones).22 These references serve to emphasize the colonial character of patriarchy. DF demands recognition of the struggles of indigenous and black women in Abya Yala. The recovery of historic narratives shows that enslaved women took multiple everyday actions to weaken the slave system, from absenteeism to forced work journeys to a scrupulous control of natality (abortion, infanticide, suicide), as a strategy for reducing the work force. Ten years before Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and the Female Citizen in France (a fact made widely visible in the feminist meta-narrative, although not in androcentric history), Bartolina Sisa, an Aymara indigenous woman, was rebelling against the Spanish empire, organizing her community for the revolt. The struggles of women in Abya Yala were being fought even before that feminism was formed, as collective mobilizations that defended the emancipation of peoples as a whole. In this sense, the role of women in Abya Yala has been – and is – essential for the self-determination of women and their communities. DF takes from feminism the experiences of struggle that question the process of undervaluing women, their knowledge, and the place they occupy in the patriarchal society. It recognizes how, in the social order of gender, feminiza­ tion is a mechanism of social degradation, mainly of women, but also of the

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land and of life itself. It upholds all feminist contributions to the socialization of care works, as a way of weaving affective links and recognizing the social value of such work. It recovers the contributions of Ecofeminism for another possible world, and, in fact, all feminist expressions and epistemologies that put life in the center of the fight. However, its identification with feminism is critical, since it questions the racism within feminism that, as with other sciences and interpretative frame­ works, was constituted from a privileged situation, not with respect to white European males, but to racialized and impoverished women. In this sense, DF questions the universal imposition of white feminism, which establishes a meta-narrative of women’s struggles and challenges, where universality is a Euro-centered principle. Decolonial Feminism recovers from Black Feminism the intersectionality of oppressions based on gender and skin color, emphasizing that racism is also a producer of violence, not only against women, but against black men too. Because of this, the struggle that DF bets on must be fought hand-in-hand with oppressed men. Black Feminism also questions the singular discourse of the Sexual Division of Labor, making visible the experiences of African and Afrodescendant enslaved women, since the pattern of global power imposed forced labor on them in all the spaces; however, in the “history” of feminism it has been considered valid to include only the process of European women when they were ostracized to the so-called “private realm” during the Industrial Revolution, and the other experiences have been made invisible. For DF, intersectionality is a powerful tool that has allowed us to see the imbrications of oppressions; however, activists such as Ochy Curiel have poin­ ted out the appropriation of intersectionality by a liberal narrative that has deprived it of its content, by only observing the discrimination of “diversity” without questioning the systems that produce it. Likewise, María Lugones states that this conceptual tool must be a category for provisional analysis, because the conditions and characteristics that cut across people cannot be separated; bodies cannot be divided in parts – migrant in one arm, woman in one leg, lesbian in the other, etc. Oppressions fuse within bodies: When we live as fusions that resist multiple oppressions, we can appreciate the forms in which others have conceived, given cultural form, theorized, expressed and incorporated their resistance to multiple oppressions… We have spoken of “Women of color” as a coalition identity against the monologisms, not as a racial identity. As a coalition identity, it seeks identifications that are multiple, unstable, historically situated, through complex dialogues from within the interdependency of the non-dominant differences.23 Another source of knowledge for DF is Third World Feminism, which, besides questioning the proliferation of studies about peripheral women made from the

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Western academic hegemony, in an attempt to colonize and appropriate plur­ alities, promotes – taking from the recognition of the differences – the con­ struction of coalitions and strategic affinities that allow the weaving together of connections and common political identities to face humankind’s challenges.24 In sum, DF is – as Ochy Curiel says – a life option that diverse political practices have built to emancipate themselves from the coloniality over bodies, knowledge, lands, forms, or production and of human connection. For this, the first exercise is the decolonization of our subjectivity and practices. To question everything that has been sold to us as “natural,” the hegemonic narratives; make visible the coloniality of power, reconstruct our history, and recognize the struggles and productions of knowledge from Abya Yala: To decolonize, then, means to extend the complexity of relationships and subordinations that are exerted upon those considered “others” …it means to understand that race, sex, sexuality, class, have been constructed in a particular way derived from the colonial experience; therefore, to decolonize implies to understand, first, how it was created, how it was built, and what does it imply to unhook ourselves from all that.25 The second thing is to see the imbrication of discriminations, identifying and questioning the systems of oppression, as Aura Cumes says: those who analyze patriarchy without seeing the capitalist system, do so from a privileged space and position, and vice versa.26 This exercise allows us, first of all, to recognize differences; that not all of us are in the same subordinate position, but also that it is possible to build strategic coali­ tions against the logic of power, to make community around a shared fight, because the systems of oppression are indivisible, and the fight must be indivisible too. The resistances and alliances of the Global South – following Boaventura de Sousa – are built from shared experiences of injustice. In this sense, the tools of the decolonial option, combined with feminism, present themselves as a pow­ erful political practice, which calls for the collective articulation of multiple subjects, through community political practices, to confront the deprivation of bodies, land, and life itself.

Notes 1 From the Kuna language, a term invoked by Indigenous peoples to name the American continent. But it is not simply a synonym, but a deeply political stance derived from the decolonial epistemic struggle. In this article we will use Abya Yala to refer mainly to the countries spanning from Mexico to the southernmost point of the continent. 2 Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, “Panorama Social de América Latina, 2020,” 28 (Santiago: CEPAL, 2021), https://n9.cl/51raw. 3 OXFAM International, “El Virus de la Desigualdad,” OXFAM, 2021, 24, accessed September 2021, https://www.oxfam.org/es/informes/el-virus-de-la-desigualdad. 4 International Organization for Migration, “Migration Data Portal”, accessed Sep­ tember 2021, https://www.migrationdataportal.org.

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5 To deepen this information: Michael Löwy (2014) “Diez Tesis Sobre la Extrema Derecha”; Ivo Alho Cabral (2020) “La Ultraderecha Tiñe el Mapa de Europa”; Glyn Ford (undated) “Después de la Xenofobia: El Nuevo Racismo en Europa.” 6 International Organization for Migration, “Inmigrantes Muertos o Desaparecidos en el Mediterráneo en Su Camino a Europa,” in Epdata, 2021, accessed September 2021, https://n9.cl/t9x65. 7 Slavoj Žižek, “Mi Manifiesto Europeo,” Revista Dialektika (2021), https://n9.cl/eyoqa. 8 Walter Mignolo, Historias Locales/Diseños Globales: Colonialidad, Conocimientos Subalternos y Pensamiento Fronterizo (Madrid: Akal, 2003). 9 Enrique Dussel, “Europa, Modernidad y Eurocentrismo,” in La Colonialidad del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales, Perspectivas Latinoamericanas, edited by Edgardo Lander (Caracas: FACES, UCV, UNESCO, 2000), 65. 10 Anibal Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina,” in La Colonialidad del Saber. 11 Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder,” 284. 12 Eduardo Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina (Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1971). 13 Akuavi Adonon, “Soy Negra y No Soy Afrodescendiente: El Desarraigo de los Mexicanos Negros y el Discurso Oficial del Reconocimiento,” Revista Norbis, no. 10 (2022), 19. 14 Enrique Dussel, “Europa, Modernidad y Eurocentrismo,” 71. 15 Mignolo, Historias Locales/Diseños Globales, 34. 16 This paragraph, which represents the proposal for an emancipatory struggle, will be built based in the constructed genealogies and the contributions produced mainly by Ochy Curiel and María Lugones. 17 María Lugones, “Colonialidad y Género,” Tábula Rasa, no. 9 (2008): 82, https:// www.revistatabularasa.org/numero-9/05lugones.pdf. 18 Rocío Medina, “Feminismos Periféricos, Feminismos-Otros: Una Genealogía Femin­ ista Decolonial por Reivindicar,” Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Político, no. 25 (2013): 57, https://n9.cl/yv96x. 19 “From certain sexual dissidents of the South we have tried to understand that the binary notion of man-woman is not natural but a colonial effect, since a multiplicity of bodies and desire already existed previously before the arrival of the colonizers,” Ochy Curiel and Diego Falconi, Ochy Curiel Dialoga con Diego Falconí Trávez: Feminismos Decoloniales y Transformación Social (Barcelona: Icaria, 2021), 112. 20 Lugones, “Colonialidad y Género,” 89. 21 Lugones, “Colonialidad y Género,” 89. 22 Lugones, “Colonialidad y Género,” 87. 23 Lugones, “Multiculturalismo Radical y Feminismos de Mujeres de Color,” Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política, no. 25 (2005): 74, https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/ 592/59202503.pdf. 24 Chandra Mohanty, “Bajo los Ojos de Occidente,” trans. Maria Vinos, in Descolo­ nizando el Feminismo: Teorías y Prácticas desde los Márgenes, edited by L. Suárez, L. and A. Hernández (Madrid: Cátedra, 2008).

25 Ochy Curiel and Diego Falconi, Ochy Curiel Dialoga con Diego Falconí Trávez:

Feminismos Decoloniales y Transformación Social (Barcelona: Icaria, 2021), 100–7.

26 Aura Cumes, “Luchas Anticoloniales y Antipatriarcales de las Mujeres,” Instituto de Liderazgo Simon de Beauvoir, 2021, https://n9.cl/lg49i.

Bibliography Adonon, Akuavi. “Soy Negra y No Soy Afrodescendiente: El Desarraigo de los Mexicanos Megros y el Discurso Oficial del Reconocimiento.” Revista Norbis, no. 10 (2022).

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Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe. “Panorama Social de América Latina, 2020.” CEPAL 28, (2021). https://n9.cl/51raw. Cumes, Aura. “Luchas Anticoloniales y Antipatriarcales de las Mujeres.” México, Keynote speech at the Instituto de Liderazgo Simon de Beauvoir, 2021. https://n9.cl/lg49i. Curiel, Ochy and Diego Falconi. Ochy Curiel Dialoga con Diego Falconí Trávez. Feminismos Decoloniales y Transformación Social. Barcelona: Icaria, 2021. Dussel, Enrique. “Europa, Modernidad y Eurocentrismo.” In La Colonialidad del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales, Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Edited by Edgardo Lander, 59–77. Caracas: FACES, UCV, UNESCO, 2000. Galeano, Eduardo. Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI, 1971. International Organization for Migration. “Inmigrantes Muertos o Desaparecidos en el Mediterráneo en Su Camino a Europa.” Epdata (2021). Accessed September 2021. https:// n9.cl/t9x65. International Organization for Migration. “Migration Data Portal.” Accessed September 2021. https://www.migrationdataportal.org. Lugones, María. “Multiculturalismo Radical y Feminismos de Mujeres de Color.” Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política, no. 25 (2005): 61–76. https://www.redalyc. org/pdf/592/59202503.pdf. Lugones, María. “Colonialidad y Género.” Tábula Rasa, no. 9 (2008): 73–101, https:// www.revistatabularasa.org/numero-9/05lugones.pdf. Medina, Rocío. “Feminismos Periféricos, Feminismos-Otros: Una Genealogía Feminista Decolonial por Reivindicar.” Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Político, no. 25 (2013): 53–79. https://n9.cl/yv96x. Mignolo, Walter. Historias Locales/Diseños Globales. Colonialidad, Conocimientos Subalternos y Pensamiento Fronterizo. Madrid: Akal, 2003. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Bajo los Ojos de Occidente.” Translated by María Vinós. In Descolonizando el Feminismo: Teorías y Prácticas desde los Márgenes. Edited by Liliana Suárez, and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, 112–161. Madrid: Editorial Cátedra, 2008. OXFAM International. “El Virus de la Desigualdad.” OXFAM (2021). Accessed September 2021. https://www.oxfam.org/es/informes/el-virus-de-la-desigualdad. Quijano, Anibal. “Colonialidad del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In La Colonialidad del Saber: Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales, Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Edited by Edgardo Lander, 281–348. Caracas: FACES, UCV, UNESCO, 2000. Žižek, Slavoj. “Mi Manifiesto Europeo.”Revista Dialektika (2021): https://n9.cl/eyoqa.

23 UNIVERSALITIES The Power of Lack . ˘lu Evren Inançog

In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels the narrator Elena Greco says: Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city …is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.1 In this sense, today, every city in the world is Naples, where their inhabitants have lost trust in the promise of unlimited progress by the liberal-capitalist democracy. The rise of populist leaders and parties all over the world is a symptom that the system is malfunctioning. Covid-19 and the ongoing climate crisis have further fueled the existing discontent all over the world. In order to cope with this discontent, we have been searching for a way to be “whole” or to be part of a unity that will give us peace. We can trace this search in litera­ ture, cinema, TV, and in other arts. Though one wants to be whole or part of a unity, lack in fact, is a blessing, especially during the times when humanity needs solidarity more than ever. Today, on the one hand, we have been witnessing the rise of populist nationalism on the right side of the political spectrum. On the other hand, left-wing politics has been dominated by identity politics. That’s where we confront the deadlock of any politics based on identity. Let’s trace this dead­ lock in the case of the Cyprus question. Identity is one of the core issues of Cyprus that has remained unsolved for a long time. Many times, even the ones DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-26

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who are supposed to emphasize class issues are caught in this identity struggle. If one is normally leftist, in addition to supporting the reunification of the Island s/he is expected to underline Cypriotness (Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot at least) as an identity, rather than to adopt Turkish or Greek identities. Consequently, debates about the Cyprus issue oftentimes end up as an identity struggle, which is not a true struggle, due to the deadlock of an identity in general. For this reason, Cypriot micro-nationalists who constitute themselves against Greek and Turkish identities cannot define what exactly Cypriot identity is. The irony of this is that nobody can describe what a Cypriot identity is, nor can they identify its difference from a Turkish Cypriot, Turkish, Greek, or Greek Cypriot identities. This, of course, does not mean that Greek or Turkish identities can be defined. All those symbolic national identities on the island; Turkish, Greek, Turkish Cypriot, Greek Cypriot, Cypriot are constructed by antagonism, and hence cannot be defined with their positive features. In his column in the Afrika Gazetesi, Turkish Cypriot journalist S¸ener Levent attempts to distinguish Turkish Cypriot identity from Turkish identity through highlighting the different food habits of Turkish Cypriots and Turks. As a reaction to a census in northern Cyprus, Levent claimed that Turkish Cypriots are losing their identity due to mainland Turks settling in Cyprus, thereby staking an ironic claim that instead of Turkish Cypriots, Turks should be counted. He writes, “Don’t count the ones who drink coffee, count the ones who drink tea… Don’t count the ones who smoke ‘Benson’ count the ones who smoke ‘Samsun.’”2 as Turkish Cypriots are more likely to drink coffee when they visit someone’s house, whereas Turks are more likely to drink tea. He even refers to cigarette brands that are preferred more either in Cyprus or in Turkey while trying to distinguish Turkish Cypriot and Turkish national identities. And yet there still are Cypriots who like tea and there are Turks who prefer coffee to tea. As we see in Cyprus case, what is problematic about identities is not only that these identities exclude some individuals but also that they can never include all the particular items that make up these identities. These particular items are either too many or less so. identities are never whole. This is true for all identities, thus what is universal is the failure of all identities to become whole. It is never possible to reach an identity by adding its particular features together. Hence, in this context, nobody is Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, Japanese, German, woman, man, father, tea­ cher, doctor, artist, or barber enough. All symbolic identities fail and this very failure itself is universal. In other words, there is a lack or an antagonism that haunts all identities. Todd McGowman (2020) argues that “There is universal solidarity because no one fully belongs and everyone deals with lack. No one who transcends the society’s structuring absence gains total belonging.”3 Despite its negative association, lack can be a blessing that can lead humanity to a universal solidarity beyond identities. As a reaction to the feeling of incompleteness, we desire to be whole. This desire, oftentimes, is expressed with the metaphor of “being home.” We can trace the desire to be home in literature, cinema, and other artistic and cultural pieces. Chloé Zhao’s film Nomadland which won best picture at 2021 Oscars

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tells the story of Frances who moves into her van, living like a nomad in a nat­ ural park after losing her job and house during the financial crises in 2008. When a girl who knows Frances says to her, “I am sorry for your house,” Frances replies, “I don’t have a house but I have home.” Frances’ home is nature. The discontents of life, though, find Frances in nature as well. Although she finds a temporary peace when she takes a walk in the countryside or when she swims in a lake, she can’t run away from the contradictions and discontents of life; soon she has to face numerous problems. There is no permanent peace for Frances. In this sense, Frances is not home when she lives in “nature.” The movie fails to portrait the new-age axiom: Nature is our home in which we are whole. The England national team played the final against Italy at UEFA 2020 foot­ ball championship. Before the final match many English fans shared the slogan “It’s coming home” on social media. This slogan, indeed, refers to football’s history: It’s widely accepted that football developed in England before spread­ ing and becoming a popular sport across the world. This slogan, though, was even more meaningful considering the fact that the UK has recently left the EU. England, as one of the countries that make up the United Kingdom, has left the European Union and come “home.” Coming home would solve England’s pro­ blems; at least, this was what the Brexiters hoped. In other words, The Brexiters wanted to go home where they would be whole. Is¸ık Barıs¸ Fidaner (2021) argues that such home is a place in which the sexual relation, in Lacanian sense, is possible.4 No wonder, the song that was rebranded to mark England’s Euros run by the band Atomic Kitten “Southgate You’re The One (Football’s Coming Home Again)” is originally entitled “Whole Again.” England lost the final game. This defeat hid the fact there was no home to be returned to. There is no home where we can be whole; no home in which there is sexual relation. Leaving the EU doesn’t seem to solve England’s pro­ blems just like living in nature didn’t solve Frances’ problems. It seems that searching for home in which we will be whole, getting rid of life’s discontents will keep haunting us in the movies, songs, slogans, fictions, and other artistic and cultural pieces. Being home, oftentimes, is associated with our childhood. Our childhood is home we left to where we want to return. Turkish poet Edip Cansever writes: “Childhood is like the sky. It never goes away.” Mladen Dolar opposes this with Kafka. In his short story entitled “Investigations of a Dog” Kafka’s protagonist, which is a dog, says: “There are more important things than childhood”5 Dolar takes Kafka’s sentence as a most serious political slogan: “There are more important things than childhood: this is also the slogan of psychoanalysis, which indeed seems to be all about retrieving childhood, but not in order to keep this precious and unique thing, but to give it up.”6 After all, living in the past, longing for returning home that has never existed makes us melancholic. In his manifesto published in Le Monde, Slavoj Žižek (2021) argues that we have to defend Europe which is the target of attacks because of its emancipating power like no other, the Europe of secular modernity, of the Enlightenment, of

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human rights and freedoms, of solidarity and social justice, of feminism.7 The Europe that Žižek defends is not based on a pregiven European identity but rather on a master signifier that signifies a union of values like freedom, equal­ ity, gender equality, secularism among others. These values are open-ended and change throughout time. In this sense, a Europe that signifies these values is not a completed project but rather an ongoing process. Hence, a Europe that is not based on identity but on values is castrated; it’s an ongoing project that will never be completed. In Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun the protagonist, a solar-battery robot with artificial intelligence, named Klara fails to become human.8 Although readers can easily identify with Klara when it comes to her curiosity, willingness to learn, and readiness to sacrifice herself for her human friend, she lacks some­ thing, and this prevents her being human. What Klara lacks, however, is not something that human beings possess, but rather, something that humans too lack; it is the kernel of love and sexuality. In other words, Klara fails to be a human because she lacks the lack. Klara doesn’t need love nor solidarity. As artificial intelligence, Klara does not need to be in a society. Though Klara notes a fundamental loneliness to the human condition – “Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially” – Humans are social beings in need of one another. When Manager sees her in the yard where Klara is waiting for her “slow fade,” she offers Klara to change her location and put her together with other robots for company. Klara declines Manager’s offer. She does not need other robots. She is okay with her loneliness. On the contrary, feeling incomplete plays a crucial role to bring people together. Even though Klara fails to become a subject, she cannot avoid malfunctioning as a system. Is¸ık Barıs¸ Fidaner (2020) argues that “what disrupts a conscious will is an unconscious desire, and what disrupts a system is a malfunction.”9 Does acknowledging that a system will always malfunction lead us to pessimism? Not necessarily! Let’s approach it from a different perspective: Any oppressive system would necessarily malfunction at some point as well. Saul Newman (2006) rightly argues that for Lacan “there is always a lack in the structure of power”10 In this sense, power is never absolute. There is forever a “lack” haunting power. This is in line with Is¸ık’s argument that systems always malfunction. No matter how flawless an oppressive system functions, at some point it stumbles, there is always an inherent failure in all systems. In the Wachowskis’ Matrix, despite its sophis­ ticated technology, the system malfunctions. The Matrix produces Agent Smith, something that works against it and with Agent Smith we reach a self-sabotaging inconsistent system. We can also trace the malfunctions of our own bodies via biology. In his popular science book Human Errors, A Panorama of Our Glit­ ches, From Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, Nathan H. Lents (2016) writes about the errors of our own body. According to Lents copying errors made when DNA is duplicated in preparation for cell division show how even our DNA’s copying system malfunctions.11 Cancer is also a product of the malfunctioning of our own body. Cancer in the body is what Agent Smith is for the Matrix. Since the

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Matrix’s oppressive system can never be absolute; it does not stop Leo, Trinity, and other rebels from finding a space outside the Matrix’s control to start a struggle against it. Let us remember Rilke’s famous lines: “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” We can rephrase these verses based on the lack of the structure of power: “Beauty and terror. You’ll face it all. Don’t give up. Just keep struggling. No power is absolute.” Orwell’s Big Brother can never have absolute control. The Matrix will always malfunction. Covid-19 has demonstrated that in order to succeed in struggling against pandemics we need international cooperation. Thus, a new structure beyond nation-states is needed. The ongoing climate crisis is another example of severe crisis that requires an effective international organization beyond nation-states. To keep the international system as it is does not seem sustainable. A uni­ versality based on lack can make us come together in solidarity. This requires a new structure based on a new fiction and a new discourse. In Von Trier’s Melancholia, when it becomes clear that life on earth will end, Justine comforts herself and her loved ones with a fiction. However, Justine knows very well what is going to happen, she is not in denial, yet she takes living till the last minute as an ethical task. This kind of ethics is what we need today. Something that will keep us going, reconciling with the antagonism of life, and the fact that we have a lack that can never be filled. It is precisely because of this lack that we need each another. Today, we need solidarity more than ever if we want to survive the global crises facing us. If lack is universal, love is universal too. If discontent is universal, solidarity is universal too. Love is solidarity.

Notes 1 Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 4), trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2015), 337. 2 S¸ener Levent, “Beni Saymayın,” Afrika Gazetesi, March 10, 2006. 3 Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (New York: Colombia University Press, 2020), 42. 4 Is¸ık Barıs¸ Fidaner, “The Latcher from the World-Symptom: Neurope,” Zizekian Analysis, July 4, 2021, https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2021/07/04/the-latcher­ from-the-world-symptom-neurope-isik-baris-fidaner. 5 Franz Kafka, Investigations of a Dog (New York: New Directions, 2016), 44. 6 Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing Else (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 182. 7 Slavoj Zizek, “Mon Manifeste Européen,” Le Monde, May 18, 2021, https://www.lem onde.fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html? fbclid=IwAR0OEpkzHNZJNUIadm sgdxnTFk8P1eSHNsoHe8cARX8rNEwkKwJuMzdZ7ec. . 8 Evren Inançog˘ lu, “Klara and the Sun: Lack of the Lack,” Zizekian Analysis, March 21, 2021, https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/klara-and-the-sun-lack-of-th e-lack-evren-inancoglu. 9 Is¸ık Barıs¸ Fidaner, “There Are Only Embodiments and Authorizations,” Zizekian Analysis, July 3, 2020, https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/there-are-on ly-embodiments-and-authorizations-isik-baris-fidaner. 10 Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lexington Books, 2016), 145.

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11 Nathan H. Lents, Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

Bibliography Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing Else. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006. Ferrante, Elena. The Story of the Lost Child: A Novel (Neapolitan Novels, 4). Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2015. Fidaner, Isık Barıs¸. “There Are Only Embodiments and Authorizations.” Zizekian Analysis, July 3, 2020. https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2020/07/03/there-are-only-embodim ents-and-authorizations-isik-baris-fidaner. Fidaner, Isık Barıs¸. “The Latcher from the World-Symptom: Neurope.” Zizekian Ana­ lysis, July 4, 2021. https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2021/07/04/the-latcher-from -the-world-symptom-neurope-isik-baris-fidaner. . Inançoglu, Evren. “Klara and the Sun: Lack of the Lack.” Zizekian Analysis, March 21, 2021. https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/klara-and-the-sun-lack-of-the-la ck-evren-inancoglu. Kafka, Franz. Investigations of a Dog. New York: New Directions, 2016.

Lents, Nathan H. Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to

Broken Genes. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Levent, S¸ener. “Beni Saymayın.” Afrika Gazetesi, March 10, 2006. McGowan, Todd. Universality and Identity Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Newman, Saul. From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. “Mon Manifeste Européen.” Le Monde, May 18, 2021. https://www.lemonde.fr/ idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html?fbclid= IwAR0OEpkzHNZJNUIadmsgdxnTFk8P1eSHNsoHe8cARX8rNEwkKwJuMzdZ7ec.

24

AUSTERITY, BREXIT, COVID Short Circuits and a New Identity for Wales Alex Mangold

This chapter makes use of Žižek’s short-circuit reading1 to uncover several performative trends in recent UK culture and politics. The chapter presents austerity, Brexit and, the Covid pandemic as performative categories that have led to a new understanding of Welsh identity. It concludes that current Welsh identity politics illustrate a parallax gap between the United Kingdom and Wales that has the potential to lead to a more independent and more sustain­ able future for us all.

The System is Broken – Short Circuit #1 In Maid, a Netflix drama series released in 2021 to some critical acclaim, Alex, a young mother, successfully escapes poverty and an abusive relationship to pro­ vide a better future for her 3-year-old daughter. The series, set in the US, high­ lights numerous flaws and holes in the US social security system. Alex’s mother, for instance, suffers from bipolar disorder, and was abused by Alex’s dad before leaving him. Alex’s estranged father is a recovering alcoholic who repeatedly refuses help, whilst actively avoiding taking sides against Maddy’s abusive dad, also an alcoholic. Alex secures a position as a house cleaner, and with the gen­ erous help of a wealthy customer, she eventually manages to escape her deprived upbringing and her abusive relationship. In the final episode, she and her daugh­ ter arrive in Missoula, Montana, where Alex will start Creative Writing studies, with childcare and social housing provided courtesy to a generous scholarship from the University. The main problem with the series is, of course, that none of the above holds true in real life. The series may seem like it is depicting a poor woman’s struggle with an exceptionally happy conclusion, but “[t]he brutal clarity with which Maid depicts the realities of poverty and abuse falters when it comes to DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-27

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Alex’s parenting skills.”2 Alex’s unlimited patience in the direst of situations, and Sean’s eventual realization that Maddy would be better off with her mother are two examples of almost entirely inconceivable positions for people who have lived through abuse and poverty. What the show depicts instead is a young mother that succeeds only because she gives up on her own needs to an extent that sees her “endure even the most difficult, humbling experiences to provide better for her child” (Netflix).3 But by doing so, it leaves no room for mistakes or for a more normal experience of the abysmal social security system it depicts. “Maid misses a vital opportunity to explore the raging anger of mothers who have had systems that were already stacked against them break down, and the bleak truth over which mothers are allowed to make mistakes.”4 The real problem with such stories of poverty and emancipation, of course, is that they invariably perpetuate one of the biggest lies of a broken neoliberal system: “If you apply yourself, if you work hard enough, and if you’re pure at heart, you can make something of yourself.” The truth is that poverty and freedom are mutually exclusive in neoliberal capitalism. The precariousness of low wages here becomes illustrative of a perverse free market mantra: efficient exploitation means that those on the lower end of the spectrum cannot and will not seek to escape the system. Likewise, the abuse portrayed in Maid is not Alex’s fault, but the perpetrator’s. Nevertheless, the system would still like us to attribute most of the blame where it does not belong. Alex’s eventual escape seems little more than a Pyrrhic victory: while she successfully flees her upbringing to provide a better future for her daughter Maddy, the very fact that she is moving to Missoula, Montana, puts that future into question. If we bring climate change and global warming into the equation and acknowledge that climate change affects people living with multiple deprivation factors much more severely, Alex and Maddy’s happy ending proves to be far from happy. Recent climate change predictions esti­ mate that Montana could lose up to half of its bird population, triple its dangerous or extremely dangerous “heat days” and lose most of its famous glaciers within the next few decades. So why is it that the series is so appealing to people who are evidently better off? Psychologically, both inequality and sustainability are problems that require a certain type of framing to prompt public engagement. The “bystander” effect is as much a factor for climate change lethargy as it is for the public’s response to instances of inequality. Framing inequality as a group problem and as lowerclass disadvantage engenders higher support for political action than if it were to be framed as a simple income discrepancy.5 Climate change lethargy is best fought by framing the narrative against the predominant “bystander effect”6 and against availability bias and loss aversion.7 From a Lacanian perspective, however, it is quite apparent that the escapism found in the imaginary realms of our own well-endowed existence serves to hide the fissures of the Real that can be found in Alex’s story. This is best understood by looking at what Žižek calls “fetishist disavowal”:8

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I know well that neoliberal capitalism serves only a few select members of society, but I still act as though I did not know this is the case. The “Other supposed to know” will rectify the perceived injustice/inequality/climate change, so that I do not have to deal with it myself. The Real felt by the confrontation with stories such as Alex’s can be enjoyed with a little bit of jouissance: we experience a form of psychological joy when confronted with the abject – all the while knowing very well that it is unlikely to affect us personally. The fissures of the Real evident in the portrayal of Alex’s abuse and in her failure by the system are pleasantly plastered over by the notion of the symptom. As Kuldova confirms in “Fetishism and the problem of disavowal,”9 all disavowal is ideological – thereby inadvertently confirming our own fetishist and irrational belief that exploitation can be avoided if we apply ourselves and strive to provide a better future for our children. Coupled with a genuine conservative understanding that those who are better off mostly deserve their wealth,10 this inevitably leads to a system embedded and perpetually reinforced by plot structures that legitimize our own inaction.

Austerity, Brexit, and the Framing Effect – Short Circuit # 2 After more than a decade of austerity policies, the current socio-economic situation of the UK can arguably be described with tropes that would not look out of place in Maid: local councils’ budgets and workers’ rights are cut to shreds; infrastructure on the brink of collapse; mental health provision all but non-exis­ tent; to say nothing of the covert and ongoing sell-off of the National Health Ser­ vice (NHS). The Covid-19 pandemic unmasked deepening inequalities too. To take childcare as one example, average UK costs mean that a single parent with two children who is not on benefits would have to earn approxi­ mately £40,000 a year to be able to afford childcare in the first place; people with an average income of £20,000 regularly rely on food banks.11 When the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the Trussell Trust (England’s main food parcel and food bank operator) gave out 40,000 food parcels a year. This has increased more than tenfold. The UN’s poverty envoy recently stated that the “UK government has inflicted ‘great misery’ on its people with ‘punitive, meanspirited, and often callous’ austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake ‘social re-engineering rather than economic necessity.’”12 Following Žižek, we can argue that the whole financialization process and the course of austerity in the UK demonstrates vividly and violently that “the fate of whole strata of population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the ‘solipsistic’ speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality.”13 In other words, as long as the capital elite are profiting from the systemic violence they create, the social dimension of inequality in the fifth-largest economy in the world remains mostly negligible.

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The 2010 London student riots addressed this systemic violence directly, as did the riots that broke out after the killing of Mark Duggan in 2011. On the surface, the student riots were about the broken promise made by the Liberal Democrats not to raise tuition fees and reform the Higher Education sector. They also arose, however, as a response to the financial collapse of 2008. By 2011, the Mark Duggan case simply served as yet another example of an oppressive system that was displaying utter disregard for young people’s needs and their future. Derrick Campbell, a former adviser to the Cameron government put it in these terms: [Y]oung people felt they were subjected to unacceptable levels of over-policing and there was a sense of disfranchisement. The shooting of Mark Duggan was said to be the reason for the disturbances but that wasn’t the case, it was simply the spark… Long story short, society was broken.14 The meaningless violence that unfolded in places such as Birmingham and London made no sense precisely because it did not articulate any concrete reasons. As Žižek argued at the time: “Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst.”15 While Conservatives were quick to reject the violence as depraved and coming from undesirable elements in society, left-wing liberals pointed out that poor backgrounds and socially problematic upbringings had to be at the core of the problem. However, either explanation only served to further estrange young people from a system that was clearly not offering them anything other than systemic violence. Žižek argued: The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.16 In a sense, the riots heralded a whole decade of further conservative cuts and disfranchisement, particularly for young people: more restrictive measures were imposed on protesters by the police and a range of other measures followed – culminating in Priti Patel’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC), which gives police forces unparalleled rights to restrict, divert or break up protests, and arrest activists deemed to be a public nuisance. In light of an evergrowing climate threat and increasing inequality, these measures are a clear indication that the systemic violence experienced by those on the lower end of the income spectrum is here to stay, especially with Brexit as an added fail-safe measure. While commentators on the right have been somewhat successful in suggesting that the UK’s departure from the EU was all about immigration, sovereignty and “taking back control,” Brexit was always more about taking austerity to an

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all-new level than it was about foreigners coming here “to steal our jobs.” Although shredding workers’ rights, avoiding taxation for offshore tax havens and the European Convention on Human Rights were simply too hard to stomach for certain types of Conservatives, the Vote Leave cam­ paign was surprisingly effective in convincing the public that Brexit was about anything else. The UK Independence Party and Nigel Farage played the racism card in most campaign material; and as the “Panama Papers” would reveal, David Cameron himself tried to intervene and keep offshore trusts off the EU central register in 201317, whereas the EU advocated the introduction of tax avoidance strategies by 2016.18 Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson would frame the Vote Leave argument as a gains-dominated gamble. Meanwhile, the Remain campaign was primarily trying to convince voters of the risks involved in leaving the EU, banking heavily on the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion. The outcome of the refer­ endum was close (52% leave – 48% remain), yet the UK voted to leave the EU. It seems that the choice presented by Johnson and Cummings was the one that nudged the British public to vote for the option that was decisively better framed.19 But the real choice was never between “taking back control” on the one hand and “avoiding economic disaster” on the other. It was ultimately a decision between widening inequality and unsustainability in Britain, and a slightly less vicious yet far more bureaucratic type of inequality within the EU. Workers’ rights,20 Human Rights,21 democratic rights such as the right to protest, asylum seekers’22 and refugee rights have all been or will be put under review now that Brexit has become effective. None of these reviews will be in the interest of the users of overburdened foodbanks, or those struggling to make ends meet. Inevi­ tably, they will once more benefit those shrewd enough to frame the Brexit debate as a straightforward case of loss vs. gain.

The Performativity of Covid Politics When asked about the greatest challenge to his government, former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1957–1963) allegedly once replied: “Events, my dear boy, events.” Macmillan faced several such events, most notably problems within his own party over the UK’s application to join the European Economic Area and a long stretch of economic downturn shortly before his eventual resig­ nation. Macmillan sacked six members of his own cabinet in a ruthless reshuffle that would come to be known as the “night of the long knives.” He nevertheless failed to turn the tide on his administration and had to resign in 1963 – citing prostate problems as the actual reason. He was succeeded by Harold Wilson (Labour) the following year. It was not only world events that sealed Macmillan’s political fate in the early sixties, but primarily his inadequate handling of scandal and old-fashioned Edwardian style. A few politically progressive events in the early sixties and the PM’s mishandling of the John Profumo scandal (during which the then Minister

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for War, John Profumo, had an extramarital affair with a 19-year-old model and repeatedly lied about it) eventually spelled out the end of his political career. Macmillan’s successor, Alec Douglas-Home was no match for the dynamic and charismatic Harold Wilson who won the 1964 election for Labour. What these events mostly showed was a political party being out of touch with the electorate after 13 years in government. In Žižek’s words, “at its most elementary, event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it.”23 The Profumo scandal, for instance, involved sex, espionage and secrecy, and captured the public’s imagination to such an extent that it (re)framed the people’s perception of conservative politics. Likewise, when the first case of Covid-19 hit the UK in January 2020, few could have predicted the change of frame the disease would initiate in UK politics. As recent studies have shown, the first wave’s initial death toll of 36,700 could have been considerably lower, if lockdown in England had come one week earlier,24 or if conservative ministers and Boris Johnson had not sent care home residents home or listened to scientific advice and acted sooner. Arguably, the pandemic as a political “event” could have followed a very different trajectory.25 But in its framing of the “world we engage in,” both the occurrence of the virus and the initial, sometimes shambolic, handling of the pandemic in Eng­ land have laid bare several problems embedded in the neoliberal capitalist system. In keeping with Marx’s theory that crises are signs of underlying con­ tradictions in the system itself, the Covid-19 pandemic only turned into a crisis when Westminster failed to procure decent amounts of personal protective equipment for NHS personnel, when herd immunity was propagated as an acceptable option, and when borders were kept open repeatedly to allow entry to new and dangerous mutant virus variants. The crisis has also highlighted terrible differences in the number of Covid deaths and hospitalizations, especially in England. Cities and regions with multiple deprivation factors have been hit disproportionately. In Greater Manchester, for instance, deprived areas suffered significantly more Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths than more affluent areas of the city. Instead of addressing these underlying inequality problems, the conservative government decided to concentrate on simple messaging. When it became clear that there was no initial strategy to speak of amid the first wave, ministers still insisted that the pandemic was under control; the PM himself failed to make much sense, either lifting measures too early or failing to lock down in time. England’s track and trace system failed spectacularly, the government all the while giving out contracts for app developments, PPE procurement and track and trace activities to party donors and friends.26 No one dared to address the ongoing sense of incompetence at the height of the pandemic, and the Tories have so far successfully stifled any attempts by parliamentarians to initiate an independent review of their handling of Covid-19.27 Boris Johnson and his

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cabinet tried to keep up appearances by constantly stating they were doing the “best they could under exceedingly difficult circumstances.” But as Žižek recently noted in an article on the disappearance of Chinese students,28 it is mostly authoritarian regimes that tend to be obsessed with appearance, even when it is clear for all to see that there is little or no truth in pretending that something did or did not happen. “In Stalin’s time,” he writes elsewhere, “it was not only prohibited to criticize Stalin, it was also prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”29 In other words, the Conservatives do not need to acknowledge that things might not have been handled well, if they do not acknowledge that things are in fact not going very well. If anyone were ever in need of further proof that conservative governments are swiftly heading towards effective authoritarianism, such an example of performative appearances would provide enough evidence for the most skeptical of analysts.

Revealing the Third Space in Politics – Short Circuit #3 Performance and politics have always been linked in almost symbiotic ways. Political engagement usually requires a performative platform, while performance in any shape or form will invariably initiate or be part of certain political dis­ courses. This is not to say that the two always create a fruitful or, indeed, mean­ ingful relationship: in keeping with its biological definition, symbiosis (from the Greek symbíosis, meaning “living together”) can be mutualistic, commensalistic, or just plain parasitic. There are certain elements in live performance and in the reception of political discourse that are supposed to resonate with audiences to create meaning and/or spell out a special type of political narrative, either in rela­ tion to current affairs or to a particular type of political ideology. The Westminster political theatre would nevertheless best be described as an example of political “amensalism” – i.e., as an asymmetric interaction between performance and poli­ tics. For over a decade now, conservative governments have repeatedly questioned their own authenticity of representation30 by performing a farcical and artificial kind of politics against the backdrop of a hollowed-out austerity agenda. This, in turn, has recently led to a new kind of political performance which culminated in Boris Johnson’s very own brand of constantly overpromising and shamelessly under-delivering across a whole range of political markers. It is interesting to note that the devolved nations of the United Kingdom (Scot­ land, Wales, and Northern Ireland) did not follow England’s lead when it came to Covid-19. While UK austerity measures have meant less capital spending and tight restrictions on block grants under the Barnett formula for all three countries, the devolution of healthcare in 1999 effectively gives Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland the right to make their own decisions when it comes to regional operations of the NHS. Whilst Boris Johnson was keeping up appearances by skipping Cobra meetings and refusing to set out a collective Coronavirus plan involving all four nations,31 Scotland and Wales were working quietly on a more coordinated response that has kept case numbers and deaths proportionately low. In Wales,

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this measured approach has put the idea of a renewed national identity and of a more independent government in Cardiff centre-stage; Nicola Sturgeon’s steady handling of public health and finances in Scotland has set the scene for a new referendum on Scottish Independence in the not-too distant future. Although certain types of political performance, such as Extinction Rebellion’s impressive Red Rebel Brigade, create moments of “meaning-making”32 because they challenge dominant political narratives in public spaces, I would argue that others can unfold their subversive potential within the realm of the political dis­ course itself. Alerting the public to the global environmental crisis can be very effective when it is done via symbolic imagery involving blood-red costumes and the movement of living statues. But symbolic gestures need not be restricted to the explicit portrayal of catastrophes. From a dialectical point of view, perfor­ mative political gestures can also occur as a reaction to something we reject as politically undesirable. As Hegel would say, “we experience Good when, after choosing Evil, we become aware of the utter inadequacy of our situation.”33 Not doing what others are doing can thus create an alternative political reality which only comes into existence by the very refusal to follow the predominant political discourse. Identity in these cases is found by an understanding of what one does not want, rather than by aligning oneself with what is already there or with what appears to be the dominant discourse. According to Žižek, Hegel uses the unique term absoluter Gegenstoss (recoil, counter-push, counter-thrust, or simply counter-punch) to designate a withdrawal-from which creates that from which it withdraws… [s]o it is “only in the return itself” that what we return to emerges at all – it begins to exist or to be perceived as a possibility where before there was no trace of it.34 This is negative dialectics at its best – but it ironically also defines the very space in which Wales has been able to (re)establish its own new-found political identity during the Covid pandemic. Mark Drakeford and the Welsh govern­ ment have unintentionally created a platform from which they can easily call for more devolved power in the future. The border closures with England during the early stages of Coronavirus restrictions were both unexpected and effective in preventing the spread of Covid-19 infections in Wales. But they were born out of a desire to “recoil, to counter-push” and to do things differently in comparison to a reeling and often downright irrational government in London. In effect, by recoiling from a lot of the early measures that were (not) intro­ duced in England in early 2020 and beyond, the Welsh government has created a performative space from which the idea of a new national identity may still emerge. If we add to this a growing sense of disappointment and disillusion­ ment with Brexit, and contrast it with what, e.g., Dan Evans calls “localized” and overtly politicized “causes,”35 it becomes apparent that this new-found “third space” makes an independent Wales more likely than ever before.36

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Thinking the Impossible for Wales – Short Circuit #4 Bhabha reminds us that it is “in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and the displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.”37 The recent pandemic has not only shown a cultural displacement in the way devolved nations were ignored by Boris Johnson’s government in Westminster; it has also provided a performative platform for a new kind of assertive national identity for the devolved nations. Following on from years of widening inequality under imposed austerity measures from London, the negative effects of Brexit were already apparent pre-pandemic. Yet after two more years of Westminster appear­ ance politics, the cracks are starting to show in every corner of the United King­ dom. Business closures, new trade barriers, a short-changed EU funding replacement called “levelling-up fund,” the loss of the Erasmus programme, and cancelled investment in northern infrastructure will only be followed by more broken promises from Westminster in years to come. Negotiating a new Welsh identity in a performative “third space” by means of recoil or counter-push nega­ tive dialectics has become more than just a fancy idea – it is an unavoidable development in the face of a global climate catastrophe and a pandemic that has disproportionately affected areas of multiple deprivation. Given that terms “of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively,”38 Wales’s measured Covid response has shown that there are certain areas in which Wales might well be capable of going it alone, despite numerous economical counter arguments that are usually thrown at Welsh nationalists and at the “indy curious.”39 Mark Drakeford’s Welsh Labour won the recent Senedd elections by a margin not because the party offered a more-or-less updated remake of what has been on offer since 1999 (i.e., a “clear red water alternative” to Westminster politics).40 The party won the election due to a perceived antagonistic strengthening of authority that was tied in closely with Drakeford’s more rational yet cautious approach to the pandemic and his repeated commitment to a cross-party set of policies to tackle climate change and inequality. As a result, Plaid Cymru (13 seats) and Welsh Labour (30 seats) as the two most progressive parties have since announced a cooperation agreement that seeks to deliver radical change in at least 50 policy areas, including free school meals for all primary school children and a possible commitment to net zero by 2035.41 Welsh government has also set up a Constitu­ tional Commission to make recommendations about Wales’s constitutional future – purposefully not ruling out Welsh independence as an option. A decade of austerity, Brexit, and Coronavirus have changed the very frame through which we perceive the world in Wales. Although it is probably too early to tell, the above-mentioned measures are a little step in the right direction – especially in light of a more-or-less absent or silenced global left in times of dire “emergency capitalism.”42 While the destruction of the planet appears to be a done deal in certain parts of the world

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and in those elite circles that profit most from systematic exploitation, Wales might be on track to remedy some of the damage done by former generations. Granted – we are not talking about the ultimate liberation of the working classes, but about the humble introduction of universal income trials and about free school meals for primary pupils. But the third space that has been established around the recent debate on Welsh independence is bound to offer at least some progressive solutions to our ongoing capitalist and environmental crises. It is safe to say that recent events have encouraged a new kind of community spirit in rural parts of the country, and that this new form of community has brought together a whole range of formerly opposing political views. The short circuit that has been established, e.g., between liberal Greens and left-wing nationalists on the one side and forward-thinking Conservatives and traditional nationalists on the other has led to a situation where independence is not only an option but – ironically – could bring together multiple (often opposing) views in one progressive and sustainable new nation. In Bhabha’s words, the “social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, ongoing negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.”43 We might not end up with Žižek’s utopian vision of global solidarity or the emergence of a new form of communism as we come out of the pandemic.44 But in Wales, at least, we will be working towards a new social articulation of difference that will be based on efforts to bridge the gap between solidarity, inequality, and sustainability. As we are reeling from the pandemic, the involuntary creation of a third space in Wales has illustrated that the parallax gap between the United King­ dom and the idea of a utopian independent Wales can be bridged by framing the debate not as an issue of independence over unionism, but as a debate on universalities: there is a need to do something about the global climate cata­ strophe and about the reasons for the Covid pandemic just as much as we need to address the wide-spread problem of inequality in Wales after a decade of Westminster austerity. This realization has led to a short circuit that may help unite us locally. It might also serve as a model for less localized framing debates in other areas of the world.

Notes 1 Žižek’s short circuits refer to a special technique of critical reading, where we cross metaphorical wires and concepts in a new and unusual way to “completely shatter and undermine our common preconceptions,” quoted in Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2007), vi. 2 Elizabeth Sloski, “Where Maid Misses the Mark,” Slate, October 30, 2021, https://sla te.com/culture/2021/10/maid-netflix-parenting-motherhood-poverty.html. 3 Netflix, “A Mom Will Endure,” Facebook, October 15, 2021, https://www.facebook. com/watch/?v=380270263743562. 4 Sloski, “Where Maid Misses the Mark.”

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5 Pia Dietze and Maureen A. Craig, “Framing Economic Inequality and Policy as Group Disadvantages (Versus Group Advantages) Spurs Support for Action,” Nature Human Behaviour 5, no. 3 (2021). 6 Jon Mills, “The Global Bystander Effect: Moral Responsibility in Our Age of Ecological Crisis,” Journal of Futures Studies 25, no. 2 (2020): 61–76. 7 Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler, “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991): 193–206. 8 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 1992), 103; Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 1997), 70; The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2009), 12. 9 Tereza Østbø Kuldova, “Fetishism and the Problem of Disavowal,” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 22 (2019), 767. 10 Paul K. Piff, “Wealth and the Inflated Self: Class, Entitlement, and Narcissism,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40, no. 1 (2014): 34–43. 11 The median income in the UK for 2019–2020 was £29,900, according to the Office of National Statistics. See Jeena O’Neill, “Average Household Income, UK: Financial Year 2020,” Office for National Statistics, January 21, 2021, https://www.ons.gov. uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/ bulletins/householddisposableincomeandinequality/financialyear2020. 12 Robert Booth and Patrick Butler, “UK Austerity has Inflicted ‘Great Misery’ on Citizens, UN Says,” Guardian, November 16, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ society/2018/nov/16/uk-austerity-has-inflicted-great-misery-on-citizens-un-says. The full report can be accessed here: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Poverty/ EOM_GB_16Nov2018.pdf. 13 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile, 2008), 11. 14 Aamna Mohdin and Jessica Murray, “‘The Mark Duggan Case was a Catalyst’: The 2011 England Riots 10 Years On,” Guardian, July 30, 2021, https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2021/jul/30/2011-uk-riots-mark-duggan. 15 Slavoj Žižek, “Shoplifters of the World Unite,” London Review of Books 33, no. 16 (2011). 16 Žižke, “Shoplifters.” 17 Heather Stewart, “Cameron Stepped in to Shield Offshore Trusts from EU Tax Crackdown in 2013,” Guardian, April 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/poli tics/2016/apr/07/david-cameron-offshore-trusts-eu-tax-crackdown-2013. 18 European Commission, “The Anti Tax Avoidance Directive,” 2016, https://ec. europa.eu/taxation_customs/anti-tax-avoidance-directive_en. 19 Compare Zoe Oxley, “Framing and Political Decision Making: An Overview,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, May 29, 2020. Oxley would call this “emphasis framing.” 20 Edna Mohamed, “Review of UK ‘Workers’ Rights Post Brexit is Axed in Sudden U-Turn,” Guardian, January 27, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/ jan/27/review-of-uk-workers-rights-post-brexit-is-axed-in-sudden-u-turn. 21 UK Parliament, “Human Rights Acts is Not Safe after Brexit,” 2019, https://www.parliam ent.uk/business/lords/media-centre/house-of-lords-media-notices/2019/january-2019/huma n-rights-act-is-not-safe-after-brexit/. 22 May Bulman, “Priti Patel’s Immigration Bill Could Fail Stateless Children, MPs Warn,” Independent, November 9, 2021, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ home-news/stateless-children-nationality-borders-bill-uk-b1953731.html. 23 Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit (London: Penguin, 2014), 10. 24 Sabine L. Van Eisland, “COVID-19 in England – Analysis of the First Two Waves,” Imperial College London, December 22, 2020, https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/ 211673/covid-19-england-analysis-first-waves/. 25 Lydia McMullan et al., “Covid Chaos: How the UK Handled the Coronavirus Crisis,” Guardian, December 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/ 2020/dec/16/covid-chaos-a-timeline-of-the-uks-handling-of-the-coronavirus-crisis.

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26 David Conn et al., “‘Chumocracy’: How Covid Revealed the New Shape of the Tory Establishment,” Guardian, Nov 15, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ nov/15/chumocracy-covid-revealed-shape-tory-establishment. 27 There is a cross-party report of the Health and Social Care Committee which is freely available via https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/ 78687/default/. But it is by no means an independent review and only states “lessons learnt” rather than focusing on “mistakes made.” 28 Slavoj Žižek, “The Mysterious Case of Disappearing Chinese Marxists Shows What Happens When State Ideology Goes Badly Wrong,” Independent, Nov 29, 2018. 29 “The Prohibition is Prohibited: New Managerialism,” CCRN&M Blog, October 26, 2016, http://critresnurse.org/critique/the-prohibition-is-prohibited-new-managerialism/. 30 See Shirin M. Rai, “Performance and Politics,” Polit Stud 63 (2015): 1179–97. 31 Peter Walker, “Boris Johnson Missed Five Coronavirus Cobra Meetings, Michael Gove Says,” Guardian, April 19, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/ 19/michael-gove-fails-to-deny-pm-missed-five-coronavirus-cobra-meetings. 32 Rai, “Performance and Politics,” 1181. 33 Quoted from Žižek, Event, 47. 34 Žižek, Event, 47–8. 35 Dan Evans (2022). “Reconstructing Welshness – Again,” in Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales. Edited by Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanah Issa, and Lestyn Tyne (London: Repeater, 2022). 214–30. 36 As an illustrative example of this new-found national identity, it may suffice at this point that Yes Cymru, the Welsh non-party political independence campaign, has recently grown from 2,500 members in Spring 2020 to more than 18,000 members in March 2021. 37 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 2, emphasis in the original. 38 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 3. 39 See Guto Ivan, Cian Siôn, and Daniel Wincott “Devolution, Independence and Wales’ Fiscal Deficit,” National Institute Economic Review 261, no. 1 (2022): 16–33, for an informed review of these arguments. 40 The phrase was coined by Rhodri Morgan, the first minister of Wales and Welsh Labour leader from 2000–2009. He was referring to the more left-wing politics favoured by Welsh Labour and the Welsh Gov when compared to Westminster in general. 41 Steven Morris, “Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru to Cooperate on Almost 50 Policy Areas,” Guardian, November 22, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/ nov/22/welsh-labour-and-plaid-cymru-to-cooperate-on-almost-50-policy-areas. 42 For a more vicious attack on the left’s failure to engage with emergency capitalism and for a more general critique of Žižek’s view of the Corona pandemic as an opportunity for global emancipation, please see Fabio Vighi’s excellent “Slavoj Žižek, Emergency Capitalism, and the Capitulation of the Left,” The Philosophical Saloon, May 24, 2021, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/slavoj-zizek-emergency-cap italism-and-the-capitulation-of-the-left/. 43 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 3.

44 Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

Bibliography Alston, Philip. “Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom.” UN Human Rights Office. November 16, 2018. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Poverty/EOM_GB_ 16Nov2018.pdf. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Booth, Robert, and Patrick Butler. “UK Austerity Has Inflicted ‘Great Misery’ on Citizens, UN Says.” Guardian. November 16, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/ nov/16/uk-austerity-has-inflicted-great-misery-on-citizens-un-says. Bulman, May. “Priti Patel’s Immigration Bill Could Fail Stateless Children, MPs Warn.” Independent. November 9, 2021. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ stateless-children-nationality-borders-bill-uk-b1953731.html. Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness. Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2007. Conn, David, David Pegg, Rob Evan, Juliette Garside, and Felicity Lawrence. “‘Chumocracy’: How Covid Revealed the New Shape Of The Tory Establishment.” Guardian. November 15, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/ chumocracy-covid-revealed-shape-tory-establishment. Dietze, Pia and Maureen A. Craig. “Framing Economic Inequality and Policy as Group Disadvantages (Versus Group Advantages) Spurs Support for Action.” Nature Human Behaviour 5, no. 3 (2021): 349–360. Evans, Dan. “Reconstructing Welshness – Again.” In Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future ofWales. Edited by Darren Chetty, Grug Muse, Hanah Issa, and Lestyn Tyne, 214–230. London: Repeater, 2022. European Commission. “The Anti Tax Avoidance Directive.” 2016. https://ec.europa.eu/ taxation_customs/anti-tax-avoidance-directive_en. House of Commons. “Coronavirus: Lessons Learned to Date.”October 12, 2021. https:// committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default. Ivan, Guto, Cian Siôn, and Daniel Wincott. “Devolution, Independence and Wales’ Fiscal Deficit.” National Institute Economic Review 261, no. 1 (2022): 16–33. Kahneman, Daniel, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler. “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991): 193–206. Kuldova, Tereza Østbø. “Fetishism and the Problem of Disavowal.” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 22, no. 5 (2019): 766–780. McMullan, Lydia, Pamela Duncan, Garry Blight, Pablo Gutierrez, and Frank Hulley-Jones. “Covid Chaos: How the UK Handled the Coronavirus Crisis.” Guardian. December 16, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/dec/16/covid-chaos-a-tim eline-of-the-uks-handling-of-the-coronavirus-crisis. Mills, Jon. “The Global Bystander Effect: Moral Responsibility in Our Age of Ecological Crisis.” Journal of Futures Studies 25, no. 2 (2020): 61–76. Mohamed, Edna. “Review of UK Workers’ Rights Post Brexit is Axed in Sudden U-Turn.” Guardian. January 27, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/27/revie w-of-uk-workers-rights-post-brexit-is-axed-in-sudden-u-turn. Mohdin, Aamna and Jessica Murray. “‘The Mark Duggan Case Was a Catalyst’: The 2011 England Riots 10 Years On.” Guardian. July 30, 2021. https://www.theguardian. com/uk-news/2021/jul/30/2011-uk-riots-mark-duggan. Morris, Steven. “Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru to Cooperate on Almost 50 Policy Areas.” Guardian. November 22, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/ nov/22/welsh-labour-and-plaid-cymru-to-cooperate-on-almost-50-policy-areas. O’Neill, Jeena. “Average Household Income, UK: Financial Year 2020.” Office for National Statistics. January 21, 2021. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/p ersonalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/householddisposableincomeand inequality/financialyear2020. Oxley, Zoe. “Framing and Political Decision Making: An Overview.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. May 29, 2020.

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Piff, Paul K. “Wealth and the Inflated Self: Class, Entitlement, and Narcissism.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 40, no. 1 (2014): 34–43. “The Prohibition is Prohibited: New Managerialism.” Centre for Critical Research in Nursing & Midwifery Blog. October 26, 2016. http://critresnurse.org/critique/the-p rohibition-is-prohibited-new-managerialism. Rai, Shirin M. “Performance and Politics.” Polit Stud 63 (2015): 1179–1197. Sloski, Elizabeth. “Where Maid Misses the Mark.” Slate. October 30, 2021. https://slate. com/culture/2021/10/maid-netflix-parenting-motherhood-poverty.html. Stewart, Heather. “Cameron Stepped in to Shield Offshore Trusts from EU Tax Crack­ down in 2013.” Guardian. April 7, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ 2016/apr/07/david-cameron-offshore-trusts-eu-tax-crackdown-2013. UK Parliament. “Human Rights Acts is Not Safe after Brexit.” 2019. https://www.pa rliament.uk/business/lords/media-centre/house-of-lords-media-notices/2019/janua ry-2019/human-rights-act-is-not-safe-after-brexit/. Van Eisland, Sabine L. “COVID-19 in England – Analysis of the First Two Waves.” Imperial College London. December 22, 2020. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/ 211673/covid-19-england-analysis-first-waves. Vighi, Fabio. “Slavoj Žižek, Emergency Capitalism, and the Capitulation of the Left.” The Philosophical Saloon, May 24, 2021. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/slavoj-zi zek-emergency-capitalism-and-the-capitulation-of-the-left. Walker, Peter. “Boris Johnson Missed Five Coronavirus Cobra Meetings, Michael Gove Says.” Guardian. April 19, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/m ichael-gove-fails-to-deny-pm-missed-five-coronavirus-cobra-meetings. Žižek, Slavoj. Event: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin, 2014.

Žižek; Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 1997.

Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular Culture.

London: MIT Press, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Mysterious Case of Disappearing Chinese Marxists Shows What Happens When State Ideology Goes Badly Wrong.” Independent. Nov 29, 2018, https://www.indep endent.co.uk/voices/china-missing-marxists-communists-dissidents-students-beijing-peking -university-a8657621.html. Žižek, Slavoj. Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World. Cambridge: Polity, 2020. Žižek, Slavoj. “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” London Review of Books 33, no. 16 (2011). Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile, 2008.

25

NO MORE MANIFESTOS!… ŽIŽEK SAID “EUROPE”? Ricardo Espinoza Lolas

Slavoj Žižek’s “Manifesto,” originally published in French on May 13, 2021, in Le Monde under the title “Mon Manifeste Européen,”1 is an excellent short text by the Slovenian thinker that allows us to dive into four precise questions: three of content and one of form. Those of content are: 1 – the European itself, 2 – Europe as a light of the planet, and 3 – other regions of the planet. And the formal question indicates the need to write “Manifestos” to generate and/or produce roadmaps in the consciousness of many Europeans so that they see themselves reflected as a kind of “center” that seeks to be a beacon giving meaning to the whole disarticulated, shattered, fragmented by Capitalism at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. We go step by step, like the dismemberer or the forensic scientist. 1 – Is Europe today? 2 – Is Europe the all-pervading light? And 3 – What is happening beyond the European center in other planetary regions? And, secondly, in the formal, that is, the need to write “Manifestos” a la Marx (1848). In the first place: What is Europe today? The first thing I would like to state categorically is that Europe is not at all what Žižek thinks (and other like-minded European intellectuals, especially the French). It is clear that the Slovenian thinker, as the good Slavic European that he is (always too close to the feared imperialist Russia of Tsar Putin), in this Parisian Manifesto and in other of his texts (and conferences, interviews, etc.) wants to redeem a stale Europe, a Europe complicit with Capitalism and traitor of the values of the human, and turn it into the “idea” of the communist Europe giver of meaning in times of misery and post-pandemic decomposition. That is why Žižek writes the Manifesto and that is why he publishes it in such a “classic” social-democratic medium in France and read all over Europe (and beyond Europe) as Le Monde. It is the newspaper of the left-wing “bourgeoisie” that all “left-wing” intellectuals always read and, moreover, want to read. That DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-28

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is to say, Žižek writes to the European establishment of intellectuals, to the elite of the left, to certain politicians, from one of his illuminating Beacons: Le Monde. It is a text not for European communists, if there are any. And the second thing, which I am interested in emphasizing, is the attempt, time and again, to understand Europe in a centric way (Jean-Luc Nancy never fell into this narcissistic trap), like Aristotle and his Politics (which, as we know, are texts of Aristotle’s lessons that he gave throughout his life), in the 4th century BC, or, in the middle of the 20th century, at the beginning of the Second World War, by Heidegger in his complex and uncomfortable course Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935 (the first thought for a Greece to be built after the Peloponnesian War and the second for a Germany to come in pre–World War II; both projects are notorious fail­ ures). And by this, I mean to think that Europe, today at the end, it seems, of the pandemic, is a type of center that is always threatened by certain pincers that want to annihilate it (capitalist pincers), but that its function in history is another. Europe would be called to another destiny beyond Capitalism. Žižek sees “his” Europe as a center and in this I do not agree with him and since he lives it like that, as a means that can mediate every­ where, he “believes” that now the pincers to destroy it are multiple and he explains it in his text with his precise and, at the same time, ironic tone (pincers that are even within Europe itself). But let us never forget what Nietzsche knows very well and expresses it in his Zarathustra III (1883), by the hand of Meister Eckhart, and says it explicitly as follows: “The center is everywhere” (Die Mitte ist überall). Every center hap­ pens everywhere, and this is where the whole problem of thinking from centers or roots or points comes into play. And hence in this political theology Europe is seen in all its illuminating-radiating, as the theophany of an omnipresent god, traversing everything: there is no territory that resists this god, not even the virtual, much less the unconscious. But if in Nietzsche this text expresses, in part, the eternal return as a material differential, and without sense, that per­ forates everything and always jovially actualizes itself because it is the very perforation of all sense; with Žižek, however, it is the opposite, it is neither more nor less “the” European sense that perforates everything. And in this we do not agree at all among Ourselves. Nietzsche punctures with hammers the European’s thirst for meaning, thirst for ideology, thirst for metaphysics: from Luther to Wagner passing through Kant;2 and, in these times, he totally punc­ tures the new critical theory, like that of the Slovenian in his pretension and anxiety for a European metaphysics, that is, a European politics that expresses itself everywhere and for the good of all (as well as the Starbucks franchise). Europe has never been a center, as nothing is (neither was ancient Greece, that of physis, nor the updated Amerindia of Abya Yala). And if we want to know Europe, we can know it very well in what it is, in its own movement, in its history, As Hegel (always more radical than Sade) says: Europe is the history of the “Slaughterhouse Bank.”3

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And if Europe is not a center, because it is not the center of anything, because there is nothing to center it, because there is neither an outside nor an inside of Europe, then what is Europe? Why does Europe become in its own movement like a “Slaughterhouse Bank”? Europe is the “not-I” par excellence or, inverting Rimbaud’s famous phrase (to Georges Izambard, Charleville, May 13, 1871): “I is Other” to “Other is I,” that is, “Other is Europe.” And with this inversion of Rimbaud, I am referring to something like a shot from Orson Welles’ classic Citizen Kane (1941), to those shots in which what really happens is always “out of field” or, as in Michael Haneke’s Das Weisse Band (2009); all that is horrific happens “outside of what is shown in the image.” Europe is that “out of field” of the planet itself, of the board on which we Europeans and nonEuropeans play every day, of the Labyrinth in which we live. Europe is like the “I” that was invented, by some Europeans (and that today is also maintained by non-Europeans), that is behind the game in which we live, like the hunchbacked dwarf, Benjamin’s puppeteer (1940), and that pulls all the strings of the “Slaughterhouse Bench” of the history of the pain of one against the other. Europe, mythically said, is the one behind Ariadne’s Labyrinth from which we cannot get out and that when we think we can get out we are more lost and submerged in it (no Daedalus can get out of his own constructive fiction). And this, of not being able to get out of the Labyrinth, happens not only to the Europeans themselves, but to all of us in our link with Europe. In the end, Europeans do not even exist, they are the precipitate of an own other that constitutes them. Europe, and the Europeans, have no center, they are out of the field (we are and live only in the Labyrinth). The old continent is always late to what it was or to what was “invented” with the performative notion of “Europe” and by extension of “European.” That performative of the notion, that master signifier: Europe, is an invention (Erfindung). It is the “Invention of Europe” that has been realized for centuries and not of an epidemic as Agamben thinks at the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19 (in 2020). Just because Europe has already been invented, it is then possible to invent different institutions, forms of reality, pandemics, roadmaps, etc. Europe is late to what it is (and it could not be otherwise), to what was constructed with its name, it is always and will always be out of the field, for it can never become what it is (it cannot realize Pindar’s sentence that constitutes the West), it cannot reconcile itself with itself (against Honneth and the Frankfurt School), because that very “is,” its “essence” is a construction, a mediation, an invention, as well as that of gender, as Butler clearly shows (in 1990). And as such there is no possibility of immediate reconciliation, but always monstrous. Europe was invented, as Nietzsche invented Ariadne in the “Zarathustra” of Ecce Homo (1889). Mazzino Montinari, one of the editors of the Complete Works of Nietzsche together with Giorgio Colli, says that when the German philosopher, in Ecce homo, in the section dedicated to Zarathustra, expresses Ariadne as the key to understand Dionysos himself, in the original manuscript

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what is literally said is Ariadne as invention (Erfindung der Ariadne). And this serves me well for Žižek and this “permanent abstraction of Europe” that flits through centuries and is actualized in the solitary Slovenian thinker in 2022 in Le Monde. If we play with the German language and with the translation of Erfindung not only as an invention, but necessarily seeing literally that particle of “Er-” at the beginning of the word and at the end that of “-ung,” we realize that these particles give the verb actionality and transitivity. That is to say, it is not a matter of understanding invention as a subjective creation of Nietzsche (in this case of Žižek’s “head”); rather, we must understand that it is an “encoun­ ter” with Ariadne. And in that same measure she configures herself; she makes herself present, she assaults you, she seizes you, she imposes herself on you. In this case she is present in the myth of Dionysos, and in an essential way: the god hangs on her. And in Nietzsche’s own life and in the interpretation of his abysmal thought of the eternal return. Something similar happens to Žižek and to the European intellectuals and obviously to their politicians: they need to encounter their invention so that it assaults them, seizes them, requires them as a “good European.” And, in this way, they articulate with it and dance with it, as a Greek god dances with his human-goddess. Žižek wants to dance with his Ariadne, with his Europe and thus be a “good European.” And at the same time, as the good European Christian that he is, even if he is an atheist, and a lover of Wagner, he wants to dance with his Ariadne, better said, with his Kundry, to redeem her, with a new Parsifal, from the shit and prostitution of the operating Capitalism that devours everything until the pandemic; even if she dies in this attempt and does not want to be saved by anyone. Communism will save its Ariadne from the brothel of Capit­ alism. Žižek, like a new Wagner, a new operatic stage designer, in his hysteria, pretends on the Good Friday of the end of the pandemic that Europe will shine again, but with another destiny for all. And in this happening is beautiful the pretension of the philosopher of wanting to give a new and updated possibility to this old beauty of Europe, but which is closer, at times, to the Rome of Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (2013) or the Barcelona of Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010). This European beauty becomes as more natural, in these times of quarantines and confinements, and European discourses of saving nature appear, to this Kundry of thousands of years. It is important to point out that the term “Nature” that resonates in our unconscious, so important in these times of pandemic and Capitalism, is the son of Ariadne, of Europe (and it is the serious problem of current envir­ onmentalisms). That Nature always expresses from Latin a “to be born,” even in the contraption that Europeans invented as Europe to see themselves as a self, as I pointed out above. And with that self they created the State, and this goes with an adjective, namely “nation.” The State is itself “nation-state,” it is a State in which those who are born into it give it its identity, and thus its bor­ ders and boundaries both inward and outward. And this, this space-time, this territory, is the structural expression where the emperor “I” is going to

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establish his rules (the Hulk is born when Ariadne is invented); the invention of “Nature” was not enough, it was also necessary to invent the “Nation-State” to rule as its lord (hence the European colonizing imperialism). And without for­ getting that the “Heaven of God” had to be invented, where we will or will not end up according to our actions in life and the “Unconscious,” the place par excellence where we are governed without our realizing it by means of a com­ plicit clinic that seeks to defend the “European gender,” as if such a thing existed. Butler would laugh at this. The nation-state is one of the best contraptions, together with Capitalism (they go hand in hand) that Europeans have invented to be able to dominate sovereignly, to dominate whatever: either empirical territories, or virtual territories, or unconscious territories (primarily among themselves in order to constitute themselves as Hulks). It is a logic of war and domination. The State in its “Nature” (“Nation”) is like a great totalitarian monster, in the style of Hobbes’ Leviathan; it is the War Machine par excellence that has been invented to hegemonize the planet and tame it without any difference; and obviously tame it for a few, even for an abstract ideology that endures and does not decay and with the pandemic it has become clear that the only one who has won is the same as always: the producer and distributor of capital. A Parsifal to be Parsifal needs his Kundry always created and, at the same time, domesticated, even if she dies, as in the final Act of Wagner’s opera Parsifal. And in this way Europe becomes the permanent Good Friday of social democracy, so hated by Benjamin, so that all revolutionary poten­ tial is deactivated and nothing at all happens, but it is “believed” that something does happen and that it happens for Europe. It is Lampedusa, it is Visconti, it is the Gatopardo of Europe that is found in those who sing hymns to the European center. Europe is an invention, a relation of measure, which invents Europe itself (the Europeans themselves among themselves) and with it the operative center of the emperor Me. A center that works everywhere; a center with a thirst for metaphysics and religious ideology, because it is for the good of the whole planet. It is clear that Žižek wrote “his” Manifesto without his Engels, and without the Communist Party or the League of Communists asking him to do so (if they exist); and it is also clear that he did not write to the European communists, because in fact they no longer exist. To whom does Žižek write? To the establishment of the bourgeois left? … If the Real became Lacan’s symptom, it is likely that a similar operation occurs in the Slovenian, namely, Communism is Žižek’s symptom because Europe itself became a symptom for European intellectuals and politicians. I still have to deal with the other two points of content around Europe and the formal one regarding the need to write Manifestos, but for now I will leave it there, because a word to the wise is a word to the wise… Hat man mich verstanden?4

No More Manifestos!… Žižek said “Europe”? 183

Notes 1 Slavoj Žižek, “Mon Manifeste Européen,” Le Monde, May 13, 2021, https://www.lem onde.fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Götzen-Dämmerung: Wie die Wahre Welt Endlich zur Fabel Wurde,” in Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe, edited by Paolo D’Iorio (Parigi: Nietzsche Source, 2009), http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/ GD-Welt-Fabel. 3 Georg W.F. Hegel, “Vorlesung über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil I,” In Werke 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). 4 “Have I been understood?”

Bibliography Hegel, Georg W.F. Vorlesung über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil I. In Werke 18. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Götzen-Dämmerung: Wie die Wahre Welt Endlich zur Fabel Wurde.” In Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe. Edited by Paolo D’Iorio. Parigi: Nietzsche Source, 2009. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/GD-Welt-Fabel. Žižek, Slavoj “Mon Manifeste Européen.” Le Monde, May 13, 2021. https://www.lemonde. fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html.

26

FROM BALKANIZED UNIVERSAL(S) TO ARCHIPELAGIC MULTIVERSE Andrea Perunovic´

Throughout the long history of the notion of universal, many of its conceptual forms have seen their rise and their fall on the stage of philosophy. From the classical definitions brought by Plato and Aristotle, through Christianity, all the way to Kant, Hegel, and finally to contemporary debates, the topos of universal has been one of the pivotal points around which were organized some of the key philosophical concepts. An examination of the notions such as identity and difference, or domination and emancipation – seen through the lens of uni­ versals – will take a central place in the text that is to follow. But before engaging with them, our first task will consist in finding a way in the complex web of meanings that are woven into the very notion of universal. In order to achieve this, we will not perform a philosophical genealogy of the universal, but we shall rather directly address some of its contemporary conceptualizations. For example, in his book entitled Des Universels: Essais et Conférences, Étienne Balibar offers his perspective on the state of arts concerning the concept of the universal, regrouping his diverse texts and conference presentations that engage with the thought of many contemporary thinkers on the subject. There are several insights to be found in there, that will be of primary importance for our own considerations. First important thing to note is that Balibar insists on the plurality, or rather, on the equivocity of the universals. As in the underlying idea of this very book, Balibar is taking the universal willingly in its plural form – “universals.” Like in the present global manifestos which propose that those universals are in constant and multiple struggles, Balibar also sees a certain conflictual mode of existence of universals; one which seems to create conflicts between human beings, and conflicts with themselves – “conflit entre eux et avec eux-mêmes.”1 These conflicts are driven, explains Balibar, by the anthropological differences, and we can remark that they are, in their turn, framed by specific hegemonic discourses (to use a Gramscian term), or more broadly by what Lacan names the big Other. DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-29

From Balkanized Universal(s) to Archipelagic Multiverse 185

Thus, anthropological differences are not just any diversities capable to be inscribed a posteriori as objects of “human sciences,” but the ones that can serve as tools to govern the “humanity of men and their unequal access to citizenship.”2 With, and maybe counter this insightful Balibar’s claim, we will propose later how the same anthropological differences can also be used subversively, as tools for resisting and unsettling the very governing instances through a subversion of universalities. Yet another important aspect of universals, claims Balibar from his neo-Marxist perspective, is that they are always dependent on their specific historical and geographical context. Their enunciation happens always sometimes and some­ where. A complementary argument is to be found in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, co-written by Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, where all of the three authors agree that “universality is not a static presumption, not an a priori given, and that it is ought instead to be understood as a process or condition irreducible to any of its determinate modes of appearance”3 These ways of taking universals into account can be completed also by Žižek’s definition of the “concrete universal,” which on the contrary to the “abstract” one that “is the mute medium of all particular con­ tent” – “unsettles from within the identity of the particular.”4 Therefore, in our present analyses of different appearances of universals, we will tend to examine their plural, equivocal, and conflictual character, their enunciative dependence of the specific geo-historical and socio-linguistic context, as well as their con­ creteness, opening thus a terrain on which it will be possible to ask which types of universals are more adapted to serve as instruments of domination, and which have a rather emancipatory potential. Two different models of disposition of universals will serve here as paradigms of two possible structures of universality: the “balkanized” universals and the archipelagic, creolized universal (or more precisely – multiverse, as we will see later). This choice calls out for justification. The first objection that could be made considering the logic of our proposition is: why one would speak about the universal in terms of what is seemingly particular? The argumentation concerning this is fairly clear: the denominators “Balkans” and “Caribbean” (as two con­ ceptual figures that we will draw upon later) are simply not particularities, they are geographical, but also semantic, linguistic, historical, political, social terri­ tories or regions without clear and unambiguous limits. They are drawn instead in hazy lines of the Imaginary, which are to be contoured by universals, as sym­ bolic formations that are enacted on them in their diverse and frequently opposed relations. Secondly, one could ask why do we compare the Balkans with the Caribbean, a peninsula with an archipelago, and moreover, two historically and socio-politically very different regions of the world? The answer is: this kind of comparison will not take place in this text. A geopolitical or historical compar­ ison of the two would be indeed superfluous or even absurd, but nevertheless, it seems there is several reasons why it could be theoretically fruitful for under­ standing the way universals shape the world we live in. So, the aim of the

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following argumentation will not be to draw a precise parallel between those two regions of the world, but rather to put in a common perspective of universality some of their key symbolic features, so to see how universals interact in different milieus. That should cast a light on the way in which universals exist concretely and which are the real consequences of their (non)relation.

Balkanized Universal(s) – A Twofold Process In the last decades of the 20th century, “universal” gradually became a dirty word for an important part of the “Western” philosophical and theoretical discourses. The regimes of being and knowing that this idea was enacting, became predominantly considered as inadequate to respond to the issues of the growingly globalized world that has emerged. Namely, some important exam­ ples of what we will call here the “balkanization” of the universal, followed in the coming years after the publication of Lyotard’s Postmodern condition. As Javier Burdman writes: “The idea that Lyotard’s conception of postmodernity dismisses any claim to universality has had a long-standing predominance among both critical and sympathetic readers of his work.”5 Burdman names some of the critical readers that imputed the rejection of universality to post­ modernism, such as Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, or Richard Rorty amongst others, but he doesn’t list the sympathetic ones. Anyhow, with these, and many other (mis)readings that promoted the presumed postmodernist disavowal of universality, the concept of universal has largely slipped out of the radar of theory. Paradoxically, instead of fueling further debates, the quarrels around the universal ended up in a différend that has reduced the question of universals to silence all the way to the early 2000s. This wasn’t deemed to be necessarily bad news, and to a certain extent, the disavowal of universality could end up being a valid maneuver in search for new conceptual tools. In addition to that, the wish to abandon universalism wasn’t necessarily senseless, given the history of violence that was committed in the name of “universal causes.” But what certainly was a mistake, is that different strands of Western philosophies turned away their heads from the universal thereafter, as though its material con­ sequences would cease thus to exist. And they didn’t. They were simply pushed to the periphery of knowledge staying, nonetheless, a substantial part of the shared, common reality. The realm of universal thus became the “Balkans of the European thought.” From then onwards, a specter is haunting the European thought – a specter of the universal. The way in which the notion of universal(s) became “balkanized” is twofold, its transition occurs in two dimensions and in two directions. The first part of this process is following an impulse which is directed top-down, from the (imbroglio in the) dominant discourse – to the subjected or convicted concept. We subdivide it in two movements: 1) when being balkanized, the concept of universal transitions not only from the positive extreme of the axiological spectrum of signifiers to the negative one, but it almost disappears from the

From Balkanized Universal(s) to Archipelagic Multiverse 187

spectrum itself, staying present in it only spectrally. Much like in the case of formation of the imaginary around the word “Balkans,” described by Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans, a misconception-driven transitioning of the concept of universal had inflicted on it different pejorative attributes such as archaic, irrelevant, and even dangerous, violent, and so on. All those newly acquired pejorative attributes (amongst which some of them weren’t inaccurate) were nevertheless imposed on the universal with a certain reserve, as the Uni­ versal was “almost,” and not completely correspondent to them. Unlike the Balkans which were always on the periphery of Europe, the universal was ori­ ginally, and for a long time, central to the Western philosophy. Anyhow, this axiological transition was possible primarily because the signifier “universal,” much like the signifier “Balkans,” was “detached from its original and from subsequent signified(s) with which it enters into a relationship,” while simulta­ neously “becoming saturated with a social and cultural meaning that expanded its signified far beyond its immediate and concrete meaning.”6 Furthermore, the transition of universal and its transformation is to be understood as a qualita­ tive degradation: by transitioning, Universal has lost its positive qualities, above all its “strong, constant and certain light”7 that was providing “clarity” for two thousand years of history of philosophy, and gained new, negative ones. 2) Nevertheless, the Universal didn’t therefore became strictly speaking the “other” of European thought – similarly to Balkans which were never equal to the Orient in relation to Europe. While the Orient is considered as the antiworld of the West (according to the Saidian critique of orientalism), and as such is a different type, Balkans represent the difference within the type “Europe.”8 Likewise, the transitioned universal keeps being an integral part of the Western thought, but now, since it was “balkanized,” it is recognized as ambiguous – and ambiguity is always treated as anomaly – as writes Todor­ ova referring to Mary Douglas. Finally, we could say that, exactly like the notion of Balkans, the notion of Universal once balkanized, became the low­ ermost of the Western thought, which suggests “the shadow, the structurally despised alter-ego,”9 the abstract theoretical demon (see how Todorova des­ ignates Balkans as the “abstract cultural demon”10 that should be banished to the periphery of Western knowledge, and more specifically, to the periphery of its understanding of the political). Moreover, yet another part of the twofold process of balkanization of the Universal responds to the first one. We are thus witnessing here to the reverse, bottom-up movement of balkanization of universal. This one comes as a kind of symptom of the previous one, a symptom which, as every symptom according to Freud’s definition from Moses and Monotheism, can be “considered as the ‘return of the repressed.’ The distinctive character of them, however, lies in the extensive distortion the returning elements have undergone, compared with their original form.”11 The distinctive character of the return of the repressed balk­ anized universal lies in its fragmentation, its pluralization, so that from now onwards what emerges on the surface of the symbolic order are balkanized

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universals. The “original form” came back as “returning elements.” The anomalous ambiguity of the repressed balkanized universal comes back as the violent equivocity of plural balkanized universals. Transition thus becomes shat­ tering, and this shattering might be understood in different terms. Speaking in an interview about his considerations exposed in L’Universel en Éclats, Jean-Claude Milner reminds us about the difference between the Greek word kath’olou which designates the universal through the idea of the “whole,”12 and the Latin uni­ versale, that rather implies the idea of “one.”13 The multiple rests implicit in both terms. In this part of the process of balkanization of the universal, the whole is shattered, and the multiple, unitary, concrete universals emerge, unsettling the particulars from within. The violence which was the part of the shattering will stay an integral part of shattered pieces. Furthermore, we can recall here yet another specificity of the process that is inherent to the notion of balkanization, namely the dividing in parcels, parcelization which ends in “creation of small entities at war with each other.”14 This parcelization or shattering of the universal seems always to create cracks on the lines of division that already preexisted. Milica Bakic´­ Hayden is showing something similar in the context of former Yugoslavia, which offers a disquieting example of the implications of the redeployment of old dividing lines and the construction of new political identities. Yugoslav peo­ ples have not only questioned their common-identity-through-common-com­ munist-state but led by their political and intellectual elites, have also embarked on re-storing “original” identities that predated the common state.15 Thus, the claim of universality of the unitary balkanized bits and pieces of the former universal that was considered as a whole, is based on the myth of the original, which Bakic´-Hayden explains, referring to Homi K. Bhabha, as follows: [T]hey have ignored the presentness of the present and pastness of past, creating a kind of “primeval present of the Volk,” with heroes from remote history either identified or appearing side by side with those of more recent and contemporary history.16 If we return to Milner, we can see that the relation between those balkanized universals, seen through the lens of personification, is similar to those which is deployed between what Lacan names the “parlêtres”: “from the moment when the ‘parlêtres’ are more than one, each one condemns the other to muteness, for it to cease to be a ‘parlêtre.’”17 To use here an already mentioned Žižek’s dis­ tinction: in this stage of the process, the abstract universal has disappeared, and concrete universals are in the situation where they cannot communicate any­ more. Violence and conflict become thus only means through which this kind of universals can “communicate” or enter in a “dialogue.” It is exactly this specter of balkanized universals that is haunting contemporary Europe and the entire Western world today.

From Balkanized Universal(s) to Archipelagic Multiverse 189

Archipelagic Multiverse: Universality as Relation If ever the previous pages seemed to offer a eulogy of the concept of universal as it was traditionally understood, the following will aim to dismantle this potential impression. Hence the question could be: should we return in panic to the tradi­ tional usage of the concept Universal, under the threat of “balkanized universals,” and give new credit to the “totalitarianism of universal”?18 Surely not. What is important to point out here is that the balkanized universals, as well as their traditional predecessors, imply a tree-like conception of identity, a stable hier­ archical rootedness in an a priori given grounds which we are tending to subvert here. It is in such relation between universality and identity (where universality is identity) that lies the oppressive, reactionary potential of all universalisms. Should we then maybe turn ourselves to the premises of the mantra of multi­ culturalism, to the neoliberal melting pot paradigm? Neither, luckily, because this would presuppose predictable outcomes in which differences end up being repressed in the all-englobing processes of capitalist exploitation of sense. What we will try to propose hence is a form of archipelagic, rhizome-like (to use the Deleuzian term dear to Édouard Glissant) universals. A multiverse in which the speech (the lacanian parler) wouldn’t be guaranteed only by solitude19 (or auto­ matically endangered by the mere presence of others (other parlêtres), as Milner claims following Lacan). A way to handle this aporia is political, but also poe­ tical. It calls for an interlocution driven by politics and poetics of Relation. As Élie During writes (when reflecting on the work of Jean-Michel Salanskis), “it is essential that the universal offers itself in a diversity” and that “it is installed from the beginning in the element of sense, for which we know it could be con­ stituted only by the means of variation and difference.”20 Moreover, resisting to the traditional paradigm, During insists that the universal should be given “in a certain dispersion,”21 a dispersion which is unavoidable and obligating, even if there is no primary institution to it and there is no possible deduction from one universal to the other. To offer an imagery of this dispersed universal, During introduces the figure of archipelago, and the famous Lyotard’s interpretation of the nature of Kant’s faculty of judgement, which, like an admiral or a ship-owner which directs expeditions from one island (or one discourse) to the other, “so the former could serve to the later as an ‘as-if intuition’ that could validate it. This force of intervention, war or commerce, doesn’t have its object, its own island, but it demands for a milieu, the sea, Archepelagos.”22 The dispersion process of archipelagic universal as described in Lyotard’s reading of Kant, and echoed by During, is certainly important, but the way relation is reestablished between the dispersed instances seem inadequate for our aims, not emancipatory enough (both poetically and politically). Instead of relying on the military or merchant figure, representing the faculty of judgement, which would ensure perfectly transparent and previously organized – thus predictable – relations between the islands of the archipelagic universal, we should choose rather the figure of “pacotilleuse.”23 Instead of “expeditions,” we should maybe try vagabondage.

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Instead of aiming the model of Kantian unity of apperception, we could try the Hegelian cunning of reason. Instead of obedience, we could try defiance and insubordination. The universal that could possibly be deduced from the thought of Édouard Glissant subverts the very idea of universality. It is certainly not an abstract one, because “the abstract universal makes us faceless,”24 as writes Glissant pledging for the concreteness of what we call here an archipelagic multiverse, which is just another term we coined here to express the Relation and the Whole-world (Tout­ monde) in the context of Balibar’s idea of equivocity of universals. The idea of archipelago tends to be opposed to the one of the continent. The archipelagic thought is a “thought of a try, of intuitive temptation, which could be opposed to the continental ones, which are above all thoughts of a system.”25 Instead of the big picture, archipelagic thought is focused on infinite details, and their unity is not on the list of its priorities. Differences, and not identities, are the “elementary particles of the tissue of the living, or of the woven canvas of cultures.”26 In archipelagos such as the Caribbean, languages don’t evolve in distinction and predominant separateness as on the Continent – instead, they creolize. The linguistic differences thus coexist in solidarity, offering new, unpredictable outcomes. In linguistic terms, creolization is the opposite of balkanization – the newly standardized languages of former Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croat gave after the war: Montenegrin, Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian) are constituted in proportionally opposite processes comparing to the ones of formation of the creoles. In ontological terms as well: “The archipelago, the peninsula, Bal­ kans, as Mr. Claudio Magris observes amongst others, this peninsula gave, maybe wrongly, one of the most negative verbs of Relation in the world: to balkanize.”27 But all like balkanization, creolization (and not “creolity”28) should be understood as a universal process.29 Creolization is the process that makes possible and affirms the opacity (which has nothing to do with obscurantism or apartheid) in relations between and within different archipelagic universals. Instead of reenacting the mediating clarity of sublimation offered by the traditional Universal, the archipelagic multiverse resists its top-down dom­ inating impulse, by reclaiming “the right to opacity, which will not be an enclosing.”30 In this opacity flourish the Imaginary, which is driven by the poetics of Relation, thus not giving a definite solution, but creating each time new cun­ ning ways of dealing with the equivocity of universals, thus enabling the desti­ tuent power of political emancipation. The forces of the archipelagic Imaginary are lyrical, on the contrary to the epic ones that characterize the balkanization. In all those senses, balkanized universals and archipelagic multiverse, both con­ ceptualized as neither outsider nor insider responses to the traditional Western Universal, are two opposed ways of conceiving universality – they both wear the mark of dominant oppression, but the first has turned it into exclusive identarian violence, while the second opens paths of emancipation that could concern everyone-everywhere, tout le monde in a Tout-monde, while not falling into the liberal trap of inclusive multiculturalism.

From Balkanized Universal(s) to Archipelagic Multiverse 191

Notes 1 Etienne Balibar, Des Universels: Essais et Conferences (Paris: Éditions de Galilée, 2016), 9. 2 Balibar, Des Universels, 147. 3 Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, (London: Verso, 2000), 3. 4 Slavoj Žižek, “Dialectic Clarity versus the Misty Paradox of Conceit,” in Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, edited by Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 294. 5 Javier Burdman “Universality Without Consensus: Jean-François Lyotard on Politics in Postmodernity,” PSC 46, no. 3 (2020), 304. 6 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21. 7 Jean-Claude Milner, L’Universel en Éclats (Paris: Verdier, 2011), 9 (my translation). 8 Todorova, Imagining, 19. 9 Todorova, Imagining, 18. 10 Todorova, Imagining, 37. 11 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (London: Hogarth Press, 1939), 201. 12 Françoise Dastur “L’Universel et le Singulier” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 95, no. 3 (2011): 581–99. See this article for a more detailed linguistic analyses of kath’olou and a portrait of the universal (and the singular) in the German Idealism. 13 Élie During and Anoush Ganjipour, “Jean-Claude Milner: L’Universel Difficile,” Critique 833 (2016), 825 (my translation). 14 Todorova, Imagining, 36. 15 Milica Bakic´-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” SR 54, no. 4 (1955), 922. 16 Bakic´-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms,” 922–3. 17 During and Ganjipour, “Jean-Claude Milner,” 829 (my translation). 18 Dastur, “L’Universel,” 581. 19 During and Ganjipour, “Jean-Claude Milner,” 829 (my translation). 20 Élie During, “L’Universel en Archipel,” Critique 833 (2016), 792 (my translation). 21 During, “L’Universel,” 792 (my translation). 22 Jean-François Lyotard, Le Différend (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 190, cited in Élie During, “L’universel en Archipel,” 792 (my translation). 23 Édouard Glissant, Tout-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 544–5. “Pacotilleuses” are Caribbean merchant women who travel from island to island, to sell goods of dif­ ferent origins within the archipelago, usually of no great value. For Glissant, these women create the archipelago, they relate “life to life”, they “weave the Caribbean to the Americas” and besides “selling portable radios from Miami and chain-made paintings from Port-au-Prince, bowls decorated in San Juan and rasta necklaces from Jamaica, they transport air and gossips, food and prejudices, the beautiful sun and the cyclones. But they don’t believe they are on a mission. They are the Relation” (my translation). 24 Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 19. 25 Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation: Poésie en Etendue (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 45 (my translation). 26 Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, 29 (my translation). 27 Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation, 49 (my translation). 28 Créolité is a concept proposed by writers Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau in Éloge de la Créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), and in the eyes of Glissant it is applicable only to the Antilles. 29 Édouard Glissant, “La Créolisation Est un Preocessus Universel.” Le Nouvel Observateur, February 3, 2011, https://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20110203. OBS7390/edouard-glissant-la-creolisation-est-un-processus-universel.html.

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30 Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 29.

Bibliography Bakic´-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–931. Balibar, Étienne. Des Universels: Essais et Conferences. Paris: Éditions de Galilée, 2016. Burdman, Javier. “Universality Without Consensus: Jean-François Lyotard on Politics in Postmodernity.”Philosophy and Social Criticism 46, no. 3 (2020): 302–322. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. New York: Verso, 2000. Dastur, Françoise. “L’Universel et le Singulier.” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 95, no. 3 (2011): 581–599. During, Élie. “L’Universel en Archipel.” Critique 833 (2016): 789–806. During, Élie and Anoush Ganjipour. “Jean-Claude Milner: L’Universel Difficile.” Critique 833 (2016): 823–834. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. London: Hogarth Press, 1939. Glissant, Édouard. Philosophie de la Relation: Poésie en Etendue. Paris: Gallimard. 2009. Glissant, Édouard. Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Lyotard, François. Le Différend. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983. Milbank, John. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by Creston Davis. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Milner, Jean-Claude. L’Universel en Éclats. Paris: Verdier, 2011. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. “Dialectic Clarity Versus the Misty Paradox of Conceit.” In Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? Edited by Creston Davis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

27

WAR IN THE STATE AND THE STATE IN WAR Carlos-Adolfo Rengifo-Castañeda, Alexander Muriel Restrepo, Diana-Carolina Cañaveral-Londoño, Francisco Yusty and Conrado Giraldo Zuluaga

Introduction In this chapter1 it is intended, on one hand, to contrast certain dimensions of a universal nature in relation to the conception of war and the State which probably have been established with a hegemonic purpose. On the other hand, to explain a novel conception of war and the State. For this purpose and in the first place, we will give an overview on the development of the sovereign power of the State inextricably associated with war, based on the review of this topic in Hobbes’ work with significant repercussions in modern philosophical-political thought. Secondly, this development will be complemented by the reflective and critical contributions of Slavoj Žižek who in this regard considers: The metaphorical framework we use to understand the political process is therefore never innocent or neutral: it “schematizes” the concrete meaning of politics. Ultra-politics appeals to the war model: then poli­ tics is a form of social warfare, a relationship with the enemy, with “them.” Arch-politics opts for the medical model: society is then a composite body, an organism; and social divisions are the diseases of that organism, against which we must fight. Our enemy is a cancerous intrusion, a pestilent parasite which must be exterminated in order to recover the health of the social body. Para-politics uses the model of agonistic competition which as in a sporting event, is governed by cer­ tain rules accepted by all. Meta-politics resorts to the model of the technical-scientific instrumental procedure while post-politics resorts to the model of business negotiation and strategic compromise.2

DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-30

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At the behest of foregoing, it is intended for good reasons to account for an adequate, pertinent and novel conception of the State and of the prevailing war in some political contexts with a certain pretension of universality.

Statement of the Question Following Hobbes’s thought, in the tradition of modern political philosophy it has been established that the State is constituted to eradicate war at least from the heart of a civil society. In this writing, the previous assumption supports a kind of antinomian situation in which the issue of sovereign power in relation to war is found. On one side, this obsession of the State in terms of must be legal duty and the administration of the necessary resources for the full realization of right, wellbeing, and civil order has been projected throughout modernity. This is what, at least formally, has in fact been likely to happen. It is then intended to argue that the Hobbesian premise of the State con­ ceived as a function of security has derived in our times in a kind of reassuring appearance of that sovereign power, as if it were effectively at work to restrain any intention to fight proper to men. In this way, the peaceful aspect given to the State operates by attenuating a reality that underlies as a shadow, veiling the very nature of the war associated with the State. As a result, the State has been exempted from liability. In other words, by typifying the State as the guarantor of civil order, it is understandable that the State appears with a certain degree of exemption or indulgence for its responsibility in the dynamics of war. Even being responsible for modern wars, it is considered that in many cases the State tends to justify its actions when it claims to be obliged to do so in order to confront what has been catalogued as tyranny, totalitarianism or more recently terrorism that modernly seem to have threatened the peacefulness of a civil society and democratic institutionality here or there. In any case, if it is admitted that the State originates as a result of conquest, it is possible to uphold that its raison d’être is conquest and all events con­ verge to show this belligerent nature; therefore, it can no longer be assumed that war has a mere unpredictable or fortuitous character, as if it obeyed a passionate intention to battle due to the pursuit of power that only ceases with death as it appears in Hobbes’ thought.3 On the contrary, it is pertinent to think that if the State has not dissociated itself from war to the point that there can be no State without war or war without the State, such State could reach the culminating instance of developing a war rationale or war policy. If the State is characterized by its politics of war, it is also understandable to assert along with Foucault that politics is war thus inverting Clausewitz’s4 aphorism to admit that politics is the continuation of war by other means which is fully contrasted empirically and based on the democratic security policy in Colombia. Having said that and according to Žižek, it should be noted, that:

War in the State and the State in War 195

Any universality that claims to be hegemonic must incorporate at least two specific components: the “authentic” popular content and the “deformation” produced by relations of domination and exploitation. Undoubtedly, fascist ideology “manipulates” the authentic popular longing for a return to true community and social solidarity to counteract unbridled competition and exploitation; certainly, it “distorts” the expression of that longing for the purpose of legitimizing and preserving the social relations of domination and exploitation. However, in order to achieve this objective, it must incorporate in its discourse this authentic popular yearning. Ideological hegemony, therefore, it is not so much that a particular content that comes to fill the void of the universal, as that the very form of ideological universality reflects the conflict between (at least) two particular contents: the “popular” one, which expresses the intimate longings of the dominated majority, and the specific one, which expresses the interests of the dominant forces.5 In this regard, the circumstances by which war has been thought, planned, technified, and consummated in the way it has come to be done in modern times must be analyzed, being seen not only as necessary but also longed by the people, being identified, paradoxically, with the interests of the dominant, oli­ garchic, and autocratic forces. It is even more worrying to think that all what is written before commits the State in relation to the war as responsible for these dynamics in its totality, as in the case of the Colombian Government led by the Centro Democrático and its nonsense opposition to the peace process in Colombia, signed with the movement Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). This social and political dynamics compels a debate on the arguments that lead the State to develop war potential despite the fact that even though it is argued that it is a function of maintaining a certain international power (balance of power) which, precisely for this reason, it does not cease to be filled with a certain gentle tension, not only in the local, regional, or national sphere but even in the global sphere of a tense calmness. Sophistic posture that uses the ignorance of the majorities as well as the distortion of the concept of peace, as Centro Democrático party did “well” in Colombia in order to legitimize a bloody conflict. Additionally, it means trying to see why this war rationality developed by the State, as in the case of Colombia, it is legitimized with a claim of ideolo­ gical universality by a “popular majority, authentic, but configured by a deformed conception of the relations of domination.”6 Such a universal notion of war, conflict and security is carried out with a certain endogenous char­ acter what has increasingly been called internal security (democratic security7) and which resorts to notions such as the internal enemy especially in states where the doctrine of national security has become politically naturalized, giving impetus to a type of internal war that is said to be carried out in order to provide security against the threat of new barbarians, both internal, and external.

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Ultimately, in setting this so-called range of exemption, one is led to believe that what is happening today is a certain tendency towards the privatization of war whose description does not focus on the State as the main actor but refers to warlords and war companies.8 The Hobbesian premise is rooted in the modern political philosophical tradition, because otherwise it affects the whole structure erected around sovereign power, thus coming to question the current society itself also character­ ized as an open society9 but paradoxically responsible for considerable holocausts around war. It may be objected in this sense that open societies in which rights and liberties rest and are guaranteed, are besieged by their enemies such as totalitar­ ianism and more recently terrorism. However, it can be assumed that it was pre­ cisely within this type of democratic society where the totalitarian State was conceived10 as a superior phase of that society. Furthermore, it will be said that the State has irrigated in society the benefits, even those historically accumulated in the conquest, giving with this the char­ acter of necessary evil to war. There is even less political generosity in these circumstances. It would be better to say there is no way that determined will of the sovereign power of the State could bring the greatest possible welfare to the greatest possible number of subjects or citizens. On the contrary, the history of the triumph of people’s rights and the welfare achieved, which is a clearly ver­ ifiable issue, is irremediably inscribed in that battlefield in which politics is the continuation of war by other means. It is therefore a scenario of incessant war that determines that rights are not granted benevolently but abruptly wrenched away. The scope of analysis opened up by the critique of warlike reason raises the following question: What are the implications of saying that the modern State is driven to war but thanks to the stamp given to it by legal-philosophical thinking as a sovereign entity endowed with deterrent and coercive capacity to keep in line any attempt to fight in the form of a war of all against all, it tends to keep its belligerent nature hidden?

Inseparable Nature of War and the State The thesis that concludes on the inseparable nature of war and the State, much to Hobbes’ dismay, rests on a sequence of analysis that has as its starting point precisely the exposition of Hobbes’ thought on war and the constitution of sovereignty. In relation to the current political evolution, good reasons are identified to develop this approach that the State commits to war because the determining factor has been the development of the warlike reason to prolong the conquest, as well illustrated by the Colombian government represented by the political party Centro Democrático during its 16 years of government and its pretensions to establish its political postulates in relation to war, peace, and the democratic security policy as true universals. In relation to this, Žižek warns “the paradox lies in the fact that there is no true universal without political conflict, without

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a ‘part without a part,’ without a disconnected, dislocated entity that presents and/or manifests itself as representative of the universal.”11 The paradox that Centro Democrático party apparently understands perfectly since in order to establish such universals as true (for them and their great misguided majority) they recognized the conflict as a sufficient reason for their government proposals. Regarding such universality, Žižek warns, I would like to apply the basic lesson of what Hegel calls concrete universality. Universality is never neutral. Whenever you define something as common or neutral or universal (this is a classic Marxist point) you often secretly privilege some agent.12 This is a particularly dramatic description but unfortunately, it is echoed in nations whose governments whether totalitarian or not, such as Colombia, favored the discourse of a strong hand and the political demagogy of a big heart (noble heart). Supposing the birth of the law in the clamor of the conquest is as much as to admit that the law itself is the law of the victors and that the sovereignty of the State does not find any acquiescent basis for obedience only that supported by the force of arms. In the dilemma of this transition from a natural society characterized by anxiety and warlike attitude to a civil society promising right, Hobbes locates the agreement between subjects thus becoming political subjects because they prudently agree to renounce the liberties and prerogatives of the state of nature. Precisely because of the uneasiness in which they find themselves in this original state, disposing themselves under these particular conditions to assume the very legitimacy of obedience to the sovereign power of the State.13 Some obsessions that have been left in political posterity by these characteriza­ tions of war described in the famous Chapter XIII of Leviathan which have even become commonplace, they are for example, convictions that war is an activity resulting from the passionate attitude that men have for battling against each other due to their indeclinable quest for power after power that only ceases with death. Consequently, the most natural thing is that with a greater or lesser degree of generalized conviction it has come to be believed that the State has emerged to restrain this kind of irrational belligerence underlying the human condition, being invested with a power capable of leading to the culmination of war within a civil society. But beyond its confines, given the proximity of another State, war can become infinite. The State then emerges as the rational part as the artificial man in opposition to the irrationality of war. Ultimately, it will be insisted that the topicality of war means working on a critique of the war rationale that continues in the revision of the postulates of the legal-philoso­ phical approach, particularly in this context of considerations on war that derives in fixing the vision of a modern society, at least the western society, as a political, open, liberal, and mature society in the consensual attitude and therefore, guarantor of peace and predisposed to dissuade any threat of war.

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But at the same time, it is also a point of analyzing what has happened with the state of war, that is, with the war of the State or war between States, typical of these bourgeois societies. After all, the lines written here do not suggest the intention of covering the complex bundle of situations that is woven around the State. So, the purpose of this writing is no more than to try to set the scene for a concrete situation, a relationship profusely illustrated: the involvement of the sovereign power of the State in the various manifestations of war within a civil society and in interstate interaction, setting as an added value the suspicion of that kind of political bipolarity reflected by the State in relation to warfare, in view of which it is necessary to insist on the need to advance towards a critique of war reason. Thus, this writing intends to contrast certain forms of universalizable as true in relation to war and the State as contrasted with the Colombian case, and that as Žižek points out, it is a struggle which “is not limited to impose certain meanings but seeks to appropriate the universality of the notion” …a notion of peace, democratic security, and war.

Notes 1 This paper is the result of the research by Alexander Muriel Restrepo titled “War and Power: Towards a Critique of the Warlike Reason,” PhD diss., Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín, 2021. 2 Slavoj Žižek, En Defensa de la Intolerancia (Madrid: Sequitur, 2008), 30.

3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviatán (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989).

4 Carl von Clausewitz, De la Guerra: Versión Integra (Madrid: La Esfera de

Libros, 2005). 5 Žižek, En Defensa, 19. 6 But it is not because they are in the majority, they necessarily enjoy good reasons. Falacia ad populum. 7 A statement that characterized the government policy of former President Alvaro Uribe Vélez in Colombia. 8 Dario Azzellinia and Boris Kanzleiter, La Privatización de las Guerras: Paramilitares, Señores de la Guerra y Ejércitos Privados como Actores del Nuevo Orden Bélico (Berlin: Assoziation A., 2003). 9 “An attempt has been made to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth, from the transition from the tribal or ‘closed’ society, with its subjection to magical forces, to the ‘open society,’ which sets free the critical faculties of man. An attempt is also made to show that the commotion produced by this transition constitutes one of the factors which made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization in order to return to tribal organization. It suggests, moreover, that what we call totalitarianism today belongs to a tradition that is neither older nor younger than our civilization itself.” Karl Popper, La Sociedad Abierta y Sus Enemigos (Barcelona: Paidós, 2010). 10 Herbert Marcuse, Cultura y Sociedad (Buenos Aires: Sur S.A., 1967).

11 Žižek, En Defensa, 34.

12 Slavoj Žižek, Pedir Lo Imposible (Madrid: Akal, 2014), 37

13 Hobbes, Leviatán.

War in the State and the State in War 199

Bibliography Azzellini, Dario, and Boris Kanzleiter. La Privatización de las Guerras. Paramilitares, Señores de la Guerra y Ejércitos Privados como Actores del Nuevo Orden Bélico. Berlin: Assoziation A., 2003. von Clausewitz, Carl. De la Guerra: Versión Integra. Madrid: La Esfera de Libros, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. Defender la Sociedad. México: F.C.E., 2000.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviatán. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.

Kaldor, Mary. Las Nuevas Guerras: Violencia Organizada en la Era Global. Barcelona:

Tusquest Editores, 2001. Marcuse, Herbert. Cultura y Sociedad. Buenos Aires: Sur S.A., 1967. Münkler, Herfried. Viejas y Nuevas Guerras: Asimetría y Privatización de la Violencia. España: Siglo XXI, 2005. Popper, Karl. La Sociedad Abierta y Sus Enemigos. Barcelona: Paidós, 2010. Žižek, Slavoj. En Defensa de la Intolerancia. Madrid: Sequitur, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Pedir Lo Imposible. Madrid: Akal, 2014.

28

CAN EUROPE BE A MANIFESTO? THE ROLE OF EUROPE IN KOREAN AMERICAN LITERATURE Brian Willems1

Using Europe to Analyze Oneself: Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker As Slavoj Žižek wonders in “My European Manifesto,” “can ‘Europe’ still be what Jacques Lacan called a ‘master-signifier,’ one of those words cap­ able of saying the struggle for emancipation?”3 The definition of a mastersignifier does not lie in any positive or negative content, but rather in its structure and function. The master-signifier is a framework which encoura­ ges analysis, rather than any particular analysis itself. The master-signifier is not “a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers, but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers.”4 For Žižek, the Europe of “secular modernity, of the Enlightenment, of human rights and freedoms, of solidarity and social justice, of feminism” is a master-signifier that “provides the best tools to analyze what is wrong with Europe.”5 In the Korean American novels under consideration here, Europe takes on such an analy­ tical function, which is also the function of the manifesto. However, using a non-European lens to see the European master-signifier paradoxically fore­ grounds one of its truly “European” characteristics: a construct for joining rather than separating. In Chang-Rae Lee’s debut novel Native Speaker, Henry Park is a Korean American spy embedded in the political campaign of John Kwang, who is running for mayor of New York City. Park’s estranged wife is taking a trip to Europe and Park asks one of his co-workers what kind of a trip she might have. The description Park gets is important because it does not fea­ ture Europe in any of its real-world problems or advantages, but rather Europe is given a specific function, that of not letting someone escape from their problems:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-31

Can Europe Be a Manifesto? 201

The day after she left I asked Jack Kalantzakos what he knew about the places my wife would be, whether they were beautiful, striking, possibly dangerous. “You mean will she take a lover there?” he said, his thick moustache spiced with strong oils. He was our office expert in affairs Mediterranean. I must have nodded. I doubt she will, he answered himself, “unless she favors Asiatic, hollow-cheeked boys. Lean young swimmers. But then I look at you…” Of course he knew this was what I wanted to hear. I pressed him on it and learned only that the emperor Diocletian had built a resplendent palace on the shores of the Adriatic, for his retirement, of all things, as if he might escape the snarls of his Rome.6 Park imagines his wife running away to Europe to escape her marriage troubles, but Kalantzakos says the only things that she will find there of interest are more guys just like Park. And in the latter part of the quote, the Roman emperor Diocletian builds his retirement getaway palace in what is now Split, Croatia, but it is only “as if” he will escape the snarls of Rome there, which indicates that his troubles will not be so far behind him.7 These aspects of the novel show Europe not as a particular place bound with its traditions and history, despite the reference to the emperor Diocletian. Instead, Europe is given a par­ ticular function, that of a tool with which to analyze what is wrong with one­ self. This comes very close to Žižek’s call in his manifesto for seeing how Europe “provides the best tools to analyze what is wrong with Europe.”8 It is in this role of analysis-provider that Europe takes on the coordinates of the master-signifier. The first section of the first chapter of Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do is called “The Birth of a Master-Signifier.” Here some clarification can be found regarding the differences between the “real, every-day problems” of Europe and the more abstract Europe as a master-signifier. All signifiers acquire meaning by being in relation to what they are not. Thus, the meaning of day is not found in opposition to night, but rather in the potential absence of day, which is represented by the signifier night. 9 This structure is the basis for sig­ nification and in this way, we end up with a never-ending series of actual and potential absences which develop meaning in our world, since “a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier.”10 At least until we come to the master-signifier. Rather than having an endless chain of signifiers representing the absence of others, the master-signifier denotes the end of the line. Whenever we say, “Because I told you so,” or that “everyone knows” what you are talking about, this is an appeal to the master-signifier.11 Or, in Žižek’s words, “we simply reverse the series of equivalences and ascribe to one signifier the function of representing the subject…for all the others…in this way, the proper MasterSignifier is produced.”12 In relation to Lee’s novel Native Speaker, Europe functions as a master-signifier because it is where lying to oneself comes to a stop: Europe confronts you with you. In other words, you might think you are

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going to Europe to escape your problems, but actually Europe is just a mirror, reflecting your issues right back at you. It is in this sense that Europe functions as a both a master-signifier and a manifesto in the novel: Europe is where avoiding your problems ends. Its function is to stop you from running away from yourself. Another important aspect of the master-signifier is how its stopping-function is not tied to logic or reason, but has a different economy. In “We Need a Margaret Thatcher of the Left,” from the book What Does Europe Want?, written in alternative chapters with Srec´ko Horvat, Žižek calls for a new dic­ tator for Europe, although of a more benevolent nature than those of the past. The essay opens with a discussion of Winston Churchill’s famous quote about making military decisions, in which he says, Nobody ever launched an attack without having misgivings beforehand. You to have misgivings before; but when the moment of action is come, the hour of misgivings is passed. …A man must answer “Aye” or “No” to the great questions which are put, and by that decision he must be bound.13 Churchill does not provide any specific reasons for his decision in this quote,14 but rather indicates that a leader sometimes must just act and not spend all their time getting bogged down in the details: “this gesture,” Žižek says, “which can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master. It is for the experts to present the situation in its complexity, and it is for the Master to simplify it into a point of decision.”15 The role of a master, such as Churchill and later Thatcher, is to provide a cut, “to enact an authentic division,”16 in order to enact change. Žižek then goes on to claim that we need a new authoritarian leader of Europe, a Thatcher of the Left, who would transform “the entire field of presuppositions shared by today’s political elite of all main orientations.”17 In Lee’s novel, Europe functions as such a cut for the marital problems of its protagonist. For Žižek, Europe as master-signifier is a similar decision-maker, a divider, a separator. This comes from the “buck-stops-here” nature of the master-signifier. But perhaps a master-signifier that joins rather than separates could suggest a master-signifier which is still in the position to enact change, although through bringing people together rather than dividing them apart.

North and South in East Goes West and the Dora Observatory Europe as a master-signifier can also be found in what is one of the first examples of Korean American literature, Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, from 1937. Continuing from Kang’s first novel The Grass Roof (1931), East Goes West is set in the America of the 1920s and tells the story of Chungpa Han and his life as an immigrant. Europe appears in Han’s main interest: Brit­ ish literature. Obsessed with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Ruskin, Han’s dreams of America are filtered through the British literature he loves, although

Can Europe Be a Manifesto? 203

once he comes to realize the actual life of an immigrant in America, these dreams are soon dashed. Yet British literature does not just function as a point of separation between Han’s dreams and his new reality, it also functions as a point of joining, where “the Orient” meets the west, thus redefining the master-signifier into a true meeting of differences: Some things in Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, and other poets you know will suggest what I mean. Keats has said, “A poet has no identity; he is continually in, for, and filling some other body.” This is the spirit of the Orient, at the same time mystic and sensuous.18 The quote from Keats comes from a famous letter he wrote to Richard Woodhouse on October 27, 1818. In this letter Keats continues a discussion in which he differentiates “egotistical”19 poets such as Wordsworth from himself, a selfless poet with no identity. Yet what is of most interest here is how Kang joins Europe and the Orient together through Keats’ notion of the “filling” of identity. This filling will be seen to be an important feature of the master-signifier, and it will also be a way to foreground its “truly” European nature. In The Parallax View, Žižek discusses the South Korean Dora Observatory, located on top of Mount Dora, on the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone that separates the North from the South. The Observatory is a kind of thea­ tre, with a large open window facing north, with a view of North Korea’s equally theatrical Potemkin village of Kijong-dong. “Is this not a pure case of the symbolic efficiency of the frame as such?” Žižek asks, “A barren zone is given a fantasmatic status, elevated into a spectacle, solely by being enframed. Nothing substantially changes here – it is merely that, viewed through the frame, reality turns into its own appearance.”20 The landscape has no special meaning until it is framed by the theatrical viewpoint of the Dora Observa­ tory. It is the frame of the observatory’s window that gives its view its meaning. This is why Žižek calls the frame symbolic: the frame provides the landscape with a symbolic function, a function which people can then under­ stand, discuss, and change over time. Thus, another aspect of the frame comes forth: the frame is false, it is a construct which gives the world “a fantasmatic status,” turning every-day reality into a symbolic spectacle for human under­ standing. This fantastic nature of the frame also connects it to the mastersignifier, since “fantasy is ultimately, at its most elementary, the stuff which fills in the void of the Master-Signifier.”21 What Žižek means by this last statement is, for example, that the Master-Signifier of a Nation can be found in “all the mythic obscure narratives which tell what the Nation is.”22 Here we find a connection between both the Dora Observatory and the North Korean Potemkin village that is seen through the observatory’s window: both are fake, theatrical frames which have nothing to do with the real people living in the divided county. On the other hand, the way this falseness is filled

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with meaning tells us about how each Nation attempts to define its own master-narrative.23 Kang’s use of European literature in his novel also features a kind of filling-in. His quotation of Keats foregrounds the way that poetry is not only about the expression of the ego of the poet (such as with Wordsworth) but it can also be an empty signifier which can be filled in with whatever is needed. And if we look at the actual quote from Keats that Kang uses, we see this point being made even more forcefully: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity; he is continually in for and filling some other Body.”24 This can be read as an example of a master-signifier in the sense that the poet is a void which is filled in with the fantasy of the poem. Yet when Kang then claims that this British poet has “the spirit of the Orient,” he is using the form of the mastersignifier in the form of a powerful manifesto, to join rather than separate. Kang’s master-signifier is based on a concept of Europe, yet this is Europe is not “a point of decision”25 between one choice and other. While in Kang’s novel a decision is made regarding “the Oriental” status of Keats, this decision joins East and West together rather than separating anything apart by the (however bene­ volent) axe of the master-signifier. In other words, the concept of Europe could still serve a manifesto, as long as it is formulated as the pure fantasy of joining different elements together rather than tearing them apart.

Notes 1 Research for this chapter has been supported by the project Further Development of Centre of Cross-Cultural and Korean Studies, funded by a grant by KSPS (AKS-2021­ INC-2230012). 2 Although these two examples relate to the former Yugoslavia, there is nothing par­ ticularly “Yugoslavian” about them since they tend to treat the locations as a part of Europe rather than the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in particular. 3 Slavoj Žižek, “Mon Manifeste Européen,” Le Monde, May 13, 2021, https://www. lemonde.fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_ 3232.html. The English translation of the text is one based on Kwesi Johnson’s DeepL translation as posted on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/ ncpdz8/zizeks_european_manifesto_in_lemonde_english. 4 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (London: Continuum, 2005), 202.

5 Žižek, “Mon Manifeste Européen.”

6 Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (London: Penguin, 2013), 15–6. See also Brian Will-

ems, “Za Kozmeticˇ ku Promjenu: Boy Genius Yongsooa Parka,” Književna Smotra 54, no. 203 (2022): 23–9; Brian Willems, “Bitterness and Recognition: Room for Others in the Novels of Steph Cha,” International Journal of Korean Humanities and Social Sciences 7 (2021): 37–60; and Brian Willems, “The End of Ideology: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong,” Acta Neophilologica 53, no. 1–2 (2020): 101–18. 7 The “snarls” most likely refers to the persecution of Christians the emperor initiated with a series of edicts signed in the last years of his rein, starting in 303 AD, see David Woods, “‘Veturius’ and the Beginning of the Diocletianic Persecution,” Mne­ mosyne 54, no. 5 (2001), 587–91. 8 Žižek, “Mon Manifeste Européen.” 9 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 2008), 22.

Can Europe Be a Manifesto? 205

10 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits (London: W.W. Norton, 2006), 694. 11 Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule, “Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2016), 2. 12 Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 23. 13 Winston Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, Vol. 3 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974), 2399. 14 Žižek does not actually provide the quote but says it is from the last pages of Churchill’s multi-volume Second World War. The quote is initially from a speech Churchill gave to the House of Commons during the First World War, on November 15, 1915, in which Churchill resigned from the Government and stated he would serve with the French Army in protest of the evacuation of Gallipoli, generally considered a terrible mistake. Churchill provides plenty of concrete reasons for his decision in this lengthy speech, although this does not distract from the use of the quote here. 15 Slavoj Žižek, “We Need a Margaret Thatcher of the Left,” in Slavoj Žižek and Srec´ko Horvat, What Does Europe Want?: The Union and Its Discontents (Zagreb: VBZ, 2014), 157. 16 Žižek, “We Need a Margaret Thatcher of the Left,” 157. 17 Žižek, “We Need a Margaret Thatcher of the Left,” 162. 18 Younghill Kang, East Goes West (London: Penguin, 2019), 212. 19 John Keats, Selected Letters, edited by Grant Scott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 194. 20 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 28. 21 Žižek, The Parallax View, 373. 22 Žižek, The Parallax View, 373. 23 A purposely fake object was created for the South Korean Gwangju Design Biennale of 2011. A group of architects designed several new “urban follies” around various sites in the city’s old center. One of these projects, Florian Beigel’s “Seowonmoon Lantern,” is an oversized traditional Korean lantern constructed around and over a monument dedicated to the May 18 Democratic Uprising, thus foregrounding the manner historical events are framed by their reception in order to be seen and understood, see Brian Willems, Sham Ruins: A User’s Guide (London: Routledge, 2022), 12–3. 24 Keats, Selected Letters, 195. 25 Žižek, “We Need a Margaret Thatcher of the Left,” 157.

Bibliography Churchill, Winston. His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, Vol 3. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1974. Hook, Derek and Stijn Vanheule. “Revisiting the Master-Signifier, or, Mandela and Repression.” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2016): 1–10. Kang, Younghill. East Goes West. London: Penguin, 2019. Keats, John. Selected Letters. Edited by Grant Scott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” In Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, 671–701. London: W.W. Norton, 2006. Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. London: Penguin, 2013. Willems, Brian. “Bitterness and Recognition: Room for Others in the Novels of Steph Cha.” International Journal of Korean Humanities and Social Sciences 7 (2021): 37–60. Willems, Brian. “The End of Ideology: The Poetry of Cathy Park Hong.” Acta Neophilologica 53, no. 1–2 (2020): 101–118.

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Willems, Brian. Sham Ruins: A User’s Guide. London: Routledge, 2022. Willems, Brian. “Za Kozmeticˇ ku Promjenu: Boy Genius Yongsooa Parka.“ Književna Smotra 54, no. 203 (2022): 23–29. Woods, David. “‘Veturius’ and the Beginning of the Diocletianic Persecution.” Mnemosyne 54, no. 5 (2001): 587–591. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Interrogating the Real. London: Continuum, 2005. Žižek, Slavoj. “Mon Manifeste Européen.” Le Monde. May 13, 2021. https://www.lemonde. fr/idees/article/2021/05/13/slavoj-zizek-mon-manifeste-europeen_6080078_3232.html. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. “We Need a Margaret Thatcher of the Left.” In Slavoj Žižek and Srec´ko Horvat, What Does Europe Want?: The Union and Its Discontents, 157–162. Zagreb: VBZ, 2014.

29

LAPULAPU’S KRIS AND PANGLIMA AWANG’S FIRST CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE WORLD Ramon Guillermo1

When Christopher Columbus sailed westwards across the Atlantic from Europe, he believed that he had reached South Asia when he landed in the Americas in 1492.2 Thinking that he had successfully circumnavigated the world, he called the native inhabitants he encountered “Indians” (or “Indios”). However, the lines drawn going from Europe to the East and to the West on the globe had not yet been joined to make a circle. Their ends still indetermi­ nate, the vastness of space they had to traverse before meeting was yet unknown. According to Hegel, until the two ends formed a circle, there could only be what he called a “bad infinity” stretching out in both directions.3 Before the first circumnavigation of the world, the Europeans could only encounter a “bad infinity” of “Indias” (or of “non-Europes”) in their voyages from Europe going either to the far West or the Far East. And because the whole was yet unknown, European Reason could not grasp the totality of the world as a space where it could exercise its absolute power. It is said that there are two possible first circumnavigators of the world: the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan and a Malay baptized as Enrique de Malacca.4 This historic feat was achieved by these two individuals together in two sepa­ rate voyages. The first was Magellan’s voyage back from Malacca to Lisbon in 1513, with Enrique as his interpreter. The second was their fateful voyage westward from Sevilla that reached Limasawa in 1521. The fact that the chief­ tains in Limasawa understood the language Enrique spoke meant that they had probably returned to the same part of the world where Enrique had originated. It is highly likely that Enrique spoke Bahasa Melayu which was the lingua franca in the “Malay World.”5 In this way, for the first time in human history, the two lines from Europe that had stretched out in opposite directions were joined in both a practical and metaphorical sense. This ideological moment, which established “Eurocentrism,” was crucial in the ensuing process of DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-32

208 Ramon Guillermo

material integration of all societies under what would become a global capital­ ist system throughout the succeeding centuries until the present.6 It can therefore be surmised that the modern European Subject was born in 1521 when European civilization first attained its practico-theoretical “universal horizon”7 by means of the first circumnavigation of the world. This differs with the view of the Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel who theorized that the modern European Subject was born in 1492, when Columbus reached America and began the brutal conquest by Europe over the “Other.”8 It is true that Columbus’s encounter with the “Indians” of America inaugurated Europe’s violent masculinist and racist colonial project. It is also true that 1492 is an important date in the European Subject’s birthing process. However, its defini­ tive birth can be said to have been in 1521. Prior to this, faced with the bad infinity of “Indias” to the West and to the East, Europe had not yet encountered the universal “Other” or “Indio” on a planetary scale. Only after 1521 could the European Subject survey the totality of the world laid before it as a map or globe. Europe’s developing material and technological superiority then allowed it to launch countless colonial explorations in all possible directions, but noth­ ing more could be considered as existing outside or beyond its horizon.9 From the modern European Subject’s practical domination of the world emerged the idealist philosophies of Europe. These philosophies argued that it is impossible to conceive of or even imagine the existence of anything if it is not connected to or related to a subject, which can only mean the “European” uni­ versal Subject. The existence of the tarsier (Carlito syrichta), endemic on the island of Bohol in the Philippines, and even its entire tree and mountain habitat suddenly became dependent on the gaze of the European Subject. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer once wrote, “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”10 However, what these Eurocentric thinkers neglect to mention is that the beings installed by the process of Enlightenment as “masters” (Herren) are exclusively Europeans and that those who have experienced this “calamity” (Unheil) in its greatest violence are the colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, Adorno and Horkheimer also assert that the Enlightenment’s “principle of immanence” acknowledges “nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the mean­ ingless game have been played out, all the great thoughts have been thought, all possible discoveries can be construed in advance.”11 But what they actually mean here is that Europe believes that it has played all the moves in the “meaningless game” and has discovered everything which can still be discovered. More importantly, European man believes he has already thought all thinkable great thoughts (die großen Gedanken alle schon gedacht). A philosopher once said that “there is nothing outside the text.”12 It is said that this phrase has been variously misinterpreted, but it can best be understood in its practical and concrete sense if it is translated as “there is nothing outside

Lapulapu and Panglima Awang 209

the European text.” For do Europeans actually know anything outside European texts?13 Even the so-called “dialogical” philosophy with its “ideal speech situation” turns out to be a mere comfortable conversation of Europeans among them­ selves.14 To speak or write in a language that is not European is almost synon­ ymous to not speaking or writing at all. European philosophies are deaf to these voices. One way of understanding the series of supposedly universal philosophical categories such as the “subject,” “consciousness,” and “language” would therefore be to translate these as “European Subject,” “European consciousness,” and “Eur­ opean language.”15 Only in this way can those outside of Europe grasp the whole breadth of European philosophizing since 1521. Adorno once said that “the whole is untrue” (das Ganze ist das Unwahre). This is so because the supposed “whole” that European philosophy unabashedly claims for itself merely revolves around its own limited horizon. Its false universality is based on the erasure, forgetting, and eradication of countless worlds outside Europe. Within the absolute horizon of the modern European Subject, the existence of someone known as Lapulapu is impossible. A good example of this is the Aus­ trian writer Stefan Zweig’s retelling of Magellan’s death on April 27, 1521. According to him, In this senseless way, in his supreme and greatest moment, did the triumph of the greatest seafarer in history end, in a pitiful skirmish with a naked horde of islanders – a genius, like Prospero who triumphed against the elements, weathered all storms, and made men submit to him, would fall by the hand of a laughable insect-man (ein lächerliches Menscheninsekt) named Lapulapu!16 More often than not, Lapulapu’s name is omitted in Spanish and European historical narratives. In the rare instances where he is remembered, such as in Zweig’s work, he is presented as a laughingstock and likened to an “insect” easily squashed by European giants. If Zweig is to be believed, it is only Magellan’s actions that hold meaning while the actions of someone such as Lapulapu who merely defended his homeland against invaders are “senseless” (sinnlos). One also cannot but notice Zweig’s condescending use of the term “islander” (nackte Insulanerhorde), which demonstrates the stubbornly terracentric European view which considers land as the primary theater of history despite the fact that more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface is water.17 In the great history of Europe, Lapulapu is but a hyphen in between two illustri­ ous names in the phrase “Magellan-Elcano Expedition.” This hyphen leaves a trace of where Lapulapu’s kris (a “kris” is a traditional Malay blade) tempora­ rily thwarted the first circumnavigation of the world begun by Magellan and continued by Juan Sebastian Elcano as the first successful continuous cir­ cumnavigation of the world. This tiny hyphen in between the names of two European giants obscures the name of one such as Lapulapu who is not worthy of being mentioned in the exalted narrative and polite conversations of the universal history of Europe.

210 Ramon Guillermo

Perhaps only an intellectual outsider such as Walter Benjamin would have been able to sense the problem with this sort of European “forgetfulness.” For example, he once puzzlingly wrote that the true meaning of “relational con­ cepts” (Relationsbegriffe) could only be grasped when these are understood separately from humans.18 Benjamin’s assertion could perhaps be more easily comprehended if the word “human” is replaced by the word “European.” According to Benjamin’s example, the “unforgettability” of something that is really “unforgettable” (unvergeßlich) would not be diminished even if not a single person ends up remembering it. Thus, even if Europeans have forgotten Lapulapu, his unforgettability remains undiminished. What really happened is that Europeans have proved inadequate to the challenge of his unforgettability. After Benjamin’s conversion to Marxism, he began to understand this from the perspective of the enslaved.19 According to him, the master does everything to make his slaves forget even their own traditions and memories. For Benjamin, these memories are like dynamite if and when they explode in the consciousness of the enslaved. Lapulapu, who interrupted the first circuit of European universalism with his kris, was restored to memory by the Filipino hero José Rizal in his anno­ tations to the work Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Events on the Philippine Islands) (1609) which had been written by a Spanish colonial official, Antonio de Morga.20 While Morga did not explicitly mention Lapulapu, the latter would be mentioned twice in Pigafetta’s account which Rizal translated and added to the text of the Sucesos as footnotes. In this way, Lapulapu was reappropriated and became a crucial part of the memory and traditions of the 19th century Filipino nationalists and revolutionaries. A new horizon was born where such heroes as Lapulapu could exist. But to better understand the birth of this new horizon, the transformation of the “Indio” (or “Indian”) into the “Filipino” must be examined. An “Indio” is that which has been subjugated as an object of domination by the European Subject. Strictly speaking, Lapulapu and his people were not yet “Indios” in 1521. The transformation into “Indios” of a large part of the population of the archipelago which would later become the Philippines would take place during the ensuing centuries of Spanish colonial rule. In a broader sense, the combined “Indios” of the “East Indies” (Indias Orientales) and the “West Indies” (Indias Occidentales) (which used to refer to the whole of the Americas) can be taken together as the “Other” dominated by the European Subject.21 In the Master-Slave discourse of European philosophy, the concept of “Indio” can be interpreted as the universal ontological category for the Slave. One recalls here how even Hitler and the Nazis also used the word “Indianer” to refer to the Slavs of Eastern Europe.22 The “Indio” exists under the gaze of the European Subject as a pure object of exploitation and is therefore not in a position to seek any kind of “recognition” (Anerkennung) in the Hegelian sense. The transformation of the “Indio” to “Filipino” can be considered as a movement from being a pure object towards

Lapulapu and Panglima Awang 211

becoming a quasi-subject/subject. In other words, this is a transition from Hegel’s notion of “one-sided” recognition (einseitiges Anerkennen) to that of “unequal” recognition (ungleiches Anerkennen).23 Here we see the rise of a completely novel horizon of the “Filipino” as an independent and national subject. From being “Indios,” the emancipated “Filipinos” launched the great project of founding the Philippines as a sovereign nation in 1896 during the first anti-colonial revolution against a European power in Asia. However, due to its endless striving to “correct” the colonizers’ denigration of the “Indio” and because of its unending desire for equal recognition, a certain reactive character took root in the Filipino national subjectivity.24 The Filipino historian Zeus Salazar labeled this mentality “reactive” because it begins with and remains trapped within the process of negating the colonizer’s attitude towards the colonized.25 Different from the “Filipino,” the “Indio” as a pure object of manipulation and domination of the European Subject could not be reactive. The Filipino anti-colonial subject is obsessed with these acts of negation because of its unrequited desire to be finally recognized by the European Subject that had enslaved the Indio. Salazar gave a few classic examples of this reactive mental­ ity. One type of negation is enacted by refusing the European propositional statement while accepting and reifying their value systems, “We are not incap­ able of scientific thinking as you Europeans say, in fact we are also capable of producing great scientists just like you.” Another type is by accepting the Eur­ opean proposition while rejecting their value system as in the expression, “It is true that we are deeply spiritual as you observe. If you Europeans have science, then we have our superior spirituality.” Any which way, these expressions are simple negations of the propositions of the European Subject. It is not easy to break out of this inexorable dialectic. Even those who seek to escape this system of negations end up being trapped by it. One example is the strategy of simul­ taneously refusing both the propositional statement and the value system of the European Subject which can be seen in the statement, “It is not valid to say that we are ‘unscientific,’ in fact, a Western category like ‘science’ cannot possibly apply to us.” In this way, it seems that the nationalist subject has turned its back on the European Subject. But this final resort still remains reactive. Like all reactive strategies, the nationalist horizon is still trapped within the absolute horizon of the European Subject and cannot break free from it. As long as the “Filipino” has not been freed from the reactive dialectic of recognition, the “Indio” within him/her remains. The “Filipino” will always remain subsumed under the unsurpassed European Subject which it can never seriously challenge on the same plane of the universal. Despite these limitations, the anti-colonial struggle was a necessary historic moment. Nevertheless, it can perhaps be said that the Rizal and his comrades had already perceived the lim­ itations inherent in this simple movement from “Indio” to “Filipino.” This could have been one of Rizal’s motivations in pushing for the concept “MalayFilipino.” One can glimpse in this phrase two possible directions. The first is the incorporation of the “Malay race” within the concept of “Filipino” as a

212 Ramon Guillermo

historical component of civilizational identity rooted in a purportedly ancient past leading towards the formation of an independent nation. The second direction absorbs the “Filipino” within the Malay World as a possible future project that goes beyond the limits of nationhood. On the one hand, the term “Filipino” in the phrase “Malay-Filipino” simply refers to the nation-form, while, on the other hand, it can be inferred that “Malay” refers to an imaginary that transcends the nation-form and stretches towards the universal. In his essay “On the Indolence of the Filipinos” (1889–1890), Rizal enumer­ ated a few purported characteristics of the Malay race.26 First and foremost, he described the Malay as “sensitive.” The Malay would not easily forget any slight against his honour and dignity whether perceived or real. Rizal used the Spanish term “amor propio” but he most probably gathered this observation from the British colonizers of Malaya who mentioned “sensitivity” frequently in their writings as a Malay trait.27 Until today, this notion persists in the dis­ course about the supposed national characteristics of the Malays among Malaysians themselves. Often mentioned in relation to this is the saying “Luka boleh sembuh, parutnya tinggal juga” (The wound may heal, but the scar remains).28 The second characteristic of the Malay, according to Rizal, is that they cannot be brutalized or reduced to animals by the colonizer because their human dignity unfailingly endures. One recalls how Frantz Fanon characterized the European colonial project as one of “animalizing” the conquered peoples.29 Third, their race cannot be decimated unlike other nations that had been con­ quered by the Europeans. This can be likened to the expression of the mythical Malay hero Hang Tuah, “Takkan Melayu hilang di dunia” (The Malay will never disappear from the earth). Rizal was probably here thinking of the wars of extermination launched by white colonizers against the native peoples of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.30 Lastly, Malays are known to be active traders and seafarers. In other words, based on the characteristics Rizal laid out, colonialism can never eradicate the Malay, and by implication, the Filipino, both physically and morally. The Malay cannot be reduced to purely passive objects of colonial exploita­ tion. In spite of the colonizer’s vigorous efforts to degrade them to the level of animals, it is impossible that they will remain “Indios” forever. It is interesting how Rizal discovered the inexhaustible spring of human dignity of the Filipinos in their “Malayness.” In other words, Rizal did not emphasize any supposed unique particularity in the blood of the Malay race, but found instead a pow­ erful force asserting the universality of human dignity and equality in response to European domination. The Indios Bravos, an organization founded by Rizal in Paris in 1889, is symptomatic of this. A clandestine group allegedly existed at its core that was named “Rd.L.M.” which stood for “Redención de los Malayos” (Redemption of the Malays).31 It is important to remember that “Indio” and “Malay” are both categories which transcend the narrow limits of the nation. If the “Indio” can be considered the universal object of domination by the European Subject, then the “Malay” is the universal principle that

Lapulapu and Panglima Awang 213

challenges the universality of the modern European Subject. They are opposite faces of the same universal history. One can glimpse in Rizal’s use of the concept of the “Malay,” a straining towards the universal even though the language available to him was the inadequate one of race. Because of this, much like the Mexican José Vancon­ celos’ concept of “raza cosmica,”32 Rizal’s emancipatory intent could not fully escape the perils presented by racial concepts. For example, in his broadest and most speculative understanding of the Malay race, he lumped together as Malays the Borneans, Siamese, Cambodians, and Japanese seemingly just to emphasize how different they are from the Chinese.33 Furthermore, he does not and cannot include the “darker skinned” Negritos or Aetas in his speculative concept of “Malay.” Despite these limitations, one can attempt to read “Malay” not as a biological and racial category, but as a principle of universality that could challenge the European Subject on the same level as the universal, some­ thing that could not be done on the level of nationhood which is imprisoned by the dialectic of recognition. Only on the level of the universal can the former “Indios” attain a dignity that can surpass the reactive dialectic. Nevertheless, there is still something more to be said in connection with the supposed racial trait of Malays as natural seafarers and voyagers. In his letter to the Austrian ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt dated March 9, 1887, Rizal wrote, “I still have in my blood the wanderungslust of the Malays.”34 It is interesting to observe that he used a German word that describes the supposed innate German yearning to travel to distant places. It seems that Rizal found a perfect translation into German of the Malay term “merantau.” Until today, Malays claim “jiwa merantau” (the spirit of travel) as integral to their identity as a people and as an ethnic group. “Merantau” means to go on a voyage to distant places in order to gain experience, knowledge, and a better life. It is often related to the representation of Malays as natural seafarers. Mythmaking around the personage of Enrique de Malacca has thus become uniquely popular in modern Malaysia. In 1958, he was renamed “Panglima Awang” in a histor­ ical novel of the same title.35 It perhaps no longer matters if the individual Malaysians call Panglima Awang was truly one of the first to circumnavigate the world. What really matters in this case is what this belief means. What would it mean if a Malay were indeed the first to successfully circumnavigate the world? Could this present an alternative history of universalism that can challenge the dominant universalism of the European Subject? If the category of “Malay” in Rizal’s discourse symbolizes an alternative universal, the following three categories of “Indio-Filipino-Malay” can be read as a series of three moments. The first is the moment when the universal Eur­ opean Subject dominated the universal object of enslavement which it called “Indio.” The second moment is that of the Philippines striving to establish its independence and seeking recognition within the modern international imperi­ alist system. The third moment is the emergence of an alternative universalism symbolized by the “Malay” that could challenge and transcend the limited

214 Ramon Guillermo

universalism of the European Subject that was born in 1521. The last two ele­ ments in this series that form the pair “Filipino-Malay” can be juxtaposed with the pair “Lapulapu-Panglima Awang.” Lapulapu represents the momentary but fateful interruption of the first circumnavigation of the world by Europe, while Panglima Awang bears the universal principle of an alternative circumnaviga­ tion of the world. Both symbolize two ways of challenging European domina­ tion, the first represents the national principle, which periodically generates tremors within the absolute horizon of the European Subject, while the second is the challenge posed by an emerging alternative universalist horizon against the prevailing absolute but limited horizon of the modern European Subject. However, combining and interweaving these two impulses is by no means a straightforward task.36 The alternative universal produced by this difficult pro­ cess should advance beyond today’s hegemonic racist, sexist, and narrowly Eurocentric capitalist universalism. As Samir Amin once wrote, The choice remains: true universalism that is necessarily socialist or Eurocentric capitalist barbarism. Socialism is at the end of this long tunnel… This society will be superior to ours only if it is worldwide, and only if it establishes a genuine universalism, based on the contributions of everyone, Westerners as well as those whose historical course has been different.37 In conclusion, there are other possible formulations of the conceptual pairs Filipino-Malay and Lapupalu-Panglima Awang. For example, we can revisit the fictional “Taman Manusia” (Garden of Humanity) that appeared in the book Madilog by the Indonesian communist Tan Malaka.38 He wrote that when the European colonizers have finally been driven out of Asia, a free nation called “Indonesia Raya” (or Greater Indonesia) can be realized in the future that will include, but would not be limited to, the present-day Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.39 A commemorative park called the “Garden of Humanity” with two mountains would be built on every major island of Indonesia Raya. The first mountain, called the “International section,” will represent or symbolize the universal history of humanity, while the second, called the “National section,” will illustrate the his­ tory of Indonesia Raya. These histories will be told by means of rows upon rows of monuments to individual heroes of humanity and of Indonesia Raya that will be erected from the foot up to the very peaks of each of the two mountains. Two monuments at the summit of Indonesia Raya’s mountain will be raised for the two Filipino revolutionaries who played the most important roles in igniting the first anti-colonial revolt in Asia in the 19th century, Rizal, the thinker and novelist, and Andres Bonifacio, the principal founder of the first successful Philippine revolutionary organization. Tan Malaka considered Rizal and Bonifacio as representing the epitome of heroism in the history of Indonesia Raya.40 On the other hand, at the peak of the “International” mountain, one would see two monuments to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The architects

Lapulapu and Panglima Awang 215

of the park decided that the monuments to Rizal and Bonifacio should face those of Marx and Engels. Taken together, these two mountains of the Garden of Humanity can be understood to represent the convergence of the universal and the national within Indonesia Raya itself. This means that the more com­ plicated pair consisting of Rizal-Bonifacio on the one hand, and Marx-Engels on the other, could be read as another version of the two pairs, Filipino-Malay and Lapulapu-Panglima Awang, which connect and unite the particular on one side, and the universal on the other. Panglima Awang and the tandem of Marx and Engels both symbolize in different ways the alternative universal that can transcend the limits of the Eurocentric world. In other words, these pairings are symbolic representations of the “concrete universal.”41 Asian revolutionaries such as Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong understood that only a synthesis of the national and universal could give birth to a new uni­ versalist socialism. The Bandung Conference (April 18–24, 1955) during Sukar­ no’s time can be considered part of this project. This ideal of a new and alternative universalism includes the future Bandungs that will be organized by the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 21st century. Following the thought of the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo, any convergence or synthesis of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) between the universal horizon of the current global capitalist system and the emerging alternative universal horizon is impossible.42 The “dialogue of civilizations” that liberals imagine is unattain­ able because there is no such thing as a common language between them. According to Thảo, there can be nothing but a “radical misunderstanding” (un malentendu radical).43 On the one hand, the European Subject can never let go of its understanding of history as a “progression within the European system” (progrès-à-l’intérieur-du-système) while on the other hand, we can see the most determined striving to break through and exceed this horizon itself. These are two opposite universalizing horizons that will never meet. And yet there will be new Bandungs, and history carries on. In the future, Lapulapu and Panglima Awang may yet succeed.

Notes 1 This paper was read in the original Filipino language version at the Philippine International Quincentennial Conference (Closing Session on Manifesting and Asserting a Filipino Point of View) on December 16, 2021. The English translation is by Annette Ferrer. 2 Harry Kelsey, The First Circumnavigators (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2016), xiv. 3 Georg W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik I (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014), 164. 4 Kelsey, 25–7. 5 Zeus Salazar, “The Malay World: Bahasa Melayu in the Philippines,” in The Malayan Connection (Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 1998), 112. 6 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), 154. 7 Trần Đức Thảo, “Sur l’Indochine,” Les Temps Modernes 5 (1946), 898.

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8 Enrique Dussel, 1492: El Encubrimiento del Otro (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 1994), 7–8. 9 Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 34. 10 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1. 11 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic, 8. 12 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. 13 Syed Farid Alatas, Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Sciences (New Delhi: Sage Publications), 2006. 14 Peter Dews, ed., Autonomy and Solidarity (New York: Verso, 1992), 183. 15 Domenico Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2019), 72. 16 Stefan Zweig, Magellan (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1983), 171. 17 Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, 42. 18 Walter Benjamin, Tableaux Parisiens (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2017), 12. 19 Walter Benjamin, Hinggil sa Konsepto ng Kasaysayan (Quezon City: High Chair, 2013), 37. 20 José Rizal, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Manila: José Rizal National Centennial Commission, 1961), 4–6. 21 Real Academia Española, “Indias Occidentales.” Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 2005. 22 Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental, 123. 23 Georg W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), 152. 24 Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental, 21. 25 Ramon Guillermo, Pook at Paninindigan (Quezon City: UP Press, 2009), 51–9. 26 José Rizal, “Filipinas dentro de Cien Anos,” in Escritos Politicos e Historicos por José Rizal (Manila: Comision Nacional del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961), 136–65; José Rizal, “Sobre la Indolencia de los Filipinos,” in Escritos Politicos e Historicos por José Rizal (Manila: Comision Nacional del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961), 226–61. 27 Americus Featherman, Social History of the Races of Mankind (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Company, 1887), 421. 28 Eko Sugiarto, Pantun dan Puisi Lama Melayu (Yogyakarta: Khitah Publishing, 2015), 129. 29 Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (Paris: Éditions La Découverte/Poche, 2002), 44. 30 Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental, 164. 31 Austin Coates, Rizal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 175. 32 José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 33 José Rizal, “Sobre la Indolencia de los Filipinos,” 89. 34 José Rizal, Cartas Entre Rizal y el Profesor Fernando Blumentritt: Primera Parte (Manila: Comisión Nacional del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961). 35 Harun Aminurrashid, Panglima Awang (Singapore: Pustaka Melayu, 1966). 36 Viren Murthy, “Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places?: Chibber, Chakra­ barty, and a Tale of Two Histories,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (2015), 153. 37 Amin, Eurocentrism, 216. 38 Tan Malaka. “Tungo sa Hardin ng Tao,” Social Science Diliman 9, no. 1 (2013): 87–121. 39 Tan Malaka. “Tungo sa Hardin ng Tao,” 94. 40 Tan Malaka. “Tungo sa Hardin ng Tao,” 115. 41 Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental, 185. 42 Thảo, “Sur l’Indochine,” 886. 43 Thảo, “Sur l’Indochine,” 886.

Lapulapu and Panglima Awang 217

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. California: Stanford University Press, 2002. Alatas, Syed Farid. Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Sciences: Responses to Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006. Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. Aminurrashid, Harun. Panglima Awang. Singapore: Pustaka Melayu, 1966. Benjamin, Walter. Hinggil sa Konsepto ng Kasaysayan. Quezon City: High Chair, 2013. Benjamin, Walter. Tableaux Parisiens. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2017. Coates, Austin. Rizal, Philippine Nationalist and Martyr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Dews, Peter, ed. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas. New York: Verso, 1992. Đức Thảo, Trần. “Sur l’Indochine.” Les Temps Modernes 5 (1946): 878–900. Dussel, Enrique. 1492: El Encubrimiento del Otro: Hacia el Origen del “Mito de la Modernidad.” La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 1994. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: Éditions La Découverte/Poche, 2002. Featherman, Americus. Social History of the Races of Mankind: Second Division: Papuo and Malayo Melanesians. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Company, 1887. Guillermo, Ramon. Pook at Paninindigan: Kritika ng Pantayong Pananaw. Quezon City: UP Press, 2009. Hegel, Georg W.F. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. Hegel, Georg W.F. Wissenschaft der Logik I. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. Kelsey, Harry. The First Circumnavigators: Unsung Heroes of the Age of Discovery. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2016. Losurdo, Domenico. El Marxismo Occidental: Cómo Nació, Cómo Murió y Cómo Puede Resucitar. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2019. Malaka, Tan. “Tungo sa Hardin ng Tao.” Social Science Diliman 9, no. 1 (2013): 87–121. Murthy, Viren. “Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places? Chibber, Chakrabarty, and a Tale of Two Histories.” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (2015): 113–153. Pigafetta, Antonio. The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan. New York: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2010. Real Academia Española. “Indias Occidentales.” Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas, 2005. https://www.rae.es/dpd/Indias%20Occidentales. Rizal, José. Cartas Entre Rizal y el Profesor Fernando Blumentritt: Primera Parte. Manila: Comisión Nacional del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961. Rizal, José. “Filipinas dentro de Cien Anos.” In Escritos Politicos e Historicos por José Rizal, tomo VII, 136–165. Manila: Comision Nacional del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961. Rizal, José. “Sobre la Indolencia de los Filipinos.” In Escritos Politicos e Historicos por José Rizal, tomo VII, 226–261. Manila: Comision Nacional del Centenario de José Rizal, 1961. Rizal, José. Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas por el Doctor Antonio de Morga, Obra Pub­ licada en Méjico el Año de 1609 Nuevamente Sacada a Luz y Anotada. Manila: José Rizal National Centennial Commission, 1961. Salazar, Zeus A. “The Malay World: Bahasa Melayu in the Philippines.” In The Mala­ yan Connection: Ang Pilipinas sa Dunia Melayu, 81–108. Quezon City: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 1998.

218 Ramon Guillermo

Sloterdijk, Peter. In the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Glo­ balization. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Sugiarto, Eko. Pantun dan Puisi Lama Melayu. Yogyakarta: Khitah Publishing, 2015. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Zweig, Stefan. Magellan: Der Mann und Seine Tat. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1983.

PART IV

Distinction or Difference: Letting Go of Confrontation and Starting Co-Construction

30

WHERE THE INDIVIDUAL WAS, THE SELF MUST COME! Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano

The individual is the persistence of the illusion of the one. That mythical love of the fusion of the two in one that in recent years the French philosopher Badiou1 criticized, but the individual is the fusion in unity without love. Then, to bet on the division of the subject that psychoanalysis raises would be to bet on love. The split subject is a bet for love, of two that never become one, of two subjects that can never be individuals, nor can they become a unity. Love is currently involved in some kind of attack. Love has been called illusory but doesn’t forget that what is illusory is the illusion of the one, the illusion of the uniqueness of the individual. Love would be what bets on the two. What is universal about it (love) is that all love proposes a new experience of truth about what it is to be two and not just one. Thus, when we fall in love, we verify that the world can be seen and experienced differently than the individual conscience itself would.2 Thus, it is curious that, in Rimbaud’s poetic fragment: “Love must be reinvented,”3 a new order of love is proposed; while from a philosophical point of view, according to Dolar: “the mission of modern philosophy would then be nothing less than the invention of two.”4 Following that logic, for psychoanalysis it would be: we must reinvent the subject. Love would be the act where the subject is never one, and much less with another. The subject is the individual’s exit from that spell. Neoliberal capitalism has used individualism as its badge using psychology as a tool to individualize anything, from their personalities to the use of neurology to explain everything,5 as De Vos proposes. However, it should not be forgotten that certain psycho­ analysis,6 as Illouz points out, also lent itself to converting psychoanalysis itself into an adaptive individual practice for the “American way of life.”7 This type of DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-34

222 Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano

psychoanalysis, in many parts of the world, but especially in the United States, (a place that was its summit and its end), was used from an ego autonomy. Today, psychoanalysis as a practice seems to be almost a memory in that country. For psychoanalysis, there is a structural division of the subject, a Real that cannot be crossed, a void that cannot be filled. This division leaves the subject in a place of pure possibility,8 these are the news that psychoanalysis brings in contrast to that indivisible, unitary individual. Lacan, from seminar 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique proposes a praxis that goes in a different direction to the individual, What does it mean to study it in its singularity? It means that essentially, for him, the interest, the essence, the foundation, the proper dimension of the analysis, is the reintegration by the subject of his history to his last sensible limits, that is, to a dimension that widely exceeds individual limits.9 The psychoanalytic clinic is one of the subject and not of the individual. A clinic where the subjective productions of neoliberal capitalism are not rein­ forced through the illusion of individualism. Consequently, psychoanalytic practice cannot be in those ideals of capitalism even if it was born in it. From the beginning, Freud located himself on the frontiers of those ideals of capital­ ism, which led him to be excluded. In the first place, the clinic of the subject is about listening to the subjectivity, but it is also about what cannot be heard in that subjective production, and that is the subject. For this reason, it is not possible to promote a “private individual” who can buy any enjoyment. Nor is it possible to promote the commodification of the individual through the pro­ motion of individualism through a series of technologies of the ego because it would stop being a clinical practice and would become closer to a practice of self-improvement or coaching. What Lacan proposed is a subject without substance, a subject as negativity, and the power of this negativity10 that the Slovenian philosopher Žižek raises in his Hegelian reading from Lacan: The subject is the substance reduced to the pure point of negative relation with all its predicates; it is the substance insofar as it excludes all the richness of its contents. In other words, it is a totally de-substantialized substance, and all its consistency resides in the rejection of its predicates.11 There is a gap between the Real, and the way in which the subject (which results from that gap) will try, from the symbolic and the imaginary, to do something with it, and that is where the phantasm is constituted: The gap that forever separates the domain of reality (symbolically medi­ ated, that is, constituted ontologically) from the elusive and spectral Real that precedes it, has a crucial character: what psychoanalysis calls “fan­ tasy” or “phantasm” is the effort to close that gap through the (erroneous)

Where the Individual Was, the Self Must Come! 223

perception of the pre-ontological Real as simply another level of reality, “more central.” The fantasy projects onto the pre-ontological Real the form of the constituted reality (as in the Christian idea of another reality, the supersensible reality).12 For example, isolated subjectivities always locate the other as someone who is far away and who suffers from war and violence of all kinds in another place outside/far away from us. These subjectivities are created from a place that denies acts of violence that led to the elimination, disappearance, and displacement, among other acts of another: “They know it but they do it.” From the neoliberal capitalist ideology, the subjectivity issue became an individualistic question, taking as a path, in its ideal of unity, a false recogni­ tion. At this point the ego is the way of closing the fissure, the gap, of the emptiness of the Real and of the subject. The name of this false ego recognition is what the psychoanalyst Soler raises as nar-cynicism13 – (narcinismo in Spanish). The nar-cynical – (narcínico in Spanish) subject, in his subjectivity, is characterized by an individualism marked by an immediate consumerist enjoyment. This subject is located in an ideal of a neutral place where nothing touches him, and nothing affects him, and is governed by indifference for everything that affects the other. This subject is also self-excluded from every social and historical plot and suspects any link that has to do with a commitment to the other and to the social Other. At the same time, to this subject love seems suspicious, for this reason, every act that implies and involves him in a social commitment is also suspicious. The phrase: “Who can, save himself” is the slogan, an immediate hedonism, and the only end. In the individualization of society denounced by Lipovetsky14 in his text The era of emptiness, it is necessary to point out one issue, and that is that we are not in the era of emptiness but of nothingness. For this reason, it is better to appeal to Miller the writer who tells us: “People believe that emptiness is nothing, but it is not. The void is a discordant plenitude, a world full of ghosts in which the soul makes a recognition.”15 So nothingness would be an attempt to positivize the radical negativity of the subject: the emptiness of him. For example, in anorexic symptoms, the person eats nothing – doesn’t eat (empty). The “nothing” works as a desperate attempt to empty the full. This point would be interesting to discuss with the work of the Italian psychoanalyst Recalcati and his clinic of emptiness.16 But the subject is the place of emptiness in Lacan, as Badiou mentions: The place where philosophy locates emptiness as a condition of thought is being, insofar as being. The place where psychoanalysis locates the void is the Subject, its subject, as it has vanished in the separation of signifiers where the metonymy of its being comes from.17

224 Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano

It is necessary to clarify that the subjective question is not an internal question, and it is not something that is found in the depths of the “internal” being. The subject is not found in something deep that is waiting for us to be revealed and analyzed, it is found on the surfaces, in the world of apparent subjectivities. The subject is a void that is tried to be filled by the imaginary and the symbolic of the ghost that in turn configures reality. Behind the phantasmatic veil, what is found is the void of the subject and from this void, there is the possibility of recreating that phantasmatic frame. That is why the subject posed by Lacanian psychoanalysis in a historicist key cannot be understood because it confuses the subject with the processes of subjectivization. The struggle for subjectivity is one of the main ones that are gestated in neoliberal capitalism,18 Guattari raised it in his text Chaosmosis. This is something that Foucault had already raised. In recent years, researchers such as Berardi in 200319 from a Guattari perspective, together with the works of Byung-Chul Han,20 and the investigations of Dardot and Laval,21 referencing Foucault, also raised it by establishing bridges with Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, the persistent problem with all these pos­ tulates is that they continue to confuse the subject with subjectivity. Lacan’s theory is subversive in its notion of the “subject.” No subjectivity can fully fill the void of the subject. For this reason, the subject is defined as that which can be represented by a signifier in view of another signifier.22 The rationality of neoliberal capitalism is to produce servile individualized subjectivities but located in a place of freedom. Similarly, Beauvois posits a type of liberal servitude.23 In the liberal democ­ racies of neoliberal capitalism, the signifier “freedom” is paradoxically, which makes the different servitudes and subjugations of the various subjectivities operate. However, it is possible to talk about freedom in psychoanalysis even though Lacan, quoting Hegel, says: This dialectic, which is that of man’s very being, must carry out in a series of crises the synthesis of his particularity and universality, reaching uni­ versalization of that particularity itself. This means that in that movement that leads man to an increasingly adequate consciousness of himself. His freedom is confused with the development of his servitude.24 Therefore, advancing on the path of freedom is nothing other than heading down the path of liberal servitude. For this reason, Lacan himself will say the following in the Belgian television interview in 1972: “I never speak of free­ dom.” This does not mean that in psychoanalysis we cannot speak of freedom. In other words, as Lacan told us, one cannot speak of a freedom that leads to bondage with the ideal that someone is free and with individual ego autonomy. On the contrary, subjective freedom can be proposed, where the community is important and not the individual as primacy, one that is not without an Other (community), or rather with an other.

Where the Individual Was, the Self Must Come! 225

Apparently, Lacan always believed in the subversion of the subject. From the excluded subject of science Lacan describes a subject that always looks for an individual to produce; however, where science believed it found that which it intended to control (the individual, the self), is where it has been lost.25 Devel­ oping knowledge about the individual can only lead to an error. Consciousness throws up vague data according to Freud,26 or rather, they lead to an error. Lacan in this text presents us with a subject from discontinuity, from a void, and that is the subversion that psychoanalysis brings and what we must con­ tinue to bet on. Throughout the 20th century and so far in the 21st, traditional psychology decided to choose the path of the individual. Today’s psychology and certain psy­ choanalysis allied itself with the ideals of capitalism and with those of neoliberal­ ism to adapt. This path promotes and sustains an individual who becomes a place of psychopolitics, as proposed by Byung-Chul Han.27 Consequently, this path is responsible for producing tired and precarious subjectivities, closer to those ideals necessary to sustain that political-economic system as called neoliberal capitalism. On the contrary, psychoanalysis took a path of subversion (although some have not seen it that way). This path has strong implications such as exclusions, prohibitions, attacks, and others. Some philosophers, influenced by Lacan’s psychoanalysis such as Žižek take up this subversion to raise a whole lucubration about the subject.28 Psychoanalysis cannot lose that subversive place in the name of any good.29 The commitment to the subject is the commitment to the Real, our work is from the symbolic and the imaginary, it is to develop a know-how about it.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Alain Badiou and Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love (Madrid: The Sphere of Books, 2011).

Badiou and Truong, In Praise, 56.

Arthur Rimbaud, Una Temporada en el Infierno (Bogotá: El Áncora, 1993), 59.

Mladen Dolar, Uno Se Divide en Dos: Más Allá de la Interpelación (Ciudad de

México: Paradiso, 2017), 13. Jan de Vos, La Psicologización y Sus Vicisitudes: Hacia Una Crítica Psico-Política (Ciudad de México: Paradiso, 2019) Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of SelfHelp (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2010). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010). Guy Le Gaufey, El Sujeto según Lacan (Buenos Aires: Literales, 2010). Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995), 26. Jairo Gallo, “La Potencia de la Negatividad en Zizek Como Condición de la Práctica Psicoanalítica Lacaniana,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 14, no. 3 (2020). Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Barcelona: Paidós, 1998), 56. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (Barce­ lona: Paidós, 1999), 69. Colette Soler, Lacanian Affects (London: Routledge, 2011).

226 Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano

14 Gilles Lipovetsky, The Era of Emptiness: Essays About Contemporary Individualism (Barcelona: Anagram, 2000). 15 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (Madrid: Readers’ Circle, 2004), 103. 16 Massimo Recalcati, Clínica del Vacío: Anorexia, Dependencias, Psicosis (Madrid: Síntesis, 2003). 17 Alain Badiou, Conditions (Buenos Aires: XXI Century, 2002), 64. 18 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis (Buenos Aires: Spring, 1992). 19 Franco Berardi, The Factory of Unhappiness (Madrid: Traffickers of Dreams, 2003). 20 Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Barcelona: Herder, 2012). 21 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La Nueva Razón del Mundo: Ensayo sobre la Sociedad Neoliberal (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2010). 22 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 2010. 23 Jean-Léon Beauvois, Tratado de la Servidumbre Liberal: Análisis de la Sumisión (Madrid: La Oveja Roja, 2008). 24 Jacques Lacan, “Acerca de la Causalidad Psíquica,” in Escritos 1 (México: Siglo XXI, 2009), 179. 25 Jacques Lacan, “Subversión del Sujeto y Dialéctica del Deseo en el Inconsciente Freudiano,” in Escritos 2 (México: Siglo XXI, 1998). 26 Sigmund Freud, “Lo Inconsciente,” in Obras Completas, Volumen XIV (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1992): 53–214. 27 Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics (Barcelona: Herder, 2014). 28 Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 1999. 29 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003).

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Conditions. Buenos Aires: XXI Century, 2002. Badiou, Alain and Truong, Nicolas. In Praise of Love. Madrid: The Sphere of Books, 2011. Beauvois, Jean-Léon. Tratado de la Servidumbre Liberal: Análisis de la Sumisión. Madrid: La Oveja Roja, 2008. Berardi, Franco. The Factory of Unhappiness. Madrid: Traffickers of Dreams, 2003. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. La Nueva Razón del Mundo: Ensayo Sobre la Sociedad Neoliberal. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2010. Dolar, Mladen. Uno Se Divide en Dos: Más Allá de la Interpelación. Ciudad de México: Paradiso, 2017. Freud, Sigmund. “Lo Inconsciente.” In Obras Completas, Volumen XIV. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1992. Gallo, Jairo. “La Potencia de la Negatividad en Zizek Como Condición de la Práctica Psicoanalítica Lacaniana.” International Journal of Žižek Studies 14, no. 3 (2020). Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis. Buenos Aires: Spring, 1992. Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Barcelona: Herder, 2012. Han, Byung-Chul. Psychopolitics. Barcelona: Herder, 2014. Illouz, Eva. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Buenos Aires: Katz, 2010. Lacan, Jacques. “Acerca de la Causalidad Psíquica.” In Escritos 1. México: Siglo XXI, 2009. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010.

Where the Individual Was, the Self Must Come! 227

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. “Subversión del Sujeto y Dialéctica del Deseo en el Inconsciente Freudiano.” In Escritos 2. México: Siglo XXI, 1998. Le Gaufey, Guy. El Sujeto Según Lacan. Buenos Aires: Literales, 2010. Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Era of Emptiness: Essays About Contemporary Individualism. Barcelona: Anagram, 2000. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Capricorn. Madrid: Readers’ Circle, 2004. Recalcati, Massimo. Clínica del Vacío: Anorexia, Dependencias, Psicosis. Madrid: Síntesis, 2003. Rimbaud, Arthur. Una Temporada en el Infierno. Bogotá: El Áncora, 1993. Soler, Colette. Lacanian Affects. London: Routledge, 2011. de Vos, Jan. La Psicologización y Sus Vicisitudes: Hacia una Crítica Psico-Política. Ciudad de México: Paradiso, 2019. Žižek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. Barcelona: Paidós, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Barcelona: Paidós, 1999.

31 THE PATIPOLITICAL BODY Isabel Millar

Bio, Necro, Pati Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics articulated the ways in which science joins forces with power in order to administer and produce certain types of functional or docile body. Foucault describes biopower as a power which takes hold of human life; the ancient sovereign right to “take life or let live” becomes the right of power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”1 For Foucault this power over life started in the 17th century and evolved in two separate, yet interdependent ways. The first of these poles centered on the body as machine: [I]ts disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls. All this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines.2 Foucault would call this an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second of these poles focused on the species body: [T]he body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected by an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls.3 This is what Foucault first refers to as a biopolitics of the population. The combination of these two poles, the disciplines of the body and the regulations DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-35

The Patipolitical Body 229

of the population, constitute what came to form the great organizing principle of the modern age, the power over life - biopower. Biopower then is the “ana­ tomic and biological individualizing and specifying” technology directed towards the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life.4 This characterised a new kind of power according to Foucault, one which departed from the ancient sovereign right to kill, rather whose sole function was to “invest life through and through.”5 Giorgio Agamben, however, radicalizes the Foucauldian insight into the ontological status of the political animal making politics formative to life rather than vice versa.6 Agamben’s notion of biopolitics is a concept not merely arising as it does for Foucault with the dawn of modernity, but rather one that has existed through the classical period. In his view biopower has existed at least as long as the sovereign exception. He argues that the task of political life has been to create a dichotomy between the politicized human and his mere bare zoological, biological existence, in doing so the limits of acceptable humanity are drawn up. Where Foucault discerns a historical turning point for the tran­ sition from sovereign power to disciplinary and biopower, Agamben sees no such distinction. Agamben’s notions of sovereign power and bare life sees rather the construction of human life as a sacred entity to be fostered and pro­ tected as the primary mode of biopower that has lasted from antiquity. It relies on a distinction between the life worth living bios (political life) or zoe, the mere animal unreflective state of bare life. Zoe is represented by the figure of Homo Sacer, the man who can be killed with impunity as his existence is not protected by law. Agamben defines furthermore two classes of being: “[o]n the one hand living beings (or substances) and on the other apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured.”7 Expanding on Foucault’s class of apparatuses, Agamben defines them as: [A]nything that has the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions or discourses of living beings. Not only therefore prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident) but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, com­ puters, cellular phones and why not language itself – which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses and one which thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured without realising the consequences he was about to face.8 The Lacanian implications here are obvious, since language is indeed the origi­ nal apparatus of jouissance, and also the undead structure which mortifies the body, giving rise to all the multifarious forms of suffering and modes of making others suffer that humanity has enacted upon itself. And it is Achille Mbembe’s paradigm of the necropolitical which elaborated precisely the ways that power

230 Isabel Millar

not only produces life in its most measurable and manageable sense but orchestrates regimes of death in which whole populations live under threat of death or as if they were the walking dead. In Necropolitics, the necropolitical is defined as “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.”9 This is more than just Foucault’s right to kill therefore, but also the right to impose social or civil death on a population, the right to enslave bodies, including other forms of domination and violence for which Mbembe’s prime examples were the Palestinians caught in perpetual war and poverty and the ongoing forms of apartheid and regimes of ethnic cleansing still pervasive across the globe. However, I wish to elaborate the patipolitical as another form of domination which is perhaps not yet even seen as a form of governmentality at all, and in some of its guises may even be perceived as liberatory. In our so-called “pornographic age” in which enjoyment is ubiquitous and sexuality is no longer an illicit or secretive activity there is another dimension to this governance of bodies which is becoming more apparent as our technological and socio-political conditions are shifting. Arguably today we require a new paradigm to come to terms with the ways in which it is not just biological life, nor even political death that power administers, but more specifically regimes of enjoyment which for psychoanalysis is often indistinguishable from suffering. Biopolitics and its legacy is persistently set up against psychoanalysis because of the way that Foucault originally conceived of psychoanalysis as a technology of power in the West, or what he called a Scientia Sexualis, which he distinguishes from how other cultures (India, China, Japan, the Arab world) had historically viewed sex as an object of knowledge in terms of an Ars Erotica, a technique of pleasure passed down from master to student.10 The oppressive Scientia Sexualis meanwhile, in trying to measure, contain and codify sexual practices ascribed to Freud’s “repressive hypothesis,” extracting knowledge out of the “unlearned” sexual novice via means of the confessional, giving rise to the production of guilt.11 For Foucault therefore, psychoanalysis was merely a continuation of forms of bodily control which ultimately had as their goal the domination of the biolo­ gical body as a docile and measurable entity. This he saw as another form of confessional or pastoral power. Expressed in his famous inversion “the soul is the prison of the body,” highlighting the way that contrary to the religious view of a soul trapped in a body, the notion of the “soul” or “self” is an oppressive tool of governance conceived in order to entrap the free-floating and productive desires of the body.12 Just as Foucault’s biopolitics operates across various micro and macrolevels of the population producing forms of functional and measurable biological life as did Mbembe’s Necropolitical function along various vectors in the production of death worlds, so does the patipolitical infrastructure produce different forms of enjoying body. Furthermore, it operates across various contexts producing various types of mortifying enjoyment (all of which I won’t be able to elaborate here). But essentially the realm in which patipolitics operates is, at its very foundation, the sexual.

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So, the notion of patipolitics originates out of the concern for the status of the enjoying body and its new configurations under technocapitalism. The pro­ ductions of these forms happen and have happened historically at various levels or, sites of governance, both synchronically and diachronically including in the family, the school, the workplace, social media, religious institutions, the cul­ ture industry and of course the sex industry. The ways in which an individual may be subjected to patipolitical modes of governance will be dependent on socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, religious and gendered forms of identification but nevertheless are not fully determined or predictable according to any of those factors. These sites of governance produce the multiple vectors of the enjoying body such as: self-image, object choice, identification, erogenous zones, taboos, fetishes, modes of shame, sexual pride, codes of sexual morality, inhibitions and disinhibitions, forms of aggression and violence, and bodily abjection. It is the ways in which these different modalities are harnessed and instrumentalised by power/knowledge/technology structures which makes them patipolitical as such.

Future Bodies In The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, I examine the various notions of female embodiment present in AI discourse and the ways in which speculations on these future bodies reveals the fantasies of immortality, suffering and ulti­ mate pleasure bound up with the positing of so-called “Artificial life-forms.”13 For example, the way the female body is put to work emblematically in the epistemology of the Turing Test, how she can be both a tool of sexual pleasure and an unkillable weapon of destruction, and ultimately how she can become a disposable vessel for reproduction. In sum, the female body continues to be a central problem for contemporary political thought about the future of enjoyment. To see the contours of what the future of the patipolitical aims at describing we can look to another the fictional example; the HBO series Westworld, in which the fantasy of fully functional AI sex slaves has been realised. The AIs in Westworld can be indefinitely sexually abused, waking up the next day with no memory of the past horrors, eagerly awaiting their next customers. This Westworldian dystopia I have referred to previously as a thought experiment by the name of “Priapalandia,”14 a world where sexual aggression is perpetual and sexual enjoyment is enforced to the point of horror. The point being, if Mbembe’s theory of the necropolitical pertains to the walking dead, in Pria­ palandia, a place in which extreme sexual torture is permitted on essentially undead subjects, we would have not a necropolitics but a patipolitics. The psychoanalytic angle here is that the undead quality of the sexual slaves in Westworld points to a fundamental truth about the instrumentalizable nature of the sexual drive (an undead force itself) and its relationship to the political as such.

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While today we are far off from Westworldian technology, Lacan’s reference to the “alethosphere” (from the Greek alethia, for “truth”) in Seminar XVII, hinted to a realm of individualised and spherically self-contained meaning and experience that each subject could plug into, in theory indefinitely.15 This Baudrillardian dystopia of Matrix-like meat puppets experiencing alternate virtual realities filled with unlimited sexual satisfaction has, in a perfunctory sense, already happened. Admittedly in a less thrilling way than was imagined. Today the most sophisticated alethosphere is perhaps best envisioned as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, where in the near future the brain may be implanted with microchips capable of intervening directly into our perceptual and drive systems or indeed what’s instore in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. What Lacan would perhaps have called the operceptual, combining the words operational and perceive.16 This possibility opens up dimensions which traverse the limits of perception and enjoyment of the biological body. We cannot talk about the future of the body without touching on the question of the “trans” and non-binary body. The patipolitical approach recognizes the suffering and the dignity of all bodies regardless of their biological or anatomical designation and holds that the assertion of so-called femininity or masculinity and the identification with womanhood or manhood is wholly the prerogative of the subjectivity which assumes this form of enjoyment. In short, trans women are women and trans men are men (in so far as anyone is ever definitively either a man or a woman). That being said, we must also draw attention to the impor­ tance of recognizing the specificity of the trans and non-binary experience and its particular form of suffering and crucially the singularity of each person’s mode of assuming their sexual positioning; “trans” identity is no more homogeneous than “cis” identity. This is an essential part of acknowledging that, as the human body becomes progressively more modifiable, we as a species will need to adapt our laws and institutions to reflect the changing dimensions of the enjoying body. At present the trans issue is the one which dominates the battlefield but as the pati­ political paradigm envisages, the acceptance of trans and non-binary bodies is just one of the many struggles that will be fought along the way towards a true universalism. Here we should refer to Paul Preciado’s coinage of the term soma­ theque; the body as a living “political archive.” One, which he says, “takes into account the historic and externalized modalities of the body, those that exist and are mediated through digital, pharmacological, and prosthetic technologies, the somatheque is mutating.”17

Ineffable Enjoyment The third element of patipolitics I will touch upon is the question of the ambivalence of suffering and sexual undecidability. This is not to justify suf­ fering nor sexual abuse but on the contrary to articulate the psychoanalytic insight in which enjoyment and suffering become indistinguishable to the point where in order to survive a subject cannot chose whether to partake in

The Patipolitical Body 233

enjoyment as such but merely finds a way to live with it and through it. And this ultimately is the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis stricto senso. We may recall that the fascination with the suffering of the other’s body, is something which occupied George Bataille and for whom implied something more ontologically relevant than merely the cruelty and indifference of the human animal seeking its own satisfaction. For Bataille there was a significance to the apprehension of the suffering of another body and the transgressive image in general, which implicated the very core of the ethical being and had the capacity to create a bond of community. In talking about the famous Chinese torture victim, for example, whose supposedly blissful expression of absolute suffering was so mesmeric for him, Bataille commented that he loved this man.18 This was by virtue of the transcendent feeling that bearing witness to his extreme torture provoked. Bataille’s observations about the religious function and erotics of bodily sacrifice alerts us to how images of suffering, which push the limits of the “living body” serve as the creation of a social bond. This “unavowable commu­ nity,” as Blanchot would call it,19 is built around what Bataille would refer to as the “accursed share.”20 This accursed share is the part of the libidinal economy that today is barely acknowledged but is the prime organizing principle of social relations, and indeed, comprises the fundamental metaphysical constitution of reality. This “share” is the part of everyday experience that, in its various mani­ festations must be spent, whose presence causes us great anxiety and which, in the modern restricted economy of scarcity that characterizes capitalism, is the invisible actor driving all of humanities’ strangest and most irrational activity. Whilst this example may seem grotesque and absurd, like much of Bataille’s work it functions to draw attention to the inherent contradictions underlying our apparently most pious and ethical actions. In a sense, Bataille’s beloved torture victim stands in for every tabloid story about a missing child, a rape case or molestation scandal. The public uproar and fascination with them contain within it a collective monstrous kernel of jouissance which ties the community together in a bond of both solidarity and the overwhelming experience of bearing witness to suffering. A thing only speaking beings are capable of doing. For Bataille the notion of expenditure was the fundamental concept at the heart of human life.21 Ultimately, we are creatures who, contrary to the contemporary model of homo economicus, must constantly expend with the aim of precisely never recuperating the energy we lose. This expenditure is not monetary even though it may appear so superficially. It is rather an expenditure of jouissance, that paradoxical experience on the threshold of pleasure and pain. An enjoyment which furthermore can often function according to the logic of sacrifice. Today whilst it is generally not commonplace to sacrifice goats, virgins, or even firstborn children, the practice of deliberately offering up items of value to some “higher authority” still functions as part of the mode of enjoyment in virtually all cultures. Where biopolitics is concerned with the production of life, and necropolitics the management of death, patipolitics is the administration of jouissance. It’s important to say that patipolitics does not aim to replace bio or necropolitics

234 Isabel Millar

but rather augment them. Naturally, this is a concept with wide ranging and multifaceted applications, but in essence patipolitics is concerned with the paradoxical, ambivalent, and oblique nature of the enjoying body. The way in which the body betrays us constantly and is at the mercy of drives that we either wish to supress or don’t even know exist. Although this is an insight which is the bread and butter of psychoanalysis it is still sadly and dangerously absent from much political, juridical, and popular discourse. To end on a more down to earth note with an age-old example of the way the enjoyment of the body is held hostage to domination, we can think of the ongoing necessity for rape victims to prove their lack of sexual interest in an attacker in order for it to be recognized as a crime. The point to be made here is that a victim’s potential “enjoyment” of the situation is not an indication of their culpability, an idea that is still viscerally rejected in popular culture. This inherent female guilt is nothing new but today perhaps begins even earlier with the auto-sexualization and pornification of young girls who have no idea how it will be later used against them as proof of their responsibility for whatever violence may later happen to them. But this can also work in the opposite direction as a mode of control, not just of women but of men. Porn addiction is the cause of significant distress for a generation of children who viewed hardcore sexual violence online before they learned anything about actual sex let alone relationships of equals. In relation to the patipolitical realm of the sexual maybe Jean Baudrillard (2008) was hinting at such a regime when he said: One may in fact argue that forcing the other to have pleasure, to feel rapture, is indeed the height of rape, and more serious than forcing the other to give you pleasure. At any rate, this brings out the absurdity of this entire problematic. Sexual harassment marks the arrival on the scene of an impotent, victim’s sexuality, a sexuality impotent to constitute itself either as object or as subject of desire in its paranoid wish for identity and difference. It is no longer decency that is threatened with violation, but sex or, rather, sexist idiocy, which “takes the law into its own hands.”22 Baudrillard here touches upon the core of the problematics of patipolitics. Its essential paradoxical nature and the troubling and traumatic realm of the sexual which lies beneath the manifest and perpetual violence that fuels pati­ political forms of governance. That misogyny, transphobia, and sexual violence never recedes and only seems to multiply itself wherever the technological infrastructure permits, require us to examine the ways in which the singular mode of suffering can become instrumentalised and transformed into efficient modes of control. In Julia Kristeva’s terms, we could say that the patipolitical feeds on the borders of abjection. 23 These are the extimate and intrusive ele­ ments of the enjoying body that forever plague the sexuated subject and create the polis itself.

The Patipolitical Body 235

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 138. 2 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 3 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 4 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 5 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 6 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 7 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 13. 8 Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 14. 9 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 39. 10 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 51–73.

11 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 15–49.

12 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin

Books, 1977), 30. 13 Isabel Millar, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). 14 Millar, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, 151. 15 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 161. 16 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 160. 17 Paul Preciado, Can the Monster Speak? (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), 35. 18 Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989). 19 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988). 20 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 21 Bataille, The Accursed Share. 22 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 2008), 121–22. 23 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy, Volume 1: Consumption. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bataille, Georges. Tears of Eros. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989. Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime. London: Verso, 2008. Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. New York: Station Hill Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 1978. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

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Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psycho­ analysis. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984. Millar, Isabel. The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Preciado, Paul. Can the Monster Speak? London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021.

32

“THIS IS A SHITTY GOVERNMENT, BUT IT IS MY GOVERNMENT” Love, Power, War, in Times of “Collapsed Horizons” and History’s Limitation “Willka” Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta

Love, Power, War in Constitutive Moments Bolivia is born as a result of the interests of a creole lineage, by the glory of Charcas and Potosi’s splendor, accustomed of being the center of everything “just because,” lives a sort of perpetual war with its people because of the fact that it always lived depending on indigenous tributes and never stopped being an openly racist lineage marked in its roots by an inquisitive conviction of superiority and logic of punishment for the “Indian.” Its national project is superficially democratic and plebeist so the masses approve renovation projects. More than a projection towards the external frontier {war}, itis an intent to solve the imbalance that has existed since the conquest, in respect to an internal frontier, (power): The conflicted relationship between fundamental ethical creolism estates: creole, half blood and “Indian.” War with Chile will be; confinement with the exterior (war) is manifested for the Spanish creole as a most profound internal closure (power). Caste, because of its intrinsic confinement, is unable to resolve the problem of democracy and integration, (not only in the sense of geopolitical and economic development, but in an ethnic, cultural, let’s say ideological way) and define national objec­ tives in function of the country’s majority. This permanent crisis of Bolivian creolism represents in the external front fear of pollonization by external forces to distribute the country for themselves, and the internal front as “fear of the Indian” in an apparent and popular spontaneous overflow in different public and private structures and institutions, that the estate would not be able to control. Zarate Willka’s revolution in 1898–1899 represents to paceño creolism a double conquest in the internal front (power): victory over the most tradi­ tional sectors of lineage and victory over the uprising indigenous masses. Even though the state suffers formal national popular modifications, creole content DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-36

238 “Willka” Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta

remains intact. Bolivia has a colonial structured society, with pigmentocratic hierarchy that does not permit persons with “Indianist” characteristics ascended socially because of economic situation, exploit and reproduce domination relationships over those in the same level of colonial structure, the illusion of social upgrade will never be able to penetrate the master’s stratification. In said colonial relationships (normalized) resistance to “change” of the structural bases, an “Indian” occupying presidency could be accepted, but that an “Indian” be my “boss” is unacceptable that is why consider that too much power is given to the “Indians,” being that he does not come from European ancestors, but from the worker, and takes his identity base being half caste.3 This master and slave dynamic in Bolivia’s history is the lordly paradox that appears in the encounter others as with the “Indian,” “when there is no Indian, there is no master.”4 The master recognizes himself in his servant, the Indian passes to be his master’s identity truth of independent consciousness and servant consciousness, constructed in the encounter with the “Indian.” How can it be that the Indian passes to be the identity of his master? That independent conscience be the servant? It is the price of victory, being the master’s reality. The Indian is then proof that the master exists, It is expressed then, on the other side, that vic­ tory’s trauma, or the deformation of the victorious, a way of being that always deceives: the master, the master is the power over this being, for he has demonstrated in this fight that he only exists as something negative, this is the dialectic of this schizophrenic relationship in the colonial condition plot that makes us all evil some in one way and others in another. A sickness nobody escapes, one side or the other, some feeling sorry for themselves and others feeling fortunate having Indians at their service and disposition. The servant is the sickness of his master. Denying the Indian is a confessed dependency with same, an occult dependency that irradiates the master’s life as oppressor, a being belonging to he who he oppresses. The master’s paradox is Bolivia’s tragic history, of those who need to disdain others as a defense mechanism to configure their own identity. If the other is one’s own truth, if one makes oneself in another’s image and that image is nothing else than what has been denied, means that I have constructed myself as a denial of me. I am that other denied in the context of my own superiority. My rank, my status, the desire to be myself over the others is converted into nothing, a nihilist forcé that will seek to destroy everything that shows the inconsistency of my own force. Zavaleta makes allusion to the historical “love” of our dominant classes towards the foreign, as do the Bolivian oligarchy and also Latin America, “that consists of a lack of self-esteem and the desire to disappear.”5 Disdain of all self-determination. “Men make history believing they are, but they are repeating it in an unconscious way, only transforming it, and that can be said of our oligarchic heritage.”

“This Is a Shitty Government, but It Is My Government” 239

Chaos Theory for Latin America In the context of the present moment, it is a global process, planetary with scientific corporate military political planification, that has a cybernetic human and artificial intelligence united to create a secure place for the development of capitalism’s crisis in its planetary global phase confronting a heroic, spontaneous militant and enthusiastic common intent to end the system or transform it into another society that will be collapsed or bloodily defeated by the system.6 “Chaotic dynamic systems”7 or chaos theory has had minor or mayor periods, unstable in poor equilibrium, like the tectonic plaques of the terrestrial cortex, pushing and pulling by different empires. It will be on the second half of the 20th century that it was triturated, with us inside, being disputed by both USA and USSR. Homeostasis in regard to this was solved for various decades utilizing military dictatorships. Later, dictatorships were no longer necessary for the system to be in order, and was then that USA fomented a certain type of neoliberal democracies, which worked for them and their “Pax Romana.” Another characteristic of chaotic systems is that little alternations can produce big modifications, “chaos seems to be everywhere, it has eliminated barriers and frontiers between disciplines, chaos is a global science of the nature of the systems.”8 In Postwar in Latin America the “small alteration” that initiates an imperative process of positive fractal feedback disturbing the chaotic dynamic system that had been ordered around USA world corporations called Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. The “Popular Social Indigenous Movement” led by Evo Morales was positive feedback in the interior of Latin American societies and was also a subset of the chaotic system structures around the USA world corporations. The objective of the two processes was long-term. They needed to move away from the initial values to control power. Bolivia marched on to her Comunitary Socialism. The Bolivian phenomenon called “Bolivian Economic Miracle” (Designated as so by Bolivian president Luis Arce) grows in the region becoming a strange attraction to USA world corporations. Bolivia’s economic model begins to be an example projected into Latin America, breaking the equilibrium that until then order and dominated. Perspective magazine No. 16 dedicated to denouncing “Socialism of the XXI century” as the same “Communism of XX century” but with a different way of implementation. The last one approved armed conflict as a fast way to achieve power, XXI century socialism changes and prefers democratic way, a new political party or camouflaging into an already existing one. The idea is to gain power little by little with a low profile. Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales appear to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation as the two faces of the new political enemies of the world, designated by that foundation. How to fight those threats? It would not be by bombs or direct student revolts; new technologies of information and communication would be used. Strategy is based in the use of new electronic technologies of communication

240 “Willka” Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta

and information that permits silently arm collective group nets to penetrate the academy, the students, working class and the more vulnerable… Easy access to internet permits organizing a political movement, street by street, with admin­ istrative and proselytizing cadres until a pyramid is built that connects the ideological cupola with the bases in real time, to be able to register and control followers, indoctrinate them and motivate them with economic incentives to get to the votes (sic) in a safe manner.9 Neo-liberal fear and what is at stake is not “democracy” or the “rule of law,” (categories respected only when useful). Even though political systems that were presided by Chavez, Morales, Correa, and Ortega were far from being socialist, they had a common denominator, they were perceived that way by the global bourgeoisie owners of transnationals, the dominant class of the planet, constitute the steps to mayor political control, from their positions of relative political power have major or minor control over the police and armed forces, adjusting to the ability to pressure, political actions, and people’s backup. The Neo liberal wave opposing progressive governments begins to destabilize, coups, recall referenda and corruption trials with state mediation, and fraudulent elections. Bolivia’s coup manifested the social, political and media conditions of racia­ lization and stigmatization (war) where all were converted, by other Bolivians, into internal enemies. An intent to destroy historic memories, the symbolical burning of the “wiphala,” calling indigenous movements “savages and hordes,” slaughtering them, objective function of subordinates in the name of internal peace (power). Social mobilization for the return of democratic order with inter­ national pressure taken as aggression, (war) in which the elites lose confronting internal power (power) that consolidated with the return of the Popular National Project by a democratic route, in times of collapsed horizons.

Collapsed Horizon Times Actual times seem to be where dehumanization survives and deepens, where the horizon of the times is one of chaos, global fear, war threats, (internal-external) tensions directed to take power, (oligarchy, creole, national popular indigenist) and love for a “wretched solidarity” of the people who still live in a lordly paradox, who need each other to recognize themselves in the rejection of the other. In some way, this truth, the truth of their ghostly existence, war, power and love confronts us or gives us back the image of a wretched conscience who has lost connection with the world, he has no longer the “will to exist and overcome and not recognizing the world as it is.”10 In Bolivia, despite the popular national victory, the return of democracy and the rule of law, this dialectical relationship persists between the internal front, the Dual Power and external front of the dominant class between power and war still persists, evidencing anguish of creolism that has not been able to conquer itself, but the obstinacy of the people that march towards their

“This Is a Shitty Government, but It Is My Government” 241

liberation and the Emancipatory Horizon seems to be self-love, indispensable element to imagine Utopia, but the tool of a future design that generates strategic and tactical chaining that create the conditions for its materialization if we really want it to materialize into some form of Comunitary Socialism of the 21st Cen­ tury much more farther away from the spontaneity and voluntarism so properly identified with the Latin American left.11 50 years after the Chilean coup, it would seem that the metaphorical story of love, power and war continues to mark the history of Latin America with governments declaring war on their peoples with heroic resistance and struggles, as Zavaleta points out: There is the corpse of Allende in the midst of the fire of La Moneda mur­ dered along with his people …Allende did not swear the sacrifice that he immediately assumed, when perhaps only in the final moments he saw it as a necessary consequence, while the fires lit up his eyes to see such a thing of the destruction of that Palace. They took out his body wrapped in a Boli­ vian poncho. Persecuted as a race cursed by Pinochet’s Chile, we also wanted to see in it an intact symbol of the fraternity of the revolutionaries of Bolivia and Chile.12 Probably not many would do the same as the worker from the times of Allende that would say: “This is a shitty government but I defend it because it is my government” …undoubtedly I would do the same for Bolivia, …Arce’s and Evo’s Bolivia, and for Boric’s Chile as if it was President Allende himself. In times of chaos, collapsed horizons and liminal history…

Notes 1 Álvaro Zarate, The Battle of Chile: from Allende to Boric (Santiago de Chile: Indigenous Library – Government of Chile, 2023), 33. 2 Rene Zavaleta Mercado, “General Considerations on the History of Bolivia 1993–1971,” in Latin America History of Half a Century 1: South America (Mexico: XXI century, 1977), 78. 3 Álvaro Zarate, “Oral History and Ancestral Memory to Rethink the World from the Andes,” Annals of Anthropology Journal 52, no. 1 (2018), 68–9. 4 Rene Zavaleta Mercado, “The National-Popular Thing in Bolivia,” in Complete Works, Volume II: Essays 1975–1984 (La Paz: Plural, 2014), 380. 5 Zavaleta Mercado, “The National Popular Thing in Bolivia,” 125. 6 Álvaro Zarate, “Qhananchiri: Our Mariátegui,” prologue to Towards the Great Universal Ayllu, Álvaro García Linera Anthology (Mexico: Indigenous Library, 2023), 26. 7 Isaac Schifter, The Science of Chaos (Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1996) 78. 8 Eliezer Braun, Chaos, Fractals and Strange Things (Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1996) 56. 9 Perspective N°16 (Santiago de Chile: Liberty and Development Institute, 2008) 54. 10 Álvaro García Linera, “Towards the Great Universal Ayllu,” in Anthology (Santiago de Chile: Indigenous Library – ARCIS University, 2018) 657. 11 Zarate, The Battle of Chile: From Allende to Boric, 76.

242 “Willka” Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta

12 Rene Zavaleta Mercado, The Dual Power: Problems of the Theory of the State in Latin America (Mexico: XXI Century, 1979), 198.

Bibliography Braun, Eliezer. Chaos, Fractals and Weird Stuff. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1996. García Linera, Alvaro. Anthology. Compiled by Álvaro Zárate. Santiago de Chile: Indi­ genous Library, ARCIS University Press, 2023. Perspective No. 16. Santiago de Chile, Institute for Liberty and Development, 2008. Schifter, Isaac. The Science of Chaos. Mexico: Economic Culture Fund, 1996. Zarate, Alvaro. The Battle of Chile: From Allende to Boric. Santiago de Chile: Indigen­ ous Library – Government of Chile, 2023. Zarate, Alvaro. “Oral History and Ancestral Memory to Rethink the World from the Andes.” Annals of Anthropology Journal 52, no. 1 (2018). Zarate, Alvaro. “Qhananchiri: Our Mariátegui.” Prologue to Towards the Great Uni­ versal Ayllu, Álvaro García Linera Anthology. Mexico: Indigenous Library, ARCIS University Press, 2018. Zavaleta Mercado, Rene. Complete Works Volume II. La Paz: Plural, 2014. Zavaleta Mercado, Rene. The Dual Power: Problems of the Theory of the State in Latin. America. Mexico: XXI Century, 1979. Zavaleta Mercado, Rene. “General Considerations on the History of Bolivia 1993–1971.” In Latin America History of Half a Century 1: South America. Mexico: XXI Century, 1977.

33

THE COSMOPOLITAN LEFT AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM, LIBERFASCISM, AND CYBERALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY A Latin American Approach to the Current Global Political Situation Since Post-Communism Jesús Ayala-Colqui

The history of the left in Latin America officially begins in the first decades of the twentieth century when, after the Russian Revolution, on the one hand, attempts to create communist parties aligned with the Third Communist Inter­ national (Comintern) began and, on the other hand, the first theoretical-prac­ tical texts of clear revolutionary inspiration were written.1 Although previously an influence of the Paris Commune can be verified in the manufacturing centers of Latin America, as well as some resonances of the Second International can be detected in the formation of the Latin American labor movement, only in the twentieth century will see the birth of the first formal attempts to develop the communist orientation in the region.2 However, it was necessary to wait until the second half of the century for Cuba to come to power by revolutionary means with Fidel Castro or, by democratic means, for socialism to obtain a place in Chile with Salvador Allende.3 In fact, many Latin American countries did not have left governments until the first decade of the twenty-first century, given the great resistance of bourgeois propaganda and all its military, media, ideological, and legal machinery.4 Nevertheless, the development of the left in the region cannot be interpreted as a mere import, copy, or emulation of European tendencies, since here the political projects always had an original component that restated the Marxist heritage in Latin American terms, as well as added other layers of complexity and even themes outside the European core. Alongside the great women and men of the left in the region, with relevant roles, both theoretically and practi­ cally, we can cite, for the purposes of this text, the case of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. Indeed, the amauta rethought, in a creative and origi­ nal way, Marxism, in such a way that Antonio Melis said of him that he was DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-37

244 Jesús Ayala-Colqui

“the first Marxist in America.”5 After his political exile in Italy, Mariátegui returned to Peru embracing communism without the intention of mechanically repeating the slogans of official Marxism, since he heretically postulated an Indo-American Marxism.6 Thus, the revolutionary subject, the European industrial worker, is transformed into the semi-enslaved Latin American indi­ genous. However, this substitution does not mean the elimination of the working class, but the conjugation of the worker and the indigenous: The vanguard proletariat has, under its eyes, concrete questions: the national organization of the working class, solidarity with the demands of the indigenous people, the defense and promotion of the institutions of popular culture, cooperation with the braceros and yanaconas of the estates, the development of the labor press, etc.7 Beyond the positivism and economic determinism of orthodox Marxism, Mar­ iátegui also introduced the question of faith. In other words, before FreudoMarxist authors such as Wilhelm Reich or Herbert Marcuse, left-wing Laca­ nians such as Slavoj Žižek or even schizoanalysts such as Félix Guattari intro­ duced the theme of the unconscious in the revolution, Mariátegui already advocated the importance of the desiring aspect of the revolution: The bourgeoisie no longer has any myths. It has become incredulous, skeptical, nihilistic. The Renaissance liberal myth has become too old. The proletariat has a myth: the social revolution. Towards that myth he moves with a vehement and active faith.8 Likewise, Mariátegui’s socialism was fully cosmopolitan.9 Since capitalism develops internationally, the response of the labor movement must be just as global: “We are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists, because we are revolutionaries, because we oppose socialism to capitalism as an antagonistic system.”10 It is my belief that with this triple gesture, Mariátegui thinks, to put it in our terms, the intersection between class and race, the question of voluntary servi­ tude and the task of a cosmopolitan communism that articulates the global with the local. Only in this way communism in Latin America can be a heroic crea­ tion and not a tracing or copy. This first and third point appear totally connected. Although we have become accustomed, and with good reason, to think about intersectionality based on the teaching of black North American feminism with authors such as bell hooks or Angela Davis,11 it is important to add that, from the Latin American point of view, this peripheral and even more colonial character of capitalist exploi­ tation in Latin America, already visionarily proposed by Mariátegui, will be taken up by the dependency theory in Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio Dos Santos, Vania Bambirra, André Gunder Frank12 and Aníbal Quijano’s theory of

The Cosmopolitan Left 245

the coloniality of power.13 Thinking of Latin America as an underdeveloped region implies questioning all the gears that feed the valorization of value at the international level. In this way, a coherent political strategy not only implies carry out the revolution in a limited place on the planet, but, above all, estab­ lishing an international movement that not only fights for class issues, but also combats, at the same time, the oppressions based on gender, race, disabilities, mental health, etc. This is where the second point comes in: a revolution not only competes with rational motives, but also involves the unconscious and its respective fantasies and symptoms. Perhaps, from this perspective of the unconscious, the equally original attempts to think of a theology of Latin American liberation can be read, where faith, beyond all possible dogmatics, becomes, heterodoxly, into a synonym for the unconscious.14 Now, at present, international capitalism develops in three main sides: neo­ liberalism, liberfascism, cyberalism. It will never be repetitive to mention that the orthodox fracture between infrastructure and superstructure must be ques­ tioned in the sense that the only thing that exists is that social relationship called capital (defined as the valorization of value) immanent to the economic and the non-economic. In the capitalist mode of production, labor is divided into concrete labor (konkrete Arbeit) and abstract labor (abstrakte Arbeit) and, correlatively, the product of labor power (Arbeitskraft), the commodity, has two factors: use value (Gebrauchswert) and exchange value (Tauschwert).15 Therefore, capitalism not only means that there are bourgeois and proletarians, exploitation of surplus labor, social inequality and injustice, and an ideological discourse that justifies it. Above all, it means that every possible social rela­ tionship is mediated by abstract work, every individual link appears as a pro­ duction relationship, every being becomes a commodity and, finally, the commodity form and the normativity of exchange value unconsciously orga­ nizes every act and social construction within reality. In the field of social practices, as Žižek recalls from Sohn-Rethel,16 the abstraction of the commod­ ity form is not noticed by the social actors and, despite this, it presents an incessant materiality that gives them shape: this is the renewed meaning that the Slovenian author gives to the word ideology beyond the infrastructure and superstructure dichotomy.17 Now, I want to state a first thesis in this regard: the real abstraction of the commodity form is expressed, in multiple ways, in various historical-political configurations. To think that the unique political correlate of capital is liberal­ ism shows a fundamental error that essentializes the historical dispositions and does not attend to the material discontinuities of reality. It is true that the idea of individual freedom that is realized in social exchanges could have a con­ sistent theoretical place in liberalism; however, such a notion can be combined with various political practices. In fact, as Foucault showed, the idea of free­ dom is also present in neoliberalism and despite the fact that this, more than a renewal of liberalism, is its reversal (by placing the market before the State and by changing the man of exchange for the competitive entrepreneur of himself).18

246 Jesús Ayala-Colqui

Consequently, the illusion of individual freedom, determined by commodity form and abstract work, has various phenomenical expressions: liberalism, neoliberal­ ism, fascism, – and, as we have pointed out in other places, introducing two neologisms – liberfascism and cyberalism. We know neoliberalism very well: the deregulation policies of the Interna­ tional Monetary Fund and the World Bank with the Washington consensus, the indebtedness of individuals and peripheral states, the dismantling of welfare, the privatization of basic services such as health or education, the norm of pri­ vate competition, the idealization of the entrepreneur of himself figure.19 But are all policies and subjective practices really conditioned by neoliberal gov­ ernmentality? What about, for example, the rise of the imperatives of techno­ logizing life and optimizing ourselves through digital devices? What happens with the rise of the extreme right in Latin America? Are all of them simple anecdotes of neoliberalism? In the nineties, a governmentality parallel to neoliberalism emerged: I call it cyber-liberalism or, more narrowly, cyberalism. 20 After World War II in the United States of America, computing, cybernetics, and information theory were developed that allowed the first digital technology devices to be produced. These reached a critical point when, on the one hand, personal computers were built and, on the other hand, the Internet emerged as a substitute for the Arpanet military project. These events spurred a new imaginary among pro­ grammers, artists, writers, businessmen, whose main geographical nucleus was San Francisco, California. Thus, the previous hippie counterculture was gradu­ ally replaced by a kind of technological and cybernetic counterculture. The Whole Earth Catalog and, later, Wired magazine were the main vehicles of expression for this new wave of practices, discourses, and fantasies. Among its main theoreticians, we can name Louis Rossetto, Timothy C. May, Ray Kurz­ weil, Kevin Kell, and Nicholas Negroponte.21 These new practices, however, are not limited to a local community of technology enthusiasts, but, from the twenty-first century, with the advent of a platform capitalism22 and the tacit imperative of total technologization of life, these modes invade the whole of society, since the use of each digital device is designed with cyberal political strategy in mind. What, then, is cyberalism? The novelty introduced by this governmentality, and that makes it irreducible to neoliberalism, consists of the introduction of control devices that modulate reality to convert every event into information. To rephrase it, this transforms it into discrete digits that can be predictable, programmable and manipulable; an iterative molding of the per­ sonality of each subject by sophisticated algorithms where a continuum of life, production and consumption is created; the deterministic idea that freedom is only realized and resolved through technology; and, finally, the fantasy of the enhancer of himself, namely: the dream of improving our condition through prostheses or biological modifications thanks to the inexorable technological advances.23 Thus, the paradise promised to us by the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Pages, the Gates, the Bezos and, in general, the Silicon Valley model is none

The Cosmopolitan Left 247

other than a political regime where our freedom coincides with the algorithmic control of reality to increase the valorization of value with radically new quotas of exploitation of abstract labor.24 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, although with roots in the extreme right in the twentieth century as echoes or leftovers of fascism or Nazism, another governmentality arises, especially in Latin America: I call it lib­ erfascism. 25 Although an alt-right has emerged throughout the globe that results in xenophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and conservative content26, in the Latin American region the triumph of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the multiplication of libertarian groups amalgamates a political specificity that should not be avoided, much less subsumed in past categories. Indeed, unlike neofascism, which contains an ultranationalist component inspired by classical fascism and which segregates from racial or cultural elements; and unlike neoliberalism that proposes the ideal of competition and the fantasy of the entrepreneur of himself and human capital, liberfascism is constituted, above all, by placing the free market as an object of explicit exaltation against which a complex and unique strategy is deployed. The novelty introduced by libertarian fascism lies in the fact that in it the capitalist market ceases to be a zone of competition to become a zone of protection of a threatened freedom, hence its imperative is nothing more than explicit and stark aggression against everything that opposes the capital appreciation movement; subjective fantasy is no longer an entrepreneur of the self, nor is it an improver of the self, but rather a defender of the self, which, through armed militias and dissemination collectives, violates everything that is out of the capitalist norm; and, finally, as a result of such a fantasy, the peculiar discourse of libertarian fascism is none other than post-truth, in such a way that a variety of fake news symptomatically proliferates that fights against the different threats of private property and the market.27 For all that has been said, my second thesis is: the capital combines and articulates, to date, three types of governmentalities: neoliberalism, liberfas­ cism, and cyberalism, the latter being the political responses to the exhaustion of the neoliberal “democratic” model. It is in this context that I can pose the question: seen from the Latin Amer­ ican periphery (and, specifically, from Peru, where I write), what are the chal­ lenges of the left in the face of the global situation? What is our manifesto from our colonial and racialized situation? I would like to present here, succinctly and indicatively, just five ideas. The first task is, after starting from the assumption that political theory and practice are nothing but moments always questioned by the movement of the real and, therefore, always updateable, to resolve the dichotomy between cosmopoli­ tan universalism and indigenous localism. As Mariátegui reminded us, the com­ munist movement can only be successful if it develops an international strategy that, however, does not subsume everything in a modernizing homogeneity, but instead creatively articulates the ancient and the contemporary, the indigenous, and the foreign, the past, and the future. I call this political attitude plebeianism.

248 Jesús Ayala-Colqui

The second task of the left is to articulate small-scale autonomous politics (micropolitics) with large-scale institutional politics, which involves various entities including the state (macropolitics). Faced with the antinomy of an antistatist left and a bureaucratizing left, very common in Latin America, the task is to develop a policy that respects and connects, heterarchically, the different scales of political action. Without it, the left becomes an impotent movement or a bad totalitarian parody. Therefore, I term trans-politics to the strategy that builds non-hierarchical connections between the micro and the macro, between the molecular and the molar.28 The COVID-19 pandemic, with all its social challenges,29 showed us that only by articulating resistance from communal and state spaces is it possible to counteract the abstraction of the commodity form. The third aporia to resolve is the contrast between an extractivist use of resources (especially new commodities such as lithium or rare earths) and the individuation between subjects and their environment. I call this, in Runa-simi (Quechua, an indigenous language of pre-Columbian origin), the search for Sumak kawsay (good living). Whoever writes this, not only as a Latin Amer­ ican, but also as an indigenous descendant, particularly perceives the harmful effects of the Capitalocene in his region and, consequently, I cannot fail to fight against some errors of the political left that, when it has come to government, have not modified at all the extractivist plans of capital.30 The fourth task is to recognize the role of the unconscious in political praxis and, with it, the challenge of articulating, transversally, intersectionally, differ­ ent political struggles, since what oppresses everyone is nothing other than the valorization of the value of capital. I use the term transversal intersectionality to describe this political tactic.31 Finally, the resolution of the last impasse implies multiplying political sub­ jects, not only including race or gender in addition to class, but, from a posthuman and antispeciesist perspective, including other species and entities, among them: animals, plants, inorganic matter, machines, automatons, etc. I term this inter-ontism (inter-ontismo, in Spanish).32 It is here that we not only seek an end to the exploitation of the bourgeois over the proletarian, of the cisheterosexual man over the woman and the transsexual, of the white over the non-white, but above all of the human being against the non-human, the posthuman, the trans-human. After all, for our indigenous culture, everything in the cosmos has dignity, from the rock to the divinities of nature. Therefore, the last thesis that I would like to sustain here is the following: it is the task of a cosmopolitan post-communism to resolve at least the five aforementioned aporias by developing a politics that is truly a heroic creation. For me the term post-communist33 means the realization of an internationally plebeian, transpolitical, intersectional, sumakawsist, and inter-ontic strategy. This is not, of course, an ideal that we want to impose on reality, but the real movement that denies the different governmentalities of capitalism and, at the same time, the really existing socialisms and leftisms. Faced with this, we have no choice but to say: Post-communists of the universe, unite!

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Notes 1 See Rodolfo Cerda Cruz, La Hoz y el Machete: La IC, América Latina y la Revolu­ ción en Centro América (Costa Rica: Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Rica, 1986); Manuel Caballero, La Internacional Comunista y la Revolución en América Latina, 1919–1943 (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1987); Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Filosofía de la Liberación Latinoamericana (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006); Elvira Concheiro, Massimo Modonesi and Horacio Gutiérrez Crespo, eds., El Comunismo: Otras Miradas desde América Latina (México: Uni­ versidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007); Michael Löwy, El Marxismo en América Latina (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2007); Pablo Guadarrama González, Marxismo y Antimarxismo en América Latina: Crisis y Renovación del Socialismo, Volumen 1 (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2014); Pablo Guadarrama González, Marxismo y Antimarxismo en América Latina: Crisis y Renovación del Socialismo, Volumen 2 (Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2015); Patricio Herrera González, coord., El Comunismo en América Latina: Experiencias Militantes, Intelectuales y Transnacio­ nales (1917–1955) (Chile: Universidad de Valparaíso, 2017); Lazar Jeifets and Víctor Jeifets, América Latina en la Internacional Comunista (1919–1943): Diccionario Biográfico (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2019). 2 See Elvira Concheiro, “Repensar a los Comunistas en América Latina,” Izquierdas 7 (August 2010): 1–19. 3 See Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Victor Figueroa Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez (eds.), Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2021). 4 See Steve Ellner, ed., Latin America’s Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012). 5 See Antonio Melis, Mariátegui, Primer Marxista de América (México: UNAM, 1979). 6 See Oscar Terán, Discutir Mariátegui (México: BUAP, 1985); David Sobrevilla, El Marxismo de Mariátegui y Su Aplicación a los 7 Ensayos (Lima: Universidad de Lima, 2005); Alberto Flores Galindo, La Agonía de Mariátegui (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2021). 7 José Carlos Mariátegui, Obra Política, (México: Ediciones Era, 1979), 256 (the translation is mine). 8 José Carlos Mariátegui, Mariátegui Total (Lima: Editora Amauta, 1994), 499 (the translation is mine). 9 See Martín Bergel, “José Carlos Mariátegui: Un Socialismo Cosmopolita,” Antología. José Carlos Mariátegui, selección, introducción y notas de Martín Bergel (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2021). 10 José Carlos Mariátegui, Antología, José Carlos Mariátegui, selección, introducción y notas de Martín Bergel (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2021), 295 (the translation is mine). 11 See Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 1990). 12 See Claudio Katz, Teoría de la Dependencia: Cincuenta Años después (Buenos Aires: Batalla de Ideas, 2018). 13 See Aníbal Quijano, Cuestiones y Horizontes: Antología Esencial de la Dependencia Histórico-Estructural a la Colonialidad/Descolonialidad del Poder (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2014). 14 See Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la Liberación: Perspectivas (7th ed.) (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1975); Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “La Interpretación Latinoamericana del Marxismo en las Teologías de la Liberación: Las Propuestas de Gutiérrez y Hinkelammert,” Cuadernos de Ética y Filosofía Política 7 (2018): 37–52. 15 See Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904); Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of

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16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

Political Economy (New York: Vintage Books, 1973); Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992); Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Subjetividad y Subjetivación en Marx: Una Lectura Confrontativa a Partir de Hei­ degger y Foucault,” Tópicos 61 (2021): 109–44. See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London: The Macmillan Press, 1978). See Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek (London, Verso, 1994); Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2009). See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College of France, 1978–1979 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (New York: PM Press, 2012); Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2012); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (London: Verso, 2014). See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “La Apuesta Política de Silicon Valley: ¿Tecnoliberalismo o Ciber-Liberalismo?” Latin American Journal of Humanities and Educational Diver­ gences 1 (2022): 1–15; Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “El Nacimiento del ‘Ciberalismo’: Una Genealogía Crítica de la Gubernamentalidad de Silicon Valley,” Bajo Palabra 32 (2023): 299–332. See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “El Nacimiento del ‘Ciberalismo.’” See Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “La Apuesta Política de Silicon Valley,”; Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “El Nacimiento del ‘Ciberalismo.’” See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Máquinas y Capital: Félix Guattari y la Caracterización de los Automatismos Maquínicos a Partir de un Contrapunto con las Categorías Marxianas,” Izquierdas 51 (2022): 1–21. See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “El Nacimiento del ‘Liberfascismo’ y los Distintos Modos de Gestión de la Pandemia en América Latina,” Prometeica-Revista de Filosofía y Ciencias 24 (2022): 182–99. See George Hawley, The Alt-Right. What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “El Nacimiento del ‘Liberfascismo.’” Ver Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Félix Guattari y el Problema de la Organización Política: Transversalidad, Polivocidad y Diagramatismo entre Micropolítica y Macropolítica,” Hybris, Revista de Filosofía 13 (2022): 131–55. See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Viropolitics and Capitalistic Governmentality: On the Management of the Early 21st Century Pandemic,” Desde el Sur 12 (2020): 377–95; Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Jamadier Uribe Muñoz, Jairo Gallo Acosta, Rodrigo Aguilera Hunt, Luis Roca Jusmet, Florencia Fernández, Francisco García Manzor, Gonzalo Salas, and Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Neoliberalismo, Ideología y Covid-19: Un Análisis desde la Perspectiva de Slavoj Žižek,” Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason 70 (2023): 131–54; Suhad Daher-Nashif, “In Sickness and in Health: The Politics of Public Health and Their Implications During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Sociology Compass 16 (2021): 1–13. See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Modernidad, Transmodernidad e Identidades AndinoAmazónicas a Partir de la Obra de Juan José Bautista,” Solar: Revista de Filosofía Latinoamericana 13 (2017): 49–67. See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “Félix Guattari y el Problema de la Organización Política.” See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “La Configuración del ‘Ontocentrismo’ en Martin Hei­ degger,” Letras (Lima) 92 (2021): 196–216; Jesús-Ayala-Colqui, “El Animal, ¿Es una Otredad Posible?: Indagaciones Fenomenológicas a Partir de Husserl y Heidegger,” TRANS/FORM/AÇÃO: Revista De Filosofia 46 (2023): 133–58.

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33 See Jesús Ayala-Colqui, “El ‘Ontocentrismo’ Humano en el Primer y Segundo Hei­ degger,” in Jesús Ayala-Colqui, Ricardo Horneffer, and Alberto Constante, eds., Sentido, Verdad e Historia del Ser en Martin Heidegger (Sao Paulo: Pimenta Cul­ tural, 2022), 765–94.

Bibliography Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “El Animal, ¿Es una Otredad Posible?: Indagaciones Fenomenoló­ gicas a Partir de Husserl y Heidegger.” TRANS/FORM/AÇÃO: Revista de Filosofia 46 (2023): 133–158. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “La Apuesta Política de Silicon Valley: ¿Tecnoliberalismo o CiberLiberalismo?” Latin American Journal of Humanities and Educational Divergences 1 (2022): 1–15. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “La Configuración del ‘Ontocentrismo’ en Martin Heidegger: Hacia la Elaboración de unas Ontologías No Ontocéntricas y Poshumanas Más Allá de Sein und Zeit y Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik.” Letras (Lima) 92, no. 131 (2021): 196–216. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “Félix Guattari y el Problema de la Organización Política: Transver­ salidad, Polivocidad y Diagramatismo entre Micropolítica y Macropolítica.” Hybris, Revista de Filosofía 13 (2022): 131–155. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “La Interpretación Latinoamericana del Marxismo en las Teologías de la Liberación: Las Propuestas de Gutiérrez y Hinkelammert.” Cuadernos de Ética y Filosofía Política 7 (2018): 7–52. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “Máquinas y Capital: Félix Guattari y la Caracterización de los Automatismos Maquínicos a Partir de un Contrapunto con las Categorías Marxianas.” Izquierdas 51 (2022): 1–21. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “Modernidad, Transmodernidad e Identidades Andino-Amazónicas a Partir de la Obra de Juan José Bautista.” Solar: Revista de Filosofía Latinoamericana 13 (2017): 49–67. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “El Nacimiento del ‘Ciberalismo’: Una Genealogía Crítica de la Gubernamentalidad de Silicon Valley.” Bajo Palabra 32 (2023): 299–332. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “El Nacimiento del ‘Liberfascismo’ y Los Distintos Modos de Gestión de la Pandemia en América Latina.”Prometeica-Revista de Filosofía y Ciencias 24 (2022): 182–199. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “Viropolitics and Capitalistic Governmentality: On the Management of the Early 21st Century Pandemic.”Desde el Sur 12, no. 2 (2020): 377–395. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “El ‘Ontocentrismo’ Humano en el Primer y Segundo Heidegger.” In Sentido, Verdad e Historia del Ser en Martin Heidegger. Edited by Jesús Ayala-Colqui, Ricardo Horneffer, and Alberto Constante, 684–711. Sao Paulo: Pimenta Cultural, 2022. Ayala-Colqui, Jesús. “Subjetividad y Subjetivación en Marx: Una Lectura Confrontativa a Partir de Heidegger y Foucault.” Tópicos 61 (2021): 109–144. Barria-Asenjo, Nicol A., Jamadier Uribe Muñoz, Jairo Gallo Acosta, Rodrigo Aguilera Hunt, Luis Roca Jusmet, Florencia Fernández, Francisco García Manzor, Gonzalo Salas, and Jesús Ayala-Colqui. “Neoliberalismo, Ideología y Covid-19: Un Análisis desde la Perspectiva de Slavoj Žižek.” Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theo­ retical and Practical Reason 70 (2023): 131–154. Bergel, Martín. “José Carlos Mariátegui: Un Socialismo Cosmopolita.” In Antología, José Carlos Mariátegui. Selección, introducción y notas de Martín Bergel, 8–30. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2021. Caballero, Manuel. La Internacional Comunista y la Revolución en América Latina, 1919 –1943. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1987.

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Cerda Cruz, Rodolfo. La Hoz y el Machete: La IC, América Latina y la Revolución en Centro América. Costa Rica: Universidad Estatal a Distancia de Costa Rica, 1986. Cerutti Guldberg, Horacio. Filosofía de la Liberación Latinoamericana. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. Concheiro, Elvira. “Repensar a los Comunistas en América Latina.” Izquierdas 7 (2010): 1–19. Concheiro, Elvira, Massimo Modonesi, and Horacio Gutiérrez Crespo (eds.). El Comunismo: Otras Miradas desde América Latina. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007. Daher-Nashif, Suhad. “In Sickness and in Health: The Politics of Public Health and Their Implications During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”Sociology Compass 16 (2021): 1–13. Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. London: Verso, 2014. Davis, Angela. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Ellner, Steve, ed. Latin America’s Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012. Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. New York: PM Press, 2012. Figueroa Clark, Victor. Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat. London: Pluto Press, 2013. Flores Galindo, Alberto. La agonía de Mariátegui. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2021. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College of France, 1978–1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Guadarrama González, Pablo. Marxismo y Antimarxismo en América Latina: Crisis y Renovación del Socialismo, Volumen 1. Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2014. Guadarrama González, Pablo. Marxismo y Antimarxismo en América Latina: Crisis y Renovación del Socialismo, Volumen 2. Caracas: El Perro y la Rana, 2015. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Teología de la Liberación: Perspectivas (7th ed.). Salamanca: Sígueme, 1975. Harmer, Tanya. Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War. Chapel Hill: Uni­ versity of North Carolina Press, 2011. Harmer, Tanya, and Alberto Martín Álvarez, eds. Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2021. Hawley, George. The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Herrera González, Patricio, coord. El Comunismo en América Latina: Experiencias Mili­ tantes, Intelectuales y Transnacionales (1917–1955). Chile: Universidad de Valparaíso, 2017. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press, 1990. Jeifets, Lazar and Víctor Jeifets. América Latina en la Internacional Comunista (1919–1943), Diccionario Biográfico. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2019. Katz, Claudio. Teoría de la Dependencia: Cincuenta Años Después. Buenos Aires: Batalla de Ideas, 2018. Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2012. Löwy, Michael. El Marxismo en América Latina. Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2007. Mariátegui, José Carlos. Antología, José Carlos Mariátegui. Selección, introducción y notas de MartínBergel. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2021. Mariátegui, José Carlos. Mariátegui Total. Lima: Editora Amauta, 1994.

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Mariátegui, José Carlos. Obra Política. México: Ediciones Era, 1979. Marx, Karl. Capital: Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Melis, Antonio. Mariátegui, Primer Marxista de América. México: UNAM, 1979. Quijano, Aníbal. Cuestiones y Horizontes: Antología Esencial de la Dependencia HistóricoEstructural a la Colonialidad/Descolonialidad del Poder. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2014. Sobrevilla, David. El Marxismo de Mariátegui y Su Aplicación a los 7 Ensayos. Lima: Universidad de Lima, 2005. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology. London: The Macmillan Press, 1978. Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Terán, Oscar. Discutir Mariátegui. México: BUAP, 1985. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology. Edited by Slavoj Žižek, 1–33. London, Verso, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 2009.

34

REFLECTIONS FROM THE THEORY OF THE ENCRYPTION OF POWER Energeia and the Manifestation of the Non-Being Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo

Philosophy, Power, and Transcendent Models Our premise of demonstration is that there can be no difference, let alone power, without contingency. Being must be contingent, or it cannot be at all. That “there are things instead of nothing” discloses not only the enigma of there being things but the terror of “there being nothing.” Western philosophy is driven by a single force, to negate negativity, to summon the “some-thing,” the being, what in actuality (pre)exists, to dispel the monstrosity of non-being, of no-thing.1 Since non-being is pure contingency, any necessary order is always under the siege of the unpredictable and the lawless, of what becomes itself from no pre-established order (the promise of an authentic people as constituent power, for example). While in necessity, the contingency of the future is captured in what is presently actual, contingency is the edge where possible and impossible are to be decided.2 Contingency is the unbound multiplicity of becoming. Hence, there is no expression of difference that is not con­ tingent as there is no negation of difference that does not always fall back into necessity.3 Contingency and necessity are the deadlock of power, of what is possible and impossible. Henceforth, philosophy has domesticated and imposed a single meaning of power as what already presupposes the necessity of a model, in doing so, every contingency is subdued to necessity. Philosophy is the normalizing force that upholds necessity and thus denies contingency and through it denies power. Regarding agency, a tautology prevails: to be is to be against nothingness, to be is to be possible, to be possible is to exercise power.4 Hence, to be is always exercised through some kind or other of power that is extracted from a primal presupposition, a transcendent model, in western history it has shifted from DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-38

Reflections from the Theory of the Encryption of Power 255

being called idea, logos, nature, society, man, judgement, or concept.5 Every effort has thus been directed to find ways to deactivate beingness through stringent normative limits for the exercise of power. As we have stated before, since Plato, politics is predefined through extenu­ ating conditions of belonging to the body politic. Insofar, “to be” must match an already existing qualification of life, a division within forms of identity where some are welcomed into politics, and some are excluded according to qualifications that are detached from beingness but to which beingness must conform in order to be.6 This brings forth the definition of potestas as the negation of power through the stratification of the conditions to exercise power. What defines potestas is the arrangement of systems of identity through the permanent construction of transcendent models (presupposition) to define life.7 Nevertheless, and here is the heart of the deception, the model that serves as a frontier for existence is arranged from within by those who already belong to the body politic.8

Contingency Under another light, Aristotle’s potentiality and actuality and the latter as a division between Entelecheia and Energeia may open up a new consideration of being and power.9 Through it, we may dispel Agamben´s (vanguard) inter­ pretation of power that locks political action in impotence. When we read Energeia as power without transcendent finality, contingency, as the order of the political, is released, and with it the possibility of becoming-other is open anew.10 Contingency means that only when beings exist, not as a necessity, is the meaning of being necessary. In between potentia and actuality hinges not only the definition of power but the utter possibility of existence, of what is possible and impossible, logical, contingent, necessary and time. We have called the relation of potentiality and actuality the “dyad.”11 Aristotle clearly saw in the dyad the precipice of what exists, what does not exist, and what could exist. Within its dense context two fundamental outcomes are decided. First, how does anything come about and perish? And second, how can anything persist in its being (the thing that makes it what it is) through the changes occurred to it in time and space?12 The dyad is then not solely the passage from inexistence to existence but the index of its possibility; it marks the discernibility between being and coming to being, and the exact determination of its possible occurrence in time.13 The central operation of the dyad is the explosive and constitutive relation between being and non-being. Non-being is the breaking point of ontology, the extreme and unaccountable force that can destroy any certainty and predict­ ability when confronting being.14 Aristotle’s dyad, is the prophylactic of the explosivity of becoming. The primordial aim is to prevent contingency through the primacy of actuality over potentiality.

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Aristotle15 describes potentia with a single word – dunamis (δύναμις) – while he uses two to describe actuality: Energeia (ενέργεια) and Entelecheia (ἐντελέχεια). Energeia and Entelecheia are far from being equivalent or interchangeable. They stand in utter contrast, and this is crucial to any dif­ ferentiation between power as domination (potestas) and power as the immanent and infinite exercise of difference.16 Aristotle’s division of actuality and potentiality spears the neutralization between contingency and necessity. Its objective is to transform non-being into a logical consequence of being. Subsequently, when being comes to be, it is necessary that it came to be from a given potentiality. What is potential now supposes the contingency of its becoming, hence, the contingency of the future is harnessed in the necessity of what is presently actual. Consequently, it is not that potentia is contingent; what is contingent is the coming to be of what is potential, what is in potentia may come to be or it may not. Contingency is reduced to a very precise procedure within the dyad.17 For Aristotle potentia is a source of movement or change, which is in another thing than the thing moved or in the same thing qua other.18 Accordingly, some things hold potentia in themselves, while others behest an external agent to acquire change.19 According to Aristotle, “a child has the potential to become a man,” but also has the potential to become a great musician, in this second case an external intervention is compulsory. We have thus a first and ad hoc division of potentia between natural and acquired. 20 Through potentia, Aristotle has found two ways to award primacy to what exists. The first is to explain potentia as a kind of privation, and the second is the structuring of the primacy of actuality in regard to potentiality through a theory of causes. Privation supposes that natural potentia is only capable of becoming itself, while acquired potentia is capable of producing both itself and its contrary.21 Aristotle’s typical example of the former is the pharmakon that can produce both disease and health. What Giorgio Agamben sees in the actualization of potentia is the irrever­ sible loss of contingency and hence the sheer death of politics. Agamben’s rushes to preserve its power in full passivity, in the passion of impotence. I believe he runs amiss, as the core of the problem lies not in the definition of potentia but of actuality. Agamben is categorizing actuality simply with one of its forms but utterly overlooking the other. To break necessity, we propose to actualize difference, no less than a heresy for the thinkers of our era.22 Besides the concept of privation, Aristotle deploys his theory of causes to checkmate contingency within the dyad. Accordingly, actuality is prior not only in time but in logos to potentiality, so actuality is the material, formal, and efficient cause of potentiality.23 Aristotle gives priority to the final cause over the rest. This is the axis of the dominance of actuality over potentia. For Aristotle the final cause is the end (telos) for which a thing is done. Pure actuality is attaining such an end, and in it stands the perfection of being.

Reflections from the Theory of the Encryption of Power 257

Entelecheia (ἐντελέχεια) and Energeia (ενέργεια) are the names Aristotle uses to define actuality. The compound of Energeia is ergonó, it means activity, action, or an operation, it stems in the adjective energon, meaning active or working. The etymological complex builds Energeia, from en (in, within) +ergon (work). First, we have a very specific meaning of actuality which is the work required to maintain the state of a substance through the being-at-work of the substance. The second form of actuality is Entelecheia, attained by combining entele-s (ἐντελής, “complete, full-grown”) with echein (hexis), which means to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on to that condition. Attention, a third term is subtly added by Aristotle to the composite through the word endelecheia (ἐντελέχεια, “persistence”).24 Here, something new and uncanny is unexpectedly added unto actuality, the insertion of telos (τέλος, completion) as the nuclear component of the concept. Etymologically, Entelecheia is the aggregate of en (within) + telos (end, perfection) +ekhein (to be in a certain state). Consequently, there is a crucial addition to the construction of Entelecheia; a bleak axiom according to which, reality and beingness can only come forth when they are perfect, when they have achieved an end that is not in them and thus is given by another thing that lies in another world altogether (exactly! transcendent models). Telos, finality is outside of work, it breaks its imma­ nence, as it defines what work must strive for, that is, a kind of completion that does not belong immanently to it. Telos is thus introduced as the fulcrum between en-tele-s (being within), and echein (hexis), turning the plain meaning of holding on to into a qualified being in possession of an end. An inaccessible and invisible transcendent model descends determining the things of this world. A fundamental teleological split befalls actuality. Natural, or rather “exis­ tential” final causes are involved directly in Energeia: it is the being-at-work to preserve substance that defines being. For natural things, formal, efficient, and final cause are the same: the actualization of being qua being. Energeia is thus immanent as the principle of generation is already included in it; hence, “One thing is potentially another when, if nothing external hinders it, it will of itself become the other.”25 For Energeia, perfection (as a final cause, a telos) is itself immanently constitutive of being. Henceforth, if we are searching for the meaning of politics and the configuration of the body politic, we are encircling the question of who belongs to it and under what conditions. The answer, through radical non-liberal democracy, cannot be other than everyone and everything, with no further condition or qualification than life itself and no exception that can be imposed beyond the production of difference. Entelecheia is capable of its contrary. Insofar, to the extent that “rational” potentia can produce effects contrary to its finality, it follows that to be a true actuality it must produce those effects well. Health of illness depends on the way the pharmakon is employed.26 Agamben is trapped in the connection between Entelecheia and power. His response is to build an impenetrable wall against actuality as Entelecheia, as he

258 Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo

recognizes it only as the sign of actuality corrupted in the form of potestas and domination. Entelecheia means that only those who acquire perfection are part of the political. The problem is if the (ontological, existential) definition of the political falls under a rational telos (Entelecheia) or an Energeia as a being-at­ work. This is the axis of the political that defines power and beingness. According to his Nicomachean ethics, for Aristotle the telos of a polity is virtue. Virtue (the doing well of politics) is the perfect exercise of reason. Hence, the traditional interpretations that run through the infected veins of the West, in line with Aristotle, consider that politics follows Entelecheia, and so Plato’s virtue (areté) and Aristotle’s Eudaimonia demand that politics be defined as a question of refinement, perfection, excellence. The perfect polity is as such because it has achieved an actuality through virtue as a telos. Potestas is not only happy to run along these tracks but to declare that such truth is inexpugnable. For Agamben, actuality qualifies life into a certain life (zoe tis), as the rational actualization of potentia. Politics, then, can only be determined as such by a certain finality that involves a stringent qualification of life: a division between the rational and irrational, the virtuous and the vile, of the oikos and the politikos and of life (bios) and bare life (zoe).27 Agamben is confusing the raw fact of the world (how potestas has simulated power through Entelecheia) with the world (that the world, in order to be the world, must be unqualified difference). For both Plato and Aristotle, the qualifications for belonging to politics are defined by natural conditions, a doing well, but the very demarcation zones of the definition of doing well can only be logically postulated by those who already are inside the body politic. This is the mortal ruse of Entelecheia. The only order of politics is a non-qualified actuality. Agamben’s interpretation of actuality as qualification of life is wrong. “Politics can only be considered when every being that makes a difference is considered as the condition of the existence of politics, with no further qualification.”28 The sole condition of politics is Energeia. Regarded from Energeia, humanity’s work is to relate power to power; it is before all synergy, it means to communicate incessantly and infinitely among differences. This is where our interpretation of Energeia purges the dead matter of politics. Staying the same through work brings a necessary redundancy to politics, according to which, whatever changes, changes into that into which it changes; it means the possibility of overpowering potestas in one swift change of perspective, but, more importantly, it means that contingency and immanence are at the heart of power. Privation as the root of the legitimate exercise of a technique explodes when we define politics through no particular virtue. Life (and only life) is the very condition of politics. When politics is not understood as a qualified exercise but as solely being under the condition of being a common, leads us directly to work that is not qualified, but incessantly and relentlessly producing the conditions of life on its own, as the integration of difference through immanent difference.

Reflections from the Theory of the Encryption of Power 259

Notes 1 Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). 2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008). See also Sanín Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 73. 3 Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo, ed., Decrypting Power (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), x. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), where the German philosopher sanctions Aristotle’s logic as complete and all bounding. 5 Sanín-Restrepo, Decrypting Power, xii.

6 Sanín-Restrepo, Decrypting Power, xiii.

7 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

8 Sanín-Restrepo, Decrypting Power, xiv. See also Michel Foucault, The History of

Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); and Bruno Latour, “Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sover­ eignty,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016): 305–20. 9 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 83. 10 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 87. See also Joe Sachs, “Aristotle: Motion and Its Place in Nature,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005. http://www.iep. utm.edu/aris-mot/#H2. 11 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy. 12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Perseus Digital Library, 2015, 1046a. http://www.perseus. tufts.edu/ hopper/. 13 Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (London: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1980). 14 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 85–90. 15 Aristotle, Metaphysics. 16 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 77. 17 A caterpillar may grow into a butterfly (where becoming is contingent), but when it becomes to be this butterfly, its actuality is necessary as a retrospection that knots together potentiality and actuality. 18 Aristotle, Metaphysics. 19 Lucas Angioni and Breno Zuppolini, “Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration and its Logical and Metaphysical Entanglements,” Manuscrito 42, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 2019). 20 Monica Ugaglia, “Possibility vs. Iterativity: Leibniz and Aristotle on the Infinite,” in Thinking and Calculating, edited by Francesco Ademollo (Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022). 21 Jon McGinnis, “Making Something of Nothing: Privation, Possibility, and Potenti­ ality in Avicenna and Aquinas,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 76, no. 4 (2012): 551–75. 22 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), is an iconic example. 23 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 96. 24 Sachs, “Aristotle.” 25 Aristotle, Metaphysics. 26 Malte Fabian Rauch, “An-arche- and Indifference, Between Giorgio Agamben, Jac­ ques Derrida, and Reiner Schürmann,” Philosophy Today 65, no. 3 (2021): 619–36. 27 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 28 Sanín-Restrepo, Decolonizing Democracy, 115.

260 Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Angioni, Lucas and Breno Zuppolini. “Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration and its Logical and Metaphysical Entanglements.” Manuscrito 42, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 2019). Aristotle. Metaphysics. Perseus Digital Library, 2015. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ hopper/. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Latour, Bruno, “Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sovereignty.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016): 305–320. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. McGinnis, Jon, “Making Something of Nothing: Privation, Possibility, and Potentiality in Avicenna and Aquinas.” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 76, no. 4 (2012): 551–575. Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. Prigogine, Ilya, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences. London: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1980. Rauch, Malte Fabian, “An-arche- and Indifference, Between Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Reiner Schürmann.” Philosophy Today 65, no. 3 (2021): 619–636. Sachs, Joe, “Aristotle: Motion and Its Place in Nature.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005. http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-mot/#H2. Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo. Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo, ed. Decrypting Power. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018. Ugaglia, Monica, “Possibility vs. Iterativity: Leibniz and Aristotle on the Infinite.” In Thinking and Calculating. Edited by Francesco Ademollo. Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022.

35

THE FORMATION OF A NECRO-STATE The Biopolitical Effects of Neoliberal Capitalism in Contemporary Ecuador Martín Aulestia Calero

Introduction In 2017, Ecuador went from a decade of neo-Keynesian policies under the regime of former president Rafael Correa (2007–2017) to a neoliberal one under Lenin Moreno, characterized by those policies of fiscal austerity and privatization that have characterized “neoliberal governmentality” in Latin America since the 1980s. Now, according to sociologist David Chávez, this change is not a return to the neoliberal normality prior to Correa’s govern­ ment, but rather an unprecedented process of conformation of a “power bloc”1 with the capacity for a project of “internal hegemony”;2 an authentic novelty in the history of neoliberalism in Latin America. This paper does not consist in an analysis of the policies implemented during the return to neoliberalism in Ecuador, but in the exploration of certain relationships that we can find between the deployment of this new neoliberal logic, which I would like to call a reinforced neoliberalism, and a series of events that have been occurring in recent years in Ecuador and that can be interpreted under the theoretical scope of what since Michel Foucault we know as “biopolitics,” in attention to a statement made more than a decade ago by Rafael Polo: “Research from the perspective of biopower in the field of Ecuadorian social sciences has yet to be carried out.”3 Thus, this work is intended as a manifesto in order to demonstrates the urgency and necessity of expanding research and reflection from this theoretical perspec­ tive in the field of Ecuadorian social sciences and humanities, as a strategy to understand and denounce the most brutal implications of the neoliberal­ ism that is unfolding in this country.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-39

262 Martín Aulestia Calero

Liberal Governmentality and Neoliberal Governmentality Neoliberalism must be defined based on its differentiation with respect to what it is a novelty: liberalism, understood as a “new art of governing” that began to unfold in the middle of the eighteenth century. Liberalism is fundamentally an attempt to limit the “power to govern” from within the State itself.4 What Foucault called liberal governmentality is condensed in the principle of the “frugality of government” understood as the rationality of the smallest possible government or “system of the reason of the smallest State”5 which would be the new logic that organized the old reason of State. Liberal governmentality required in turn a certain regime of truth, whose theoretical formulation is found in Political Economy. The articulation between a practice of government and a regime of truth was possible because it came from that which was becoming the privileged object of governmental interventions: the market, which had thus become an authentic “mechanism of truth formation” or “place of veridiction,” that is, a place of verification and falsification of governmental practice.6 From then on, the gov­ ernment, in order to be considered a good government, will have to act in the truth coming from the market. The interesting thing about this interpretation of liberalism deployed by Foucault is that the principle of non-intervention of the government becomes an absolute necessity not for reasons of law, but for rea­ sons of fact, of truth. This decisively overturns the modern understanding of freedom, which will no longer be understood, as it was in the iusnaturalist doctrines, as the exercise of a series of fundamental, innate, or acquired rights, but simply as the independence of the governed with respect to the rulers. However, liberal governmentality must be distinguished from specifically neoliberal governmentality. The specific question of neoliberalism consists in how to adjust the exercise of political power to the principles of a market economy. In other words, it is a matter of projecting, in a “general art of governing,” the formal principles of the market economy.7 And for this neo­ liberalism operates a decisive rupture with liberal governmentality, since it requires dissociating the economic principle of the market from the political principle of laissez-faire, which is verified in the neoliberal theory of pure competition: for the neoliberal mentality competition is not something natu­ rally present in human societies, but rather a structure endowed with formal properties but weak in terms of its effective historical actualization. The pro­ blem of (neo)liberal politics consists then in creating the conditions in which the formal structure of competition could be effectively actualized. Neoliberalism thus relies on a very important dose of political activity, required to make possible a market economy that is no longer considered something that can emerge spontaneously only by guaranteeing liberal laissez-faire. Neoliberalism, then, is a “permanent intervention”8 although subtle as far as the economic pro­ cesses themselves are concerned, but which must be massive as far as the govern­ ance of technical, juridical, scientific, and demographic-social data is concerned.

The Formation of a Necro-State 263

Government intervention is not little active or infrequent, but finer in deciding what its objects of application should be. These objects will be those that make it possible to submit society to the dynamics of competition and subjectivity to the model of the company. According to Foucault: This multiplication of the “company” form within the social body constitutes, I believe, the objective of neoliberal politics. It is a matter of making the market, competition, and consequently the company, what we could call the informing power of society.9 So, the company will become the socio-transcendental principle of society, the authentic condition of possibility of the subjective and the objective.

Governmentality and Biopower Now, (neo)liberalism is neither primarily an economic doctrine nor an ideology. It is fundamentally a practice, a form of existence of rationality with regard to the gov­ ernment of society and individuals. Neoliberalism must then be understood as a modulation of liberal governmentality, characterized by the production of a sub­ jectivity resulting from the interweaving of two logical matrixes: that of the com­ pany, on the one hand, and that of competition, on the other. The question of liberal and neoliberal governmentality leads us directly to the biopolitical question.10 Foucault defined biopower as the set of mechanisms by which the biological aspects of human life become part of a strategy of power. This became possible from the eighteenth century onwards, when the human being was discovered as a biological species. According to Foucault, modern power is deployed through three interrelated modalities: the sovereign mechanism, the disciplinary mechan­ ism, and the security mechanism.11 The latter is fundamental to understanding neoliberal governmentality and the deployment of contemporary biopower. The security mechanism keeps the factors considered negative by a society within certain acceptable limits according to the criterion of an optimal statistical average for social functioning. For this mechanism, statistics is a technical instrument that makes it possible to estimate probable events and calculate costs, while the temporal and random can be inscribed in a space, in an environment understood as a field of intervention or sphere for the circulation of goods, bodies, regulations, and dispositions.12 The milieu is a field of intervention whose object is the population, with which biopolitics is concerned. The question of population allows the irruption of the problem of the naturalness of the human species and presupposes the fundamental biopolitical notion of “sovereignty.”

Biopolitical Sovereignty: The Split Within the Population Itself The biopolitical sovereign is no longer the ruler who can exercise his power over a territory to make people die and let them live. Achille Mbembe, who

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coined the concept of “necropolitics,” defines sovereignty literally as the power and ability to decide who can live and who must die; in other words, sovereignty would consist of exercising control over mortality.13 The biopolitical sovereign is the one who can modify the human species, administer its life and decide, as Giorgio Agamben emphasizes, what life is worthy and what life is unworthy of being lived.14 Now, the population is not a homogeneous entity, but is decisively defined by a cut, internal division or border15 between a “relevant level of the population” and a “non-relevant level.”16 This non-pertinent level of the population can be reduced to the merely instrumental. Agamben explains the internal split in the population through the Greek dis­ tinction between zoê and bíos, where the former refers to natural life and the latter to a cultural and political way of living. In modern politics, zoê is captured in bíos, but in a paradoxical way, as an “inclusive exclusion.” Natural life is included but remains outside of political life. This is the bare life, which can be put to death without committing murder.17 Understanding this split is fundamental to under­ standing the biopolitical. Indeed, the declarations of rights are the founding land­ mark of modern biopolitics because they consecrate natural life as the source and bearer of rights, but the formula of inclusive exclusion is manifestly revealed as insufficient to preserve the right: it is not the person who is born who retains the right, but only the citizen. Biopolitics has as one of its fundamental mechanisms the split between the dimension of living-natural being and the dimension of beingpolitical that is expressed in citizenship, and there is no necessary correspondence between the two dimensions. This difference gives rise to the “state of exception” understood as the “original device through which law refers to life and includes it within itself by means of its own suspension.”18 It is in the state of exception that human life can become bare life, life exposed to death in the hands of anyone. There, where the state of exception is put into effect, a “concentration camp” appears, which does not refer to a certain architecture but rather to a political logic, to the biopolitical paradigm of Modernity. As Cavalletti has argued, for the bio­ political perspective, space, and power cannot be thought of separately.19 The concentration camp is any space in which the state of exception governs, sus­ pending the legal status of individuals, making them “the object of a pure lordship of the fact.”20 Paradoxically, the state of exception is less and less exceptional and has become the normal way of exercising power, while what Agamben calls the “security paradigm” has become generalized as a normal technique of government.21 The security paradigm fundamentally involves the curtailment of individual freedoms based on the criterion of securing oneself from the other, who is seen as a potential threat, as an imminent enemy. The security technique is the biopolitical technique par excellence in contemporary societies, which is well illustrated by Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis, according to which biopolitics is a politics that resorts to fear as the main source of mobili­ zation of an administered multitude that, due to the ever-increasing deployment of security strategies, is reduced to terror and panic.22

The Formation of a Necro-State 265

From Biopolitics to Thanatopolitics: Symptomatic Cases in Ecuador This administered multitude is precisely the population. The population thus becomes a fundamental economic-political principle, a “regulable machine” through statistics and governable through the management of its living condi­ tions, including its births and migrations as well as its hygiene and security. It is here that Cavalletti finds the essential link between biopolitics and so-called thanatopolitics. 23 If, as we have said, biopolitical sovereignty consists in a power over life, this is possible because it has replaced the old sovereign right to put subjects to death. This does not mean, however, that the sovereign right of death has disappeared, but rather that it has shifted towards the demands of the power that administers life.24 The frontier,25 the division within the body of the population, is most clearly visible in the characteristic biopolitical differ­ entiation between “normal subjects” and “abnormal subjects.” Now, the “normal subject” is the one who participates in a positive definition of certain conditions of life, which immediately means that there are others who are separated from these conditions, “abnormal” ones who are progressively, as Cavalletti says, “rejected towards death.” Here is evident an essential thanatopolitical function that brings together subjects who are inscribed in a relation of power in the name of life, because it is in the name of life, of a certain form of life, that in the functioning of all modern States is inscribed a diffuse homicidal potentiality, by virtue of which, in fact, it is possible to become citizens, because that homicidal potency is that of those whose life belongs by right to the nation and can be exercised on those who have simply been born. “Putting another to death is thus an opportunity implicit in the new practice of subjectivation.”26 But this is possible precisely because, in the name of caring for life, a “better life” is affirmed, which is opposed to a life that is worse and, therefore, is already less than life. During the neoliberal governments in contemporary Ecuador, the existence of forms of life that are “less than life” has been made evident. There are three cases that allow us to sustain this thesis. The first occurred in the October 2019 National Strike against the government of Lenin Moreno, where 11 people died, 1340 were injured, and eight people lost their eyes, all as a consequence of police repression.27 Extrajudicial executions such as that of Inocencio Tucumbi, indigenous leader of Cotopaxi province, were part of this violence.28 Something similar happened in the second National Strike against neoliberal policies, this time during the government of banker Guillermo Lasso, where Johnny Muenala died after falling down a ravine in his attempt to flee police harassment, and Bryan Guatatoca died as a result of a direct hit from a tear gas bomb that lodged in his skull.29 The neoliberal governments in Ecuador, to defend their program consisting of “guaranteeing the structural conditions for the recovery of the rate of profit of transnational and local capital”30 have turned the lives of the demonstrators, fundamentally those coming from indigenous peoples and nationalities, into “less than life,” into that naked life that is literally pushed towards death.

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But that’s not all: in recent years in Ecuador there have been several prison massacres, which have already left hundreds dead. “If Ecuador’s prison system were a city, it would be, after Guayaquil, the second most violent city in the country.”31 Given the inaction and inoperativeness of the Ecuadorian government, there are more and more arguments to affirm that the lives that are locked up in prisons are not lives that are going to be disciplined, but naked lives, lives that anyone can kill. Whoever enters an Ecuadorian prison is already a true living dead. The third symptomatic case of the generalization of the naked life in neo­ liberal Ecuador has to do with the lives of women. In Ecuador, during 2022 and up to the date of writing this article, it is estimated that a woman is murdered every 28 hours, and in most cases these deaths go unpunished.32 The most scandalous case in this regard has been that of lawyer María Belén Bernal, who was murdered on September 11, 2022, by her partner, a policeman, inside the Escuela Superior de Policía del Ecuador. The murderer fled, with the highly probable collaboration of the institution to which he belonged, while the body of María Belén Bernal was found ten days after her disappearance in a ravine near the Police High School. We are facing the terrifying scenario that women’s lives have become the proverbial life that anyone can kill.

Life Unworthy of Being Lived Under Neoliberalism Thus, the split or binary partition between a “more-than-life,” which is the positive form of the population, and a “less-than-life,” which is an excess, a pure negativity, or a “depopulation,” is essential to the biopolitical, and set up its essential co-belonging to the thanatopolitical. That “less than life” has always inhabited a ville dépeuplée, an uninhabited city where the lives of subjects incapable of/unable to working, fighting, and reproducing themselves exist.33 Agamben’s paradigm of security operates then by establishing a line of demarca­ tion or frontier between that “more than life” or life worthy of being lived, which designates the space of security, and that “less than life” or life unworthy of being lived, which designates on the contrary the space of insecurity. In the space of insecurity inhabit those who are rejected towards death, and this is the result of a strategy that aims to ensure and maintain the existing social conditions. This brings us back to the question of neoliberalism, for, as Foucault says in Society Must Be Defended, when speaking of the thanatopolitical formula of “giving death” we should not only think of direct murder, but of all those forms that can be considered “indirect murder.”34 With such a concept Foucault refers to any form of exposing to death, of multiplying the risk of death for some members of the population.35 Indeed, those who, according to the biopo­ litical partition, threaten or, in any case, are not relevant to the survival of the population, are left to die by being excluded from public policies, for example by denying health services,36 as has happened in the Ecuadorian case, but also by denying or cutting the budget for policies against gender violence or for the administration of the prison system, which between 2017 and 2020 went from

The Formation of a Necro-State 267

having a figure of $163 million to having barely $90 million, which translated into making it impossible to hire prison guides or provide maintenance to the infrastructure and technological equipment of prisons.37 Thus, ¡the cases of femicides and massacres in Ecuadorian prisons should be considered indirect assassinations by the neoliberal state!

Massacres: Criminal Groups as War Machines Indeed, if neoliberalism is a form of governmentality, its generalization must be understood because of the subordination of politics to the logic of global capi­ tal, or as Chávez calls it, the “real world subsumption of labor to capital.”38 It is the localization of the technical-political structure of capital at the core of the production of social life that causes politics to be reduced to the biopolitical administration of the positive pole of the population, on the one hand, and to the thanatopolitical letting die of the economically irrelevant depopulation, on the other. Neoliberalism radically increases the enormous amount of surplus population or depopulation, because of the direct subordination of the State to the logic of capital accumulation, which manifests itself in the privatization of economic policy and social policy.39 This depopulation, abandoned to its fate and deprived of the minimum conditions required to live in the conditions that the law guarantees to the population formed by economically relevant citizens, becomes an abundant pool of potential recruits for criminal gangs40 and, literally, in the Agambe­ nian bare life, insofar as it can be killed in the repeated massacres that occur in Ecuadorian prisons, authentic concentration camps where prisoners live as bare life abandoned to the government of the arbitrary. We are, then, before a loss of sovereignty on the part of the State. We speak of sovereignty in the strict biopolitical sense, that is, as a decision on life worthy of being lived41 or as the right to kill.42 Indeed, for Achille Mbembe, alongside armies, in the postcolonial world, authentic “war machines” have emerged, that is, factions of armed men who do not belong to the formal institutionality of the State. We can think of the Colombian case and affirm that the paramilitaries and the various guerrilla groups are war machines. But we can also think of a third figure, which is increasingly present in Ecuador: those armed groups that are the criminal gangs dedicated to drug trafficking. According to Mbembe, the generalization of war machines gives rise to unpre­ cedented forms of governmentality, because they are characterized by their ability to extract resources within a territory. Today, criminal gangs are dis­ puting, in an armed manner, territories in several provinces of Ecuador, with the aim of controlling drug trafficking. Criminal gangs, as war machines, exercise that form of power that Mbembe called “necropower,” that form of power that consists of control over bodies and can inscribe them in the order of the “maximum economy” of the massacre. These massacres have taken place inside prisons, as true hecatombs of

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decapitation and dismemberment, but they are already taking place outside, in the space of the cities. For example, on February 14, 2022, two lifeless bodies appeared hanging from a bridge in the city of Durán.43 The generalization of the security paradigm implies the generalization of its own presupposition, which is insecurity.44 This generalization of insecurity increases, with necropolitical consequences, the distinction between those who possess weapons, such as criminal gangs, and those who do not. Thanks to the possession of weapons, war machines can successfully claim one of the classic attributes of the conventional definition of state sovereignty: territorial control. It is symptomatic in this regard that Charles Tilly has drawn a parallel between the State and organized crime, precisely because of the importance for both of the use of force precisely in the attempt to control a territory that allows them to control the mechanisms of resource extraction, such as, for example, tri­ bute.45 Indeed, the war machines provoke national partitions and thus manage to control entire regions, as is already happening with the criminal gangs in the Ecuadorian case. Here, the war machines have the power to deploy government mechanisms that we can call neo-feudal, insofar as they consist fundamentally of charging taxes to the population for the exercise of economic activity in their territory. In Ecuador, criminal gangs have begun to charge so-called “vaccines,” which are extortive charges, a kind of tax that criminal groups demand from those who exercise some economic activity in their territory. In these territories, the war machines also exercise the sovereign right to kill, and they do so fundamentally by using the typically necropolitical practice of massacres.

Conclusion: Necro-State and Necro-Market The above shows the need to suggest a terminological differentiation. It is not the same to speak of thanatopolitics, by which we will understand everything concerning those “indirect murders” of which Foucault spoke, than to speak of necropolitics, which has to be understood as a “power to give death with technologies of exploitation and destruction of bodies,” as would be precisely the massacres, femicides, or extrajudicial executions.46 Neoliberalism in peripheral countries such as Ecuador radicalizes and increases the presence of both forms of exercise of power. Under the govern­ ment of neoliberal logic, the Ecuadorian state has become a true necro-state, which, pretending to create the conditions to let the market be, has enabled the formation of a necro-market, which is not something exceptional but a con­ stitutive component of the neoliberal dynamics. In this logic, we can suggest that those “war machines” that are the criminal gangs are one of the most realized forms of the company whose proliferation is the objective of neoliberal policy. Indeed, the necromarket is that one in which both weapons and bodies, both bombs and hecatombs are bought and sold, and must be considered an authentic condition of possibility for the deployment of neoliberal necropolitics. In order to reject the consequences of neoliberalism in Ecuador, it is urgent to

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investigate and understand rigorously all these implications. This work has been founded on the intention of demonstrating that the biopolitical perspective is adequate to carry this out.

Notes 1 See David Chávez, “El ‘Nuevo Estado’ y el Levantamiento de Octubre,” in Octubre y el Derecho a la Resistencia: Revuelta Popular y Neoliberalismo Autoritario en Ecuador, edited by Franklin Ramírez Gallegos (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2020). Also see David Chávez, “Estrategias Estatales en el Gobierno de Moreno,” in Cambio de Rumbo: Ecuador: Economía y Sociedad 2017–2021, edited by Juan Paz y Miño (Minas Gerais: Navegando, 2022). 2 Chávez, “Estrategias Estatales en el Gobierno de Moreno”, 77. 3 Rafael Polo, “Ciudadanía y Biopoder (Las Sugerencias de Andrés Guerrero),” Ecuador Debate, no. 77 (2009), 126. 4 Michel Foucault, Nacimiento de la Biopolítica: Curso en el Collège de France (1978–1979) (México: FCE, 2007), 43.

5 Foucault, Nacimiento, 56.

6 Foucault, Nacimiento, 49.

7 Foucault, Nacimiento, 157.

8 Foucault, Nacimiento, 158.

9 Foucault, Nacimiento, 186.

10 Octavio Heffes, “Biopolítica: Entre el Homo Oeconomicus Neoliberal y la ‘Sociedad del Espectáculo,’” El Banquete de los Dioses: Revista de Filosofía y Teoría Política Contemporáneas 1, no. 1 (2014): 65–88. 11 Michel Foucault, Seguridad, Territorio, Población (Buenos Aires: FCE, 2006). 12 Foucault, Seguridad, Territorio, Población, 41. 13 Achille Mbembe, Necropolítica (Madrid: Editorial Melusina, 2011). 14 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: El Poder Soberano y la Nuda Vida, trans. Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1998). 15 Andrea Cavalletti, Mitología de la Seguridad: La Ciudad Biopolítica (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2010). 16 Foucault, Seguridad, Territorio, Población, 63. 17 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18. 18 Giorgio Agamben, Estado de Excepción: Homo Sacer, I, II, trans. Flavia Costa and Ivana Costa (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2005), 24. 19 Foucault, Seguridad, Territorio, Población, 63. 20 Agamben, Estado de Excepción, 27. 21 Agamben, Estado de Excepción, 44. 22 Slavoj Žižek, Sobre la Violencia: Seis Reflexiones Marginales, trans. Antonio José Antón Fernández (Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 2009). 23 See note 16 above. 24 Cavalletti, Mitología de la Seguridad, 20. 25 It is relevant to note that the biopolitical notion of frontier was used by Ecuadorian anthropologist and historian Andrés Guerrero in his attempt to understand the question of the administration of the indigenous population in post-colonial Ecuador. For this Guerrero coined the concept of the “ethnic frontier”: “[this frontier] ‘racializes’ the national inhabitants in terms of a supposed genetic system.” This border, Guerrero believes, engenders difference as inequality in everyday life, thus legitimizing the domination of the indigenous population by the white-mestizo citizenry. See Polo, “Ciudadanía y Biopoder,” 130. Kaltmeier also tested a use of the concept of biopolitics to interpret the adminis­ tration of the indigenous population in postcolonial Ecuador. This author shares

270 Martín Aulestia Calero

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44

Guerrero’s thesis that the hacienda was not only an economic structure, but an authen­ tic institution of exploitation, administration, and control of the indigenous population in the Ecuadorian Sierra. Moreover, using Agamben’s language, Kaltmeier goes so far as to affirm that a “permanent state of exception” governed the hacienda due to the “almost sovereign” power of the hacienda owner. The hacienda would concentrate the indigenous population that, from the white-mestizo point of view, would be unfit for political life. See Olaf Kaltmeier, “La Universidad Terrateniente: Biopolítica, Poder Soberano y Resistencia Indígena-Campesina en las Haciendas de la Universidad Central en la Provincia de Cotopaxi, 1930–1980,” Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia II, no. 26 (2007): 73–96. Cavalletti, Mitología de la Seguridad, 26. Pablo Ospina Peralta, El Levantamiento de Octubre en Ecuador: El más Reciente Disturbio FMI (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2020), 280. Mónica Almeida, Paúl Mena, and Carolina Loza, “La Impunidad Cubre a los Muertos y Heridos de las Protestas de 2019 en Ecuador,” El País, July 6, 2022, http s://elpais.com/internacional/2022-06-07/la-impunidad-cubre-a-los-muertos-y-her idos-de-las-protestas-de-2019-en-ecuador.html. Doménica Montaño, “Un Resumen del Paro Nacional de Junio,” GK, June 13, 2022, https://gk.city/2022/06/13/paro-nacional-resumen. Francisco Hidalgo Flor, “Comunidad, Ágora, Barrio: Pilares del Levantamiento Indígena-Popular,” in Ecuador: La Insurrección de Octubre, edited by Carmen Parodi and Nicolás Sticotti (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2020), 223. Carla Morena Álvarez Velasco, “Las Cárceles de la Muerte en Ecuador,” Nueva Socie­ dad, January 2022: para. 2, https://nuso.org/articulo/las-carceles-de-la-muerte-en-ecua do/. Isabela Ponce, “En 2022, Cada 28 Horas una Mujer Fue Asesinada por Razones de Género,” GK, September 18, 2022, https://gk.city/2022/09/18/mujer-asesinada-cada -28-horas-femicidios-crimen-organizado/. Cavalletti, Mitología de la Seguridad, 65. When Kaltmeier, as we said before, argues that the landowner had an almost sovereign power in the Ecuadorian highlands, he refers textually to the biopolitical sense of that sovereignty, that is, he refers to the right to kill. But he points out, following Foucault’s argument, that killing does not only mean taking life, but, in a broad sense, “affecting and limiting the possibilities of life” of an indigenous popu­ lation that remained “on the margins of citizenship,” Kaltmeier, “La Universidad Terrateniente,” 80. Michel Foucault, Defender la Sociedad: Curso en el Collège de France (1976–1976) (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 231. Ariadna Estévez, “Biopolítica y Necropolítica: ¿Constitutivos u Opuestos?” Espiral: Estudios sobre Estado y Sociedad 25, no. 73 (2018), 33. Álvarez Velasco, “Las Cárceles de la Nuerte en Ecuador,” para. 15. Chávez, “Estrategias Estatales en el Gobierno de Moreno,” 2022. Chávez, “Estrategias Estatales en el Gobierno de Moreno,” 79. Six are the most important criminal organizations, which are disputing various terri­ tories, especially on the Ecuadorian coast: the Choneros, the Lagartos, the Chone Killers, the Lobos, the Tiguerones, and the Latin Kings. See “Seis Bandas Se Pelean el Control del Tráfico de Drogas,” El Comercio, November 24, 2021, https://www.elcom ercio.com/actualidad/seguridad/bandas-pelea-contro-trafico-drogas-ecuador.html. Cavalletti, Mitología de la Seguridad. Mbembe, Necropolítica, 2011. “Cadáveres Colgados de un Puente en Durán: ¿El Mensaje al Estilo de Narcos Mexicanos Implica una Escalada de Violencia?” El Universo, February 15, 2022, http s://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/seguridad/cadaveres-colgados-de-un-puente-en-dura n-el-mensaje-al-estilo-de-narcos-mexicanos-implica-una-escalada-de-violencia-nota/. Foucault, Seguridad, Territorio, Población, 63.

The Formation of a Necro-State 271

45 Charles Tilly, “Guerra y Construcción del Estado como Crimen Organizado,” Revista Académica de Relaciones Internacionales, no. 5 (2006): 1–26. 46 Estévez, “Biopolítica y Necropolítica,” 10.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Estado de Excepción: Homo sacer, I, II. Translated by Flavia Costa and Ivana Costa. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2005. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: El Poder Soberano y la Nuda Vida. Translated by Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1998. Almeida, Mónica, Paúl Mena, and Carolina Loza. “La Impunidad Cubre a los Muertos y Heridos de las Protestas de 2019 en Ecuador.” El País, July 6, 2022. https://elpais. com/internacional/2022-06-07/la-impunidad-cubre-a-los-muertos-y-heridos-de-las-p rotestas-de-2019-en-ecuador.html. Álvarez Velasco, Carla Morena. “Las Cárceles de la Muerte en Ecuador.” Nueva Socie­ dad, January 2022. https://nuso.org/articulo/las-carceles-de-la-muerte-en-ecuado/. Cavalletti, Andrea. Mitología de la Seguridad: La Ciudad Biopolítica. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2010. Chávez, David. “Estrategias Estatales en el Gobierno de Moreno.” In Cambio de rumbo: Ecuador: Economía y Sociedad 2017–2021, 77–88. Edited by Juan Paz y Miño. Minas Gerais: Navegando, 2022. Chávez, David. “El ‘Nuevo Estado’ y el Levantamiento de Octubre.” In Octubre y el Derecho a la Resistencia: Revuelta Popular y Neoliberalismo Autoritario en Ecuador. Edited by Franklin Ramírez Gallegos. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2020. El Comercio. “Seis Bandas Se Pelean el Control del Tráfico de Drogas.” November 24, 2021. https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/seguridad/bandas-pelea-contro-trafico­ drogas-ecuador.html. Estévez, Ariadna. “Biopolítica y Necropolítica: ¿Constitutivos u Opuestos?” Espiral: Estudios sobre Estado y Sociedad 25, no. 73 (2018): 9–73. Foucault, Michel. Defender la Sociedad: Curso en el Collège de France (1976–1976). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Nacimiento de la Biopolítica: Curso en el Collège de France (1978–1979). México: FCE, 2007. Foucault, Michel. Seguridad, Territorio, Población. Buenos Aires: FCE, 2006. Foucault, Michel. Vigilar y Castigar: Nacimiento de la Prisión. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2008. Heffes, Octavio. “Biopolítica: Entre el Homo Oeconomicus Neoliberal y la ‘Sociedad del Espectáculo.’” El Banquete de los Dioses: Revista de Filosofía y Teoría Política Con­ temporáneas 1, no. 1 (2014): 65–88. Hidalgo Flor, Francisco. “Comunidad, Ágora, Barrio: Pilares del Levantamiento Indí­ gena-Popular.” In Ecuador: La Insurrección de Octubre. Edited by Carmen Parodi and Nicolás Sticotti, 216–224. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2020. Kaltmeier, Olaf. “La Universidad Terrateniente: Biopolítica, Poder Soberano y Resistencia Indígena-Campesina en las Haciendas de la Universidad Central en la Provincia de Cotopaxi, 1930–1980.” Procesos. Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia II, no. 26 (2007): 73–96. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolítica. Madrid: Editorial Melusina, 2011. Montaño, Doménica. “Un Resumen del Paro Nacional de Junio.” GK, June 13, 2022. https://gk.city/2022/06/13/paro-nacional-resumen/. Ospina Peralta, Pablo. El Levantamiento de Octubre en Ecuador: El Más Reciente Dis­ turbio FMI. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2020.

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Polo, Rafael. “Ciudadanía y Biopoder (Las sugerencias de Andrés Guerrero).” Ecuador Debate, no. 77 (2009): 125–138. Ponce, Isabela. “En 2022, Cada 28 Horas una Mujer Fue Asesinada por Razones de Género.” GK, September 18, 2022. https://gk.city/2022/09/18/mujer-asesinada-cada -28-horas-femicidios-crimen-organizado/. Tilly, Charles. “Guerra y Construcción del Estado como Crimen Organizado.” Revista Académica de Relaciones Internacionales, no. 5 (2006): 1–26. El Universo. “Cadáveres Colgados de un Puente en Durán: ¿El Mensaje al Estilo de Narcos Mexicanos Implica una Escalada de Violencia?” February 15, 2022. https://www.eluni verso.com/noticias/seguridad/cadaveres-colgados-de-un-puente-en-duran-el-mensaje-al-esti lo-de-narcos-mexicanos-implica-una-escalada-de-violencia-nota/. Žižek, Slavoj. Sobre la Violencia: Seis Reflexiones Marginales. Translated by Antonio José Antón Fernández. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós, 2009.

36

REAL SUBSUMPTION, A PROBLEM RENDERED Bradley Kaye

Documents of Capitalism/Barbarism We should remember these lines from Walter Benjamin: There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of bar­ barism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.1 A capitalism that rearranges the identities of those in the corporate boardroom as a desperate measure to maintain corporate hegemony is basically rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and we need to be fully aware that the Titanic has hit the iceberg. Humans are potentially the first animal species to go extinct while endlessly talking, debating, and discussing our own extinction – or, cen­ soring out the topic of discussion, but there is a dangerous game to be played if libidinal investments produce social contracts with capitalist barbarism. There should be no question that the world market is here as folks mis­ takenly discuss world politics through the lens of identity politics and other distractions of the society of spectacle, competing capitalist blocs are emerging. Most scholars know about the World Bank, the IMF, the so-called Bretton Woods organizations. Among leftists in the United States these are discussed ad nauseum, but virtually none of the academics in the West seem to be concerned about (due to lack of knowledge) the rise of competing forms of global capit­ alism outside of Western hegemony. I mean of course, the so-called BRICS banking system. This system consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-40

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Africa, renamed the New Development Bank in 2014, and largely funded by Goldman Sachs as a way to give equity assistance to financial instruments and fund development projects supported by the bank. It all sounds good in corporatespeak, but this is the kind of thing that leads to reproducing systems of, what used to be called simply “class conflict” but is now rebranded as structural inequality, as if there is an imaginary capitalism where fairness and equality exist. We hear this kind of codified docile language all the time when corporate capitalists marketing firms get their hands on the language. These networks of capital are producing an inter-connected ontology (whe­ ther subjects chose it or not). Capital obtains wealth, workers obtain use-value in exchange for labor power, with money as the vanishing mediator between the two, money circulates into accelerated mechanisms of wealth accumulation for capital, whereas workers do not possess their labor power and watch the fruits of their labor disintegrate in consumption as wages evaporate in the maintenance of reproducing basic needs. What we need is a manifesto to transform this horrifyingly exploitative and alienating form of property rela­ tion. Not sure if anyone has said it better than Karl Marx did in the Grundrisse (a much less studied text than Capital): Just as the division of labor creates agglomeration, combination, coop­ eration… so does private exchange create world trade, private indepen­ dence creates complete dependence on the so-called world market, and the fragmented acts of exchange create a banking and credit system whose books, at least keep a record of the balance between debit and credit in private exchange.2 In the notebooks later entitled The German Ideology, Marx gives one of his clearest definitions of “communism” as a movement that recognizes the com­ mons as an a priori. Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise.3 This, in a way, this description of communism is the greatest description of u-topos rendered actual as a non-totalizing totality. Hence, a communist manifesto is not an external idea, an idealism from outside of material conditions forced upon workers and working class, but an imminent dissidence that emerges from within the matrixes of capital. We should remember the horrors of January 6th. Not the storming of the American Capitol Building by neo-fascist Donald Trump supporters, the other January 6th, in 1492, when the Catholic kings occupied Granada, handed over by Boabdil, who was the last sultan to tread upon European soil. At this

Real Subsumption, a Problem Rendered 275

terminal moment of the Middle Ages, just as the Christians occupied Malaga and cut off the heads of Andalusian Muslims in 1487, these conquests that paved the way for Spanish (and Christian) funding of Columbus’s voyage to hopefully discover sea passage to the Indies, were counter-hegemonic moves in reaction Islamic hegemony in the Mediterranean. These were not innocent Islamic empires either, as we might be led to believe by the liberal quest for an innocent victim (see: literally anything the brilliant Slavoj Žižek has written about the figure of the “Neighbor”). We should also remember that these were acts of counter-hegemonic vio­ lence. Besides the commonly cited (and also true) understanding from Marx and Engels interpretation in the Communist Manifesto, that Columbus’s journey was funded by capital from the Spanish monarchy as an investment to seek more capital, we must remember that in the centuries prior to this the Umayyad Conquest of Spain, and the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem had taken hold of the Mediterranean for several hundred years. On the losing side of this defeat at Granada was not an innocent set of Isla­ mic dupes. Take for example, the lesser-known understanding of where the word “Slave” originates. Most people, if you asked them, would probably say something about Columbus and the Atlantic Slave Trade, but they would be wrong. Slaves are a term derived from the period prior to Columbus, when the Muslim conquest of Europe forced the “Slavs” into unpaid labor power, just as, to jump centuries, the emergence of genocide as state-sanctioned extermination of a group on the basis of ethnic, religious, or racial identity was first occurring during the Armenian “genocide” (the term did not exist yet) when the Otto­ mans exterminated millions of Christians from 1915–17, some historians claim it may have spanned from the late 1890s. Interestingly enough, back to the emergence of the term “slavery.” Marx alludes to the Slavs as one of the only money free societies, interestingly enough connecting the dots with the Peruvian “minka” system, perhaps making these cultures easy pickings for slave labor because neither the Slavs or Peruvian “minka” systems utilized money within the boundaries of their own culture, preferring an exchange system on the basis of good will, doing basic chores for one another without asking for monetary remuneration and trusting on good faith that the chores will be repaid in your service to others when the time is needed: Among the Slav communities also, money and the exchange which determines it play little or no role within the individual communities, but only on their boundaries, in traffic with others; it is simply wrong to place exchange at the center of communal society as the original, constituent element.4 We are in a precarious time when our inter-connected modes of communication put each of us in contact with the forces that gave rise to fascism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and the general “law” of capitalist accumulation. For example, while this endless historical naval gazing about the Atlantic Slave Trade seems

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to occur ad nauseum, nobody talks about the fact that there are more slaves in the world today than there were during the peak of the Atlantic Slave Trade. 10–15 million slaves were traded between the 15th and 19th centuries. The United Nations International Labor Organization did a study that reported roughly 40 million slaves existed in the world in 2015. Mostly trafficked as sex slaves, sweatshop labor, and surprisingly organ transplants. Social science researchers are also discovering staggering statistics like the fact that some sociologists estimate that 40 million children are working or living on the streets of Latin America without any parental oversight. Numbers range from 30–50 million orphaned street children living in Africa as well.5

Real Subsumption, a Problem Rendered Invisible The Italian Marxist Antonio Negri once gave an interview, strolling along a sub­ urban street in Venezia-Mestre; the journalist’s camera caught him passing a line of workers picketing in front of a textile factory which was due to close down. He pointed at the workers and dismissively remarked: “Look at them! They don’t know they are already dead!” For Negri, those workers stood for all that is wrong with the traditional trade-unionist view of socialism focused on corporate jobsecurity, a socialism rendered mercilessly obsolete by “postmodern” capitalism with its hegemony over intellectual labor, we should embrace the dynamics of intellectual labor in its non-hierarchic and non-centralized social interaction, within which contain the seeds of a communism. We cannot see this because the problem of real subsumption, the problem that Marx called the “cash-nexus” of capitalism, where all aspects of life become subsumed under matrixes of the market, and there is no longer a visible outside to which on can point and rely upon as a visible effect of resistance. When postmodern theorists make totalizing statements like this one made by Judith Butler at the 2014 PEN World Voices Festival: “We are from the start both done and undone by the other. If we refuse this, we refuse passion and life and loss; the lived form of that refusal is destruction; the lived form of its affirmation is non-violence.” It sets up a rather easy “Wittgensteinian” retort. For someone to start from the premise that we are always already within power, made and unmade by power, the statement would have to render power apparent. If she, we, are all within power, then we would lack the perspective to know we are within power (especially if its already working on us since birth), but her statement seems to be made from a position of awareness, hence, her statement is made from a vantage point that renders both sides of the boundary to power visible (i.e., the question whether the universe exists inside a computer simulation or not is pointless because in order to know whether we are in a computer simu­ lation we have to step beyond the simulation, and if we were to do that then the question becomes: how do we know we are not entering into yet another simulation)? The starting point presupposes the conclusion – we are always

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within the grips of power, and one cannot help but be relieved of any political agency and recoil into a nihilistic malaise, happy with the idea that nothing truly matters. Whether this is true or not is a different story, but there are some major biases in how these statements are always from a parallax view that reinforces what cannot be known. The point is that this idea of matrixes stacked upon matrixes is itself a symptom of a postmodern fetishizing of screens and lifestyles (while the world as a material object rots to its core). We should be deeply concerned, even pessimistic, about the revolutionary challenges posed by the emergence of a plurality of new subjects as the latest turn in capitalist ideology. The accommodation of “identity politics” folded into its schematic because it barricades consumers from the slavery that is occurring. As we know from the Communist Manifesto, there can be an antiracist and anti-sexist capitalism, an anti-racism anti-sexism at the discursive level capitalism that removes the words slavery from history books will also reproduce conditions of inequality that reproduce immense cruelty. Marx and Engel wrote more than 150 years ago in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations,” and the obvious lines of demarcation in production vs. social production (caring for “actual producers” creates a sexist division of labor when production evacuates to the Global South – men are slowly turning into perpetual adolescents, with no clear passage into maturity, whereas women are more and more precociously mature, expected to control their destiny, plan their careers, men are falling into a perpetual ludic adolescence, as outlaws, while women appear hard, mature, serious, legal, and punitive).6 Even in the midst of the COVID-19 economic closure in the summer of 2020 the United States Labor Department estimated that in the months of June and July approximately 50 million workers filed for unemployment (unemployment in the United States means that the person is out of work and seeking work, therefore the former employer has a fund that the government draws from to pay the worker until they find another job, most people believe these funds are taken from taxes, but this is a mistaken understanding); while these tens of millions of people were seeking work and could not find it, the top 1% wealthiest people in the United States made upwards of $10 Billion. At the exact same time when millions of people are on the brink of starving to death in the “wealthiest” country on earth, the structures of wealth accumulation were (and are) still set up to circulate wealth into the hands of the 1% who own everything - that is capitalism at its most brutal. It is a broken system. The fact that people are unaware of these facts tells us that there are elisions of their own material conditions. Those who traverse the material conditions live like fish in water who do not notice the water in which they swim because they have never experienced life on dry land. The eye conceals itself, the one thing an eye cannot see is itself. Is euro-centrism to blame for the rampant problem of femicide in Central and South America? dealt with by the Ni Una

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Menos (“Not One Less”) movement where in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru it is estimated that a woman is killed every 32 hours, or it is true that NAFTA dis­ placed workers in Mexico, and created destitute conditions where workers turned to working with drug cartels or “illegal” migration patterns into the United States, however, the fact remains that 88 Mexican politicians were exe­ cuted between September 2020 and June 2021, and there have been roughly one hundred to two hundred assassinations every year for the last several years in Mexico because the drug cartels are running the show. So, people can say “eurocentrism” is the cause of this, when in fact, it is the displacement that occurs as a result of capitalist accumulation that disrupts the political system.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), 78. 2 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin, 1993), 158. 3 Karl Marx, German Ideology (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1998), 157. 4 Marx, Grundrisse, 103. 5 Ojelabi Sunday Adeyemi and Oyewule Oluwaseun, “Cultural Factors Promoting Streetism Among Urban Children in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria,” Research on Humanities and Social Sciences 2, no. 9 (2012). 6 Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight (London: Verso, 2019), 53.

Bibliography Adeyemi, Ojelabi Sunday, and Oyewule Oluwaseun. “Cultural Factors Promoting Streetism Among Urban Children in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria.” Research on Humanities and Social Sciences 2, no. 9 (2012). Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” New York: Mariner Books, 2019. Marx, Karl. German Ideology. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1998. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Penguin, 1993. Žižek, Slavoj. Like a Thief in Broad Daylight. London: Verso, 2019.

37

INTERIORITY AND EXTERIORITY IN THE SPACE OF CAPITAL Arturo Romero Contreras

Today, the most widespread idea about capitalism is that it has no outside. Everything would have experimented a “real subsumption” in a totalitarian system. We are summoned to “resist” capitalism from the “outside,” “subvert” it from its interstices and its “voids.” But why are we so sure that nothing escapes out of it? What would a way out of capitalism entail? What does “inside” and “outside” mean here? In the light of this commonplace, it is pertinent to consider the opposite hypothesis, namely, that capitalism lives from and is also a con­ stant producer of exteriority. Consequently, to overcome or to deactivate capitalism – the two classic meanings of Aufhebung – could not be carried out from a simple position of exteriority. But neither from its “immanent” logic, traversing it to rapidly precipitate its catastrophe. There is no capitalism without an environment, and without exchange and negotiation. In this light, I offer five points for consideration. First consideration. The Latin American critical tradition has pointed out the fact that Europe became possible as a world power thanks to a primitive accumulation process allowed by the Conquista. The emergence of capitalism as such needed the exteriority of America (and later Africa, Asia, the Middle East and so on) to capture natural resources and labor. The conquest of America and Modernity are strictly contemporary. On the one hand, we have Descartes who, with his famous formula cogito, ergo sum crowns the subject as emerging of and as doubt. Certainty is the quest (not the point of depar­ ture) for such an unstable subject, it disappears in the very moment it appears. Doubt also means the dismissal of the validity of the external world as a source of knowledge and the search of God as its ultimate guarantee. But just as essential, and even historically prior to Descartes, is Francisco de Vittoria’s ius communicationis, which confronts the European self with the American other. On the one hand, humanity was granted to indigenous peoples, as well DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-41

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as their place in the body of law. Likewise, it was claimed that the earth (as crea­ tion) does not originally belong to anybody. While, on the other, it was also claimed both the right and obligation of Spain to catechize the Indies for they had historically not yet received the word of God. From this point of view the Con­ quista hat the duty to abolish itself after fulfilling its mission. The modern subject stares at itself (as ego) and the other (as colony) through the eye of God. This relative exterior makes original accumulation possible, but above all, it grounds the right and obligation to expand, in the name of God. Such exterior, finally, provides the territory to dominate-civilize – first under the Catholic form of the Conquista, later under the Protestant form of the colony – and the humans who will have to work and be converted to Catholicism. Europe can be credited with an emancipatory tradition linked to the transformation of the monarchic state into a republican state through the expansion or market economy by the bourgeoisie, but by no means of universality. The Napoleonic expansion did not universalize the French Revolution, it only sought to extend it across Europe, while keeping America as the necessary exception (being the Haitian Revolution the negation of their negation). Prior to the French uprise America had not only raised the problem of independence and self-determination of colonies but had also organized social revolts. The best-known is undoubtedly that of Túpac Amaru II of 1780. Being a mestizo, he didn’t aim at the restitution of the pre-Columbian indigenous, but the invention of a new world. The rebellion demanded independence of America from the Spanish yoke, both politically and economically (by the suspension of all kinds of taxes) and declared the abolition of slavery. Already in the 17th Century, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (see: El Neptuno Alegórico, from 1680) understood the New Spain as the New Jerusalem, where foreign gods (Jesus came from the East and was by no means “European”) would find in America a new land of hospitality such as Spain had offered it once. Second consideration. Rosa Luxemburg explained how capitalism used precapitalist residues to accomplish its goals. Radicalizing her thesis, I claim that capitalism requires a strategic relationship towards other cultural forms of domination external to it which are not economical in principle. Critical thought in Latin America and Africa has underscored the fundamental rela­ tionship of capitalism to race and gender. When the Laws of the Indies pro­ hibited the slavery of indigenous people, Spain resorted to an ever-accelerating enslavement of the African continent to ensure labor in the colonies. This became regular in the British empire. The figure of racism was necessary to satisfy the demands of capitalism when it ran into legal and moral obstacles. Hegel himself establishes in his Philosophy of Right that man and woman are two equally free self-consciousnesses, but immediately claims that women are closer to nature (even comparing man to animals and women to plants) such that their natural place is the household (following a verbal observation by Efraín Lazos Ochoa). Patriarchy puts women back to house, additionally claiming that care belongs to the sphere of mere reproduction of life, while the human proper is production, excess, carried out by males. This is how

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capitalism manages to associate itself with other institutions, formal and informal that belong to different temporalities in the sense of Braudel (a point made verbally by Omar Acha). Capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, metaphysics, all these big formations obey different logics and operate at different levels being however deeply intertwined in an ever-changing fashion. We fail to understand any of them trying to privilege one above the others. Analyzing the “internal logic” of capital thus requires analyzing its “external logic,” i.e., the relationship with its boundaries. Polanyi developed the concept of market embeddedness. The market, no matter how developed, brutal, extended, and autonomous it seems, has an environment composed of other institutions, spaces, and structures without which it cannot perform. Such a “logic of borders” also provides the key to understanding the constant expansion of capitalism. Third consideration. The constant expansion of capitalism requires a reser­ voir of exteriority. Capitalism has no other aim than to reproduce itself through a growth imperative: more! Surplus, profit, expansion, economic growth, stock earnings, etc. The concept of Landnahme or land grabbing expresses this need for expansion that must be carried out over time (efficiency – or sabotage of competitors) and over space (the ultimate “resource and object of desire” for it is the precondition for all production as well as condition for life). When there are not enough resources, property titles can be granted to make a market appear out of thin air, as Hernando de Soto did in Peru, by turning country land into commodities by issuing property titles. Radicalizing this idea, we claim that capitalism works by constantly inventing and appropriating an exterior, and by gaining ground over presence. Time for production is shor­ tened by technologies that operate on bodies, and thoughts. Space is progres­ sively conquered, first as the earth’s surface, then as three-dimensional (skyscrapers and underground constructions) and finally as virtual spaces (the “lots” sold in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse). But it is money what assures victory over presence and immediacy: it makes possible exchange in the absence of the goods involved and to defer transactions. When there is no cash, credit is created. And even credit can be turned into a commodity (i.e., subprime mortgages). The real abstraction of capitalism consists largely in the fact that it always succeeds in inventing an exterior, moving farther and farther from presence and substance. This is how the financial world came about, appearing as a self-governed world, independent of all material production, like the transcendental modern subject: no longer tied to objects, but to its purely discursive-symbolic sphere. But there is a double catch: the conquest of the future and of the possible is grounded in debt. And debt leads to crisis, where production, things, labor, and materiality return. Fourth consideration. Political scientists claimed for a long time that capitalism and democracy were inseparable. China, Russia, and Chile (among others) refuted this claim. Capitalism is compatible not only with several political regimes, even articulates irreconcilable positions. Capitalism allies with liberals, greens, or con­ servatives; autocracies and democracies at the same time. This is what provides leeway to capitalism. A global commodity is produced in different parts of the

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world. At each moment of its production, it uses specific social, political, and legal conditions. A cell phone, for example, requires the illegal and violent extraction of resources in Africa, child labor in Asia, cheap labor force in Latin America, and financial institutions of the first world. Such a commodity (the details don’t really matter) required labor flexibility here, unions there, slave labor here and wage labor there. It went through authoritarian and democratic regimes as well; through legality and illegality; violence and corruption, and the legal channels of money and banking institutions. The true complex unity of the capitalist world can only be read in the transnational production of commodities, which brings together ideologically opposed political regimes and radically incompatible legal frame­ works. We see again relative exteriorities intertwining instead of a global homo­ geneous logic governing capitalism at all levels and scales. Corruption plays a significant role here: big capital can break rules that limit growth and profit with­ out suppressing them. There may be legitimacy issues at stake or simply the fact than better than a tailor-made law is the possibility to use laws discretionally. Fifth consideration. Until now, I have presented situations where capitalism strategically relates to an independent institution or practice. Decisive is the very definition of the borders. State and market, for example, are relatively independent structures even though both contribute to the production and reproduction of capitalism. Everyday struggles involve what lays in the sphere of the market, the state or even the so-called civil society. We arrive to the most decisive moment, namely the logic of borders. It is not established a priori what is the “interior” and the “exterior” of capitalism, for its borders are always evolving and differentiating. We have argued that the proclaimed self-sufficiency of capitalism is illusory. Such an illusion relies on obscuring the environment in which capitalism operates as well as the necessary debt in which it incurs regarding the present while allegedly conquering future. Now, the (post)structuralist left shares with the capitalist discourse the claim that capitalism is a form, independent of any sort of nature: body, life, matter, etc. As already said, invention and production are seen as formal procedures imposed on a neutral, passive, feminine matter. Such an hylomorphism dismisses not only different types of “formality,” for instance, the form of things, the form of com­ modity, the form of money as universal equivalent, the form of exchange, the form of the state, etc., but also, different types of materiality (not only that of the sig­ nifier). The relationship matter-form is not only relative to the level of analysis, on the contrary, it is abstract if it does not show the transit from one to the other. Politics is thus seen as a suspension of the (formal) order, as a subtraction and not (also) as a positive intervention on matter. There is an old discussion here on the meaning of matter and form and, above all, their relationship. Naive materialism seeks a world “without us.” Structuralism assumes the disappearance of the thing behind the signifier. But the latter position agrees with marginalists as they assume directly or indirectly, the self-sufficiency of money/language. Once money or the signifier are established as universal equivalents, the different domains involved in capitalism that we referred to are obscured. The “subject” remains here as the sole

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exteriority to (capitalist) order, having no positive powers (on matter), but only the faculty of subtraction. What if the key to understand the transit between domains, between things and commodities, between capitalism and its others relies on overcoming an implicit hylomorphism in which we still separate matter and form? In this respect, we can only hint at Simondon’s work as a philosophy of the pro­ duction of individuals, not only the subject, but also commodities and social orders, its relationship to other individuals, the role played by its environments and between environments of ideology will fail. It is necessary to understand how the borders of these three spheres and the transits between them are drawn, which make the capitalist beast operate with itself and its surroundings.

38 EPILOGUE Contradictions Between Irreconcilable Manifestos David Pavón-Cuéllar

I have been lucky enough to read what precedes before writing what follows, but this does not imply that my position is external to the particular perspec­ tives of the other authors. I do not have a metalanguage that allows me to judge from the outside everything that has been said up to now. This epilogue has as much universality and as much particularity as the other chapters. The only difference is that it presupposes them and can refer to them as a whole. To begin with, it must be said that this book lives up to its title. It is effectively a set of manifestos. All of them rethink the culture in which we live, envision a future change, and speak of important political and intellectual struggles of our time. They also participate in these struggles, taking a position and contradicting each other in what they manifest, in what they denounce and in what they aspire to. The contradictions between the manifestos, which of course do not exclude coincidences between them, are the subject I would like to focus on to finish. My purpose is not to close the chain of manifestos by solving its contradictions with dialectical syntheses or with definitive answers, but to leave it open by highlighting its hopelessly contradictory aspect and the insoluble questions it raises. We will confirm what we surely already know by now: that we have here a kind of deployment of contradictions that reflects the contradictory aspect of our reality as well as our struggles and our aspirations.

Anti-Colonialism vs. Europeanism The first of the contradictions that tear this book apart is between the supporters and the detractors of the Europeanist or Eurocentric position. This position, which is presented as a left option for the emancipatory and revolutionary uni­ versal heritage of Europe, has been claimed by Slavoj Žižek from the 1990s until now in his European Manifesto. Žižekian Europeanism has been fiercely attacked DOI: 10.4324/9781003450047-42

Epilogue 285

from postcolonial, decolonial, and anticolonial trenches in Asia and Latin Amer­ ica, but it has also been defended just as fiercely by Žižek himself and by some of his followers. This struggle has not ended, and this book is internally divided by it. Since the introduction, Žižek reproaches the decolonials for only considering European what they do not like, such as capitalism, at the same time that they disassociate from Europe what they do like about it, such as democracy or equality. Žižek not only conceives of democratic and egalitarian aspirations as originally European, but finds the European element even in decolonization itself. His final point, more provocative than reconciling, is that postcolonialism and Eurocentrism are inextricably linked, and that European influence can serve the purpose of decolonization. We know that Western liberal doctrines promoted the national independence of Latin America in the nineteenth century, just as Marxism was decisive in the twentieth century for the anti-imperialist movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, from the end of the twentieth century until now, the fight against coloniality presents a break with the European heritage, even with the most progressive and leftist heritage, assuming that it reproduces the same coloniality against which it can help us fight. This turn is notorious in the decolonial academic fashion of the American progressive academic establish­ ment, but it can also be found in more critical and radical traditions, as can be seen in several anti-Europeanist manifestos of this book, some of them written by authors who have drawn heavily on of European culture. Familiarity with Hegelian philosophy does not prevent Ricardo Espinoza Lolas from revolting against Europe, against its inheritance of domination through capitalism and the State, and against the European propensity to see itself as the centre when in reality it is not the centre of anything. This Eur­ opean centralist propensity is also criticized by Fernando A. T. Ximenes, who calls for relocating the centre to the periphery in the fight against capitalism, but also against left-wing chauvinism. In the same vein, Isabela Boada Gugliemi reminds us that Europe has only achieved centrality and visibility thanks to its colonial foundation in systems of oppression, in racial and sexual division of labour, in deprivation of bodies, land, and life. Several authors tacitly or openly agree that the impoverishment and weak­ ening of the non-European exterior have been the indispensable conditions for the enrichment and empowerment of Europe and its extensions such as the United States, Canada, Israel, and Australia. The capitalist interiority has been what it has been due to the exploitation and marginalization of an exteriority that is part and not part of capitalism, since it must be preserved outside in order to produce the surplus-value that is realized, consumed, and accumulated as economic and symbolic capital inside. Exteriority is thus indispensable for the great achievements of European and American capitalism, which was already recognized by Rosa Luxemburg and here is emphasized by Arturo Romero Contreras by showing us the interior/exterior dialectic in the structural violence of the world.

286 David Pavón-Cuéllar

Very close to Romero Contreras, Carlos-Adolfo Rengifo-Castañeda, and his colleagues discover the reason of war at the base of European political philosophy. Marx and Marxism had already taught us that the philosophical defences of the highest political ideals could be nothing more than simple ideological justifications for capitalism. Hasn’t capital, intrinsically despotic and anti-democratic, given a large part of their prestige to liberalism and democracy? The liberal and democratic ideals claimed by the Western world generally only serve to sustain the expansion of capitalism through new forms of colonialism, interventionism, and imperialism, but in themselves they consist of formal abstractions and schematics with false uni­ versal pretensions, as Jorge Torres Vinueza and Verónica León-Ron argue. Universalism depends on a deceptive totalization that always requires the exclusion of something, a lack, a remainder, or a limit. This excluded object, as Ramon Guillermo shows, could be personified by Lapulapu, the Philippine hero who put a stop to Ferdinand Magellan in his circumnavigation with which the universalist perspective of the modern European subject was inaugurated. It can be said, then, that the universe of Europe is born as something incomplete and thus refuted by the existence of what it excludes. The contradiction between Europeanism and anti-Europeanism is not only between the enunciated statements, but also between the places of enunciation. It is very significant that all the authors mentioned in the last two paragraphs come from non-European countries with a colonial past: East Timor, Philippines, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. On the contrary, Žižek and the defen­ ders of his Eurocentrism, at least the two in this book, write from Europe or more precisely from the margins of Europe, from Slovenia, Croatia, and Cyprus, which is also very significant. Perhaps there is something about these margins, about their marginal and bordering condition between Asia and Europe, which is paradoxically manifesting itself in the passion for the centre, for left-wing Eurocentrism. It must not be forgotten that Europe has for Žižek an essentially empty, negative meaning, which allows it to achieve its universality. The same idea . reappears in the two Žižek’s followers of this book, Evren Inançog˘ lu, and Brian Willems. The first of them defends a castrated Europe without identity and associated with lack, a lack for which we need each other in the world. It is surprising that this author finds lack precisely where others, including some of the anti-Europeanist authors, deplore the massive presence of Europe, its excess that fills everything, its overflow that invades the rest of the world. No less sur­ prising is that the European element that other authors associate with colonial . wars and the partition of the world is conceived by Inançog˘ lu as a condition of love, of solidarity as a principle of union in the world.

Multiversalism vs. Universalism . Coinciding with Inançog˘ lu, the other pro-Europeanist Brian Willems also sees Europe as a symbol that would serve to unite and not separate. Union is here a concrete expression of European universality, which leads us to another of the

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contradictions of this book, the contradiction between universalism and multiversalism, between the defence of one universe and the defence of multiple parallel and coexisting universes. The first option for universalism can coincide with Europeanism when universality lies in Europe, when we have a distinctively European universal particular like the one we find in . Žižek, Inançog˘ lu, and Willems. However, universalism can also bet on a neutral or apparently neutral universality, not insistently European, as can be seen in other authors of manifestos. The universalist authors are committed to overcoming the differences between cultures, between ideals and between struggles, for the constitution or recon­ stitution of universality based on diversity, and for universal unity to solve global problems that affect all humanity. Faced with the universalization of threats such as the coronavirus pandemic or global warming, Pavin Chachavalpongpun calls for sharing the blame for the problems and contributing to the solutions. Bidisha Chakraborty and Esha Sen also propose a universalist solution based on global empathy and opposed to categorizations by caste, creed, colour, nationality, and gender. Olga Vinogradova defends the need to consider gender equality as a precondition for a truly universal conception of human rights. Finally, Imanol Galfarsoro starts from a recognition of diversity, but proposes a struggle to articulate and reconnect this diversity in a true universality. The recognition of diversity in Galfarsoro does not go so far as to abandon the idea of a single universality and arrive at the paradoxical notion of multiple actual universalities and multiple potential universalisms. This multiversalism is only fully assumed in one manifesto, the one by Andrea Perunovic´, who discovers in the Caribbean cultural context a kind of multiverse where the universes appear as islands of an archipelago, as multiple universes that coexist, are in solidarity with each other, are connected in a rhizome and undergo a process of creolization, which does not exclude that there is a sea of opacity between them. The opacity of the universes, their condition as universes and the solidarity and creolization between them make Perunovic´’s multiversalist proposal different from a multiculturalist approach. In addition to distancing herself from multi­ culturalism, Perunovic´ also opposes her archipelagic lyrical multiversalism, with its universal islands as supportive as they are opaque to one another, to a balk­ anized epic universalism, made up of proportional and conflicting processes. What is certain is that both balkanization and Caribbeanization, with their proliferation and multiplication of positions and identities, are very far from the confrontation between two great blocs, namely Europe with its extensions and the rest of the world, colonialism and anti-colonialism or capitalism and communism.

Break vs. Continuity Is there still room for the clash between capitalism and communism? Hung­ chiung Li’s answer is negative. In fact, Li assimilates the communist alternative to the capitalist model, but considers the former a subspecies of the latter, and

288 David Pavón-Cuéllar

rejects both. This makes him oppose other authors who still claim the communist idea and other ideals of the left. Here we come to a third contradiction, a contra­ diction between continuity and rupture with the existing categories of political struggle. The option for rupture is also an option for novelty, for the invention of new categories, which is based on the assumption that the current struggles must be completely different from the previous ones. This is the case of Yanis Var­ oufakis, who thinks that the battle is no longer between the capitalist and communist universes, but he goes even further and thinks that the problem is no longer capitalism, but something completely new and even worse, something which he calls “techno-feudalism.” This utilization of new categories to describe the present is found in other authors who opt for rupture, among them Martín Aulestia Calero, who speaks of “thanatopolitics” or “necro-State” and “necro-market” to characterize the current Ecuadorian government. Isabel Millar goes even further in the same direction by inventing the concept of “pathopolitics,” instead of biopolitics and necropolitics, in order to describe the current relationship between jouissance and power in techno-capitalism. For his part, Jesús Ayala-Colqui proposes the notions of “cyberalism” and “liberfas­ cism” with which he respectively recognizes the role of technology in the new politics and the current libertarian moment in the history of the extreme right. In contrast to the innovators and inventors of new categories, there are those who preserve the previous categories and prefer to recognize the historical continuity between the present and the past. This is the case of those who consider that the horizon of the left’s struggle must continue to be against capitalism, against colonialism and against imperialism, for socialism and communism, for freedom and a true democracy, for equality and justice, and for a real universalization of rights such as health and education. There is no place here to recall all the manifestos that adhere in one way or another to the traditional program of the left. Suffice it to mention, as a simple illustration, Félix Angulo Rasco and Silvia Redon Pantoja, who are committed to education for social justice. In the same line of historical continuity, the communist idea still seems to be the only one capable of synthesizing all the ideals of the left. Several authors remain faithful to the event of communism, among them Bradley Kaye, Imanol Galfarsoro, Fernando A. T. Ximenes and in some way Álvaro Rodrigo Zarate Huayta, who aspires to a “comunitary socialism,” and Bara Kolenc, who prefers to speak of “communism,” conceiving it as an aspiration to a common world and placing it halfway between Marxism and anarchism. We can say that all these authors, in one way or another, wrote manifestos that are in continuity with the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels. Their manifestos are a kind of reissue or updated version of the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Communism seems to have two latent meanings for the authors who claim it in this book. On the one hand, it is defended as the insurmountable option of the radical left, the only one that makes it possible to avoid the centrist and

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postmodern deviations of the intellectual left in the last fifty years. On the other hand, communism is the only version of universalism acceptable to that radical left, the only universalism that overcomes its current contradiction with respect to multiversalism, since universality appears as a negative horizon of political integration, of alliance and not of cultural fusion or confusion between different struggles with the same universal reach.

Integration vs. Distance The option of the communists for integration can be found in other authors who do not explicitly adopt the aspiration to communism. Like the commu­ nists, the other “integrationists” place universality on the horizon, beyond the contradiction between Europeanism and anti-colonialism, but perhaps more along the path of anti-colonialism. The conditions and the means for integration seem to be the most important for several authors. Alex Mangold insists on the need for a less localized framework in the face of the broken system. Esteban Beltrán Ulate proposes a “Demopedia,” a new political grammar that makes intercultural dialogue possible through the recognition of the Other as Other, all this with the ultimate goal of integration conceived in terms of Ubuntu, Ayni, New Pangea, and Common House. José E. García thinks that integration will be conditioned by tolerance, openness, willingness to dialogue, the search for consensus and the avoid­ ance of sectarian, authoritarian, violent, and intrusive attitudes that present their own interpretations as exclusive and seek hegemony. Carrying out García’s project is a matter of attitude. This psychological for­ mulation of the political is found in other authors, including Ignacio LópezCalvo, who claims humility, sensitivity, self-reflection, and acknowledgement of one’s own limitations when one approaches other cultures different from the dominant Western one. In contrast to López-Calvo, García, and others, Jairo Gallo Acosta and Jennifer Andrea Moya Castano see psychology not as a solu­ tion, but as part of the problem: the true solution, as they conceive it, demands a liberation from the psychological conception of the human being, from the fiction of the autonomous self and from the representation of the individuals with their attitudes and their resilience, and betting on the divided subject that is always two, that is always with the other, making integration possible. Communists and other authors who aspire to community, social or global integration are in contradiction with those who insist more on the defence of distance, difference, particularity or singularity against any integration, synth­ esis, or totalization. This defence can range from the individual or local sphere to the cultural or national. In a concrete political way, Timothy Appleton vin­ dicates the sovereignty of peoples against their integration and their resulting dissolution in supranational entities such as the European Union. Celia Gonzá­ lez calls for the displacement and decentring of totalizing narratives with their vertical and patriarchal elements. Francesca R. Recchia Luciani recognizes the

290 David Pavón-Cuéllar

need for contact between human beings, but also demands respect for the right to breathe for individuals, for life and for the planet. It is clear that this right to one’s own air, to one’s own space, places limits on the integration that other authors insist on. In several manifestos, including those that can be considered the most postmodern, the preservation of distance and difference is associated with the defence not only of self-determination, but also of indeterminacy, of contingency, of spontaneity, freedom, movement, uncertainty, and imagination. These ideas refer to an open horizon through which the authors wish to escape from structure, determination, identity, and totality. Jordi Riba bets on democracy as an unin­ terrupted movement and as a present without a future, Ricardo SanínRestrepo for energeia as contingency and as power without transcendent finality, Jeremy Fernando on art as an opening to the unknown in an order of difference, Mia Neuhaus and her colleagues on imagination that can serve to create heterotopias and break with the present and with the inertia of the left.

Another Communist Manifesto The only point of agreement between all the manifestos is in their form, in the fact of being manifestos, of manifesting something. As far as content is con­ cerned, there could not be a kind of meta-manifesto precisely because there is no metalanguage, but as many languages as there are authors. We have seen how the manifestos diverge and oppose each other, constituting many irre­ concilable manifestos, as irreconcilable as the political positions of those who wrote them, as well as their diagnoses, explanations, and aspirations. Everything is different for each author, as for me, because I don’t have a metalanguage either and, therefore, I am involved in the contradictions that tear this book apart. I also have my options that some readers will have glimpsed and that perhaps I already have the right to confess options for anti-colonialism and against Europeanism, for multiversalism and against universalism, for integration and for continuity in fidelity to communism. At this point, I cannot claim the privilege of the last word and argue in favour of my options, but perhaps I do have the right to situate myself in the perspective of these options to conclude by expressing a couple of ideas about this book as a whole. I will first confess something that it pains me to admit: I think these manifestos have an advantage, at least an advantage, over the best manifesto of all time. The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels only shows one point of view, while these manifestos show multiple points of view that are incompatible with each other, thus capturing the most diverse dimensions of the historic moment in which we live. It is true that Marx and Engels had that materialist capacity, so admired by Lukács, to be a multitude, adopt multiple points of view and thus unfold reality in its three-dimensionality. However, to unfold this reality, the capacity of the most brilliant mind, be it that of Marx or Lenin or any of the schoolteachers denounced by Marx himself and Rosa Luxemburg, never surpasses the collective consciousness.

Epilogue 291

In a sense, this set of manifestos is more communist than the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It is more communist, at the level of enunciation, for being collective, for giving voice to the common with some of the differences and contradictions that constitute it, for including non-Europeans and not only Europeans, women and not only men, young and not just adults. Yet, in another sense, obviously, this set of manifestos is less communist, not only because it does not completely aspire to the communist horizon that some of us aspire to, but because it sometimes wants to flee from it and orient itself in the opposite direction, as we have seen. Furthermore, however many voices there are in this book, they are the voices of intellectuals who speak from their favoured position in an intellectual/manual division of labour correlative to the class division. One wonders, as many old Marxist militants of the twentieth century would, what on earth this book could mean for the workers, peasants, “illiterate” employees, and other manual labourers of the world. Perhaps we know this in part thanks to several manifestos, my favourites, in which a voice seems to resonate that is not that of individual intellectuals, but that of groups with collective aspirations and composed not only of the thinking intelligentsia. It is the same voice that we hear in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It is not the voice of the authors understandably clinging to their names, to their ideas, to their prestige and to their desire to be right, but the voice of the people who have nothing to lose but their chains, the same people who have a world to gain.

INDEX

1968 23 2025 WorldPride 42 Abensour, Miguel 93 absolute 11, 40 abstract labor 245 Abya Yala 148–50, 152, 153, 155 Academic Association 77 Acha, Omar 281 Adorno, Theodor 208, 209 Africa 215, 274, 279, 280, 285 Afrika Gazetesi 159 afro-pessimism 131 Agamben, Giorgio 82, 229, 256, 258, 264 AI 231 Algeria 130 Allende, Salvador 241, 243 d’Allonne, Revault 89, 90, 91 alternative 149 amauti 243 Amazon forests 63 amensalism 170 Amin, Samir 214 Andean civilizations 136 Anders, Günther 64 Angola 130 Annan, Kofi 18 Anthropocene 63 anthropology 91 anti-European 286 anti-stasis 84 anti-state 84 Arab Spring 33, 41

Arabian Sea 79 archepelagos 189 Argentina 12 Ariadne 180, 181 Aristotle 184, 255–57, 258 ars erotica 230 art 83, 85 Asia 121, 215, 279, 282, 285, 286 Asian 14, 54 Association of Southeast Asian Nations 17, 19 Atlantic Slave Trade 275 Atomic Kitten 160 aufheben 9, 54, 55, 279 austerity 166, 170 Australia 285 australopithecines 46 avant-garde 135 Awang, Panglima 214, 215 Ayni 97 Badiou, Alain 40, 126, 131, 221; event 144; love 85; reception 130 Bahasa Melayu 207 Bakić-Hayden, Milica 188 Balibar, Étienne 184, 185, 190 balkanization 186, 187, 190 balkanized universals 185, 186 Balkans 185, 187 Bambirra, Vania 244 Bandung Conference 215 bare life 23, 229 Baroque Ethos 136

Index 293

Barry, Peter 75 Basque 130 Bataille, George 233 Baudrillard, Jean 234 Baudrillardian 232 Bay of Bengal 79 Beauvois, Jean-Léon 224 “bebezonas” 137 being-with 60 Bengal 77 Benjamin, Walter 135, 210, 273 Berardi, Franco 224 Bernal, María Belén 266 Bhabha, Homi 172, 188 Biden, Joe 4 Biesta, Gert 109 biopolitics 230, 233, 264 biopower 228, 229, 263 Birmingham 167 Black Feminism 154 Black Lives Matter 10 Black Power politics 127 Blumenberg, Hans 90 Blumentritt, Ferdinand 213 Boabdil 274 Bodhisattvas 38 Bohol 208 Bolivia 137, 237–39, 241 Bolsonaro, Jair 63, 247 Bonifacio, Andres 214, 215 Boric, Gabriel 241 Borneans 213 Bosnian 190 Boxing Day Tsunami 17 Braudel, Fernand 281 Brazil 12, 63, 135, 247, 273 Bretton Woods 273 Brexit 16, 141, 143, 164, 166, 167 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) 135, 273 British 141 British empire 280 Brown, Wendy 110 Buddha Prabhūtaratna 39, 40 Buddha Śākyamuni 40 Buddhism 39 Burdman, Javier 186 Busch, Lawrence 109 Butler, Judith 182, 185, 276 bystander effect 165 Cadahia, Luciana 55 Cambodians 213 Cameron, David 168 Canada 285

cancer 161 Cansever, Edip 160 capital 274, 286 capitalism 10, 117, 119, 121–22, 178, 181, 279, 281–82 capitalist 96 capitalist imperialism 119 Capitalocene 248 Cardiff 171 care 111 Caribbean 72, 185, 190, 287 del Carmen Galdós, María 69 Casimir, Jean 9 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 55 Castro, Fidel 243 categorical affirmation 92 Catholic 280 Catholic modernity 136 Cavalletti, Andrea 265, 265 Central America 72 Centro Democrático 195, 196, 197 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 127 chaos 240 chaos theory 239 Charcas 237 Chávez, David 261 Chávez, Hugo 239, 240, 267 Chega 149 Chiapas 33 Chile 33, 137, 237, 243, 281, 286 Chilean coup 241 China 10, 35, 43, 121, 135, 230, 273; captialism and democracy 281; health crisis 15, 18, 19 Chinese 170, 213 Christianity 153 Christianization 136 Christophe, Henri 12 Churchill, Winston 202 citizenship 111 Citizenship Amendment Act 77 Cixous, Hélène 82 climate protection 79 Cloud Head 68, 69 co-sitting of two Buddhas 40 Colli, Giorgio 180 Colombia 286 Colombian 69, 196, 198, 267 Colombian Government 195 colonial 96 colonialism 55, 119, 286 coloniality of power 245 Columbus, Christopher 207, 208, 275 commodity 120, 245, 282 Common House 96, 97

294 Index

commons 27 communism 12, 27, 181, 288 Communist International 145 Communist Party 182 Communist Party Manifesto 31 communists 141, 289 communities 97 comunitary socialism 239, 288 concrete labor 245 concrete universal 185 de Condorcet, Nicolas 99, 101–4 conflict 93 Constitutional Commission 172 contingency 254–56 Corbyn, Jeremy 146 Coronel, Valeria 55 Correa, Rafael 240, 261 COVID-19 21, 22, 135, 148, 158, 162, 248, 277; bodies 60, 62, 64; Brexit 164, 166, 169, 170–73; India 74–8; neoliberalism 28–30, 32, 59 creolism 240 creolization 190 crisis 88, 118, 148 Croatia 286 Croatian 190 Crumb, Benjamin 78 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés 280 Cuba 243 cultural humility 53, 55 cultural transformation 111 Cummings, Dominic 168 Curiel, Ochy 154, 155 cyberalism 245, 246, 288 Cyclone Nargis 17 Cyprus 158, 159, 286 Dantesque 50 Dardot, Pierre 224 Davis, Angela 244 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 99 decolonial 285 decolonial feminism 149, 152–54 decolonial thinking 126 Deleuze, Gilles 23, 35, 109 Deleuzian 189 Delhi 76 dematerialization 31 democracy 89, 92, 93, 286 democratic sovereignty 143 Demopedia 97 Dependency Theory 135 depopulation 266 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian 77

Derrida, Jacques 60 Descartes, René 90, 279 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 12 development 122 différend 186 difficult dialogue 96 digitalization 31 Diocletian 201 Dionysos 180, 181 disabilities 245 dissemination 91 DNA 49, 161 Dolar, Mladen 160, 221 Dora Observatory 203 Dos Santos, Theotonio 244 Douglas-Home, Alec 169 Douglas, Mary 187 Downing Street 146 Drakeford, Mark 171, 172 dual power 240 Dufourmantelle, Anne 82, 84 Duggan, Mark 167 Durán 268 During, Élie 189 Durkheim, Émile 128 Dussel, Enrique 135, 150, 208 dyad 255 Eagleton, Terry 126, 129, 130 East Timor 286 Echeverría, Bolívar 135 eco-criticism 78, 79 eco-genocide 79 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean 135, 148 Ecuador 136, 261, 265, 286 Ecuadorian 266, 268 education 77, 107, 109, 110 Egypt 41 Einstein, Albert 22 El Alto 136 El San Jorge 69, 70 Elcano, Juan Sebastian 209 electronic technologies of communication 239 Elhaik 72 Eliot, T.S. 80 Emergency in 1975 77 encountering 83 encryption of power 254 energeia 257, 258, 290 Engels, Friedrich 6, 10, 214, 215, 275, 277, 288, 290 England 160, 169, 171 England national team 160 Enlightenment 99, 135, 208

Index 295

entelecheia 257 Erfindung 180 Escuela Superior de Policía del Ecuador 266 Eurocentric 120, 126, 127, 149 Eurocentrism 125, 126, 128, 131, 207 Europe 33, 55, 134, 135, 150, 187, 279, 285, 286; Slavoj Žižek 121, 125, 127, 128, 180–82, 201, 203, 204, 207, 208 European 127, 136, 138, 179, 181, 204, 285; modernity 10, 11 European Commission 146 European Constitution 142 European Convention on Human Rights 168 European Economic Area 168 European Enlightenment 128, 129 European gender 182 European liberalism 137 European modernity 136 European Parliament 141, 142 European Subject 208–15 European Union 15, 19, 160, 167, 168, 172; Brexit 142, 144, 145, 146 European universality 286 Europeanism 286, 287, 290 Europeans 178, 180, 209 Eurovision Song Contest 142 Evans, Dan 171 evolutionary biology 51 exchange value 245 expenditure 233 Extinction Rebellion 171 fabulating 69 Fanon, Franz 127 Farage, Nigel 168 feminism 135 Ferdinand, Malcolm 63 Ferrante, Elena 158 “fetishist disavowal” 165 Feuerbach, Ludwig 92 Fidaner, Işık Barış 160, 161 Fidesz 149 “Filipino” 210–12 Filipino-Malay 214 financialization 119 Financiarization 108 Fisher, Mark 21 Floyd, George 63, 78 fossil fuels 22 Foucauldian 229 Foucault, Michel 91, 110; biopolitics 228, 230; neoliberalism 262, 263, 266, 268 Fourth International 120 framing effect 166

Frank, André Gunder 244 Frankfurt School 180 fraternity 88 French 99, 100 French National Constituent Assembly 99 French Revolution 9, 10, 89, 280 Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional 70 Freud, Sigmund 128, 187, 222, 230 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia 195 Fukuyama, Francis 123 functional invariants 47 G7 135 Gandler, Stefan 137 Ganges 76 Gauchet, Marcel 89 gender 245, 280 Generalized Monopoly Capital 120 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas 22 Gerencialization 108 German 32 Germany 28, 179 Ghazipur 76 Glissant, Édouard 189, 190 global 244 global capitalism 145 Global Educational Reform Movement 107 Global North 15, 54, 97, 129, 130, 151 Global South 15, 54, 55, 129, 130, 151, 155; capitalism 118, 119, 120 Global Sustainable Goal 78 globalized 119 globalized capitalism 126 Goldman Sachs 274 de Gouges, Olympe 99–104, 153 governmentality 263, 267 grammar 97 Gramscian 184 Granada 274, 275 Greater Manchester 169 Greece 33, 142, 143, 179 Greek 159 Greek Cypriot 159 greenhouse gases 79 Guatatoca, Bryan 265 Guattari, Félix 109, 224, 244 Guayaquil 266 Guerreio, Carla 79 Gunn Allen, Paula 153 Guyau Jean-Marie 88–93 Haiti 11, 12, 148 Haitian Revolution 9, 10, 280 Hamlet 5

296 Index

intersectional theory 126 intersolation 24 interventionism 286 Irigaray, Luce 59, 60 Ishiguro, Kazuo 161 Israel 285 Izambard, Georges 180

Han, Byung-Chul 224, 225 Haneke, Michael 180 Hang Tuah 212 haptic ontology 60 Haraway, Donna 72 Hardt, Michael 41 Haridwar 76 Haryana 76 healthcare 54 Heckman, James 109 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 54, 93, 171, 184, 224, 280; Europe 179; Slavoj Žižek 37, 38 Hegelian 11, 22, 36, 39, 210, 222, 286 hegemonic struggle 25 hegemony 120 Heidegger, Martin 179 Herrmann, Bernard 9 heterotopia 32 High-Stakes Testing 110 Higher Education sector 167 Hindus 76 Hitler, Adolf 210 Ho Chi Minh 215 Hobbes, Thomas 197, 182, 193, 194 Hobbesian 196 Hok Kolorob movement 77 homeostasis 239 homosexuality 33 Hong Kong 286 Honneth, Axel 180 hooks, bell 244 Horkheimer, Max 208 Horvat, Srećko 202 Hulk, the 182 hylomorphism 282

Kafka, Franz 160 Kang, Younghill 202, 204 Kant, Immanuel 47, 184, 189 Kaohsiung 42 Keats, John 203, 204 Kell, Kevin 246 Khan, Shamaila 53 Kijong-dong 203 Kisner, Wendell 36 Korean American literature 200, 202 Kristeva, Julia 234 Kuldova, Tereza Østbø 166 Kumbh Mela 76 Kundera, Milan 84 Kurzweil, Ray 246

identitarianism 144 imaginary 185 immanent transcendence 143 impasse 118 imperialism 55, 286 India 10, 75, 135, 230, 273, 77, 78 Indian Central Government 75 “Indianist” characteristics 238 Indio 210 individuality 36 Indo-American Marxism 244 “Indonesia Raya” 214, 215 ineluctability 60 instantiernity 23 inter-ontism 248 International Monetary Fund 246, 273 International Organization for Migration 149 Interpride 42, 43

La Lega 149 La Mariscal 136 labor power 245 Lacan, Jacques 26, 37, 134, 143, 161, 184, 189, 199, 232; master-signifier 200; subject 222, 223, 225 Lacanian 25, 38, 141, 165, 224, 229 Lacanians 244 Laclau, Ernesto 25, 38, 185 Lake Xolotlán 70, 71 Lander, Edgardo 135 Lapulapu 209–15, 286 Lapupalu-Panglima Awang 214 Large International Scale Assessment 110 Lasso, Guillermo 265 Latin America 12, 130, 136, 137, 215, 243, 261, 276, 285; chaos theory 238, 239; neoliberalism 245–47, 280, 282

Jadavpur University 77 Jamat, Tablighi 76 Jameson, Fredric 130 Jamia Millia Islamia 77 Japan 230 Japanese 213 Jawaharlal Nehru University 77 Jerusalem 275 Jesuit Guaraní 12 Jesuits 12 Johnson, Boris 4, 16, 168, 172 Jones, Owen 141

Index 297

Latin American 135, 241, 279 Latin American Independence 136 Latin Americans 134 Laval, Christian 224 Lazos Ochoa, Efraín 280 League of Communists 182 learnification 108–9 learning 49 Lee, Chang-Rae 200, 202 Lefort, Claude 91–3 left populism 126 Leibnizian 39 Lenin, Vladimir 10, 120, 290 Lents, Nathan 161 Levent, Şener 159 Lévinas, Emmanuel 61 Lexit 141 LGBTQ+ 18, 43 liberalism 262, 286 liberfascism 245–47, 288 Limasawa 207 Lipovetsky, Gilles 223 Lobón, Camila 68, 69, 71, 72 lockdown 79 Locke, John 47 London 167 López, Darling 71, 72 Lotus Sutra 39 love 221 Lugones, Maria 135, 154 Luxemburg, Rosa 64, 280, 285, 290 Lyotard, Jean-François 186, 189 Macmillan, Harold 168 Macron, Emmanuel 4 macropolitics 248 Magellan, Ferdinand 207, 286 Magris, Claudio 190 Mahayana Buddhism 37, 39, 40 Maid, The 164–66 de Malacca, Enrique 207 Malaka, Tan 214 “Malay-Filipino” 212 Malays 213 Malaysia 76 Malcolm X 127 Managua 70 Mandela, Nelson 130 manifestos 4, 5, 284 Marches of Hope 33 Marcuse, Herbert 244 Mariátegui, José Carlos 243, 244, 247 Marini, Ruy Mauro 244 married women 100 Mars 42

Marx, Karl 6, 10, 128, 169, 178, 286, 288, 290; “Indonesia Raya” 214–15; subsumption 274, 275, 277 Marxism 10, 210, 244, 285, 291 master signifier 134, 200–3 Matrix, The 162, 232 May, Theresa 143 May, Timothy 246 Mbembe, Achille 62, 63, 229, 230, 263, 267 McGowman, Todd 159 Mediterranean 136, 149, 275 Meister Eckhart 179 Melis, Antonio 243 mental health 245 Middle East 33, 279 Mignolo, Walter 135 Miller, Henry 223 Milner, Jean-Claude 188 modernity 96, 151, 264, 279 “Mon Manifeste Européen” (Slavoj Žižek) 1, 16, 125, 134, 149, 178, 200 Montenegrin 190 Montinari, Mazzino 180 Morales, Evo 239–41 Moreno, Lenin 261, 265 de Morga, Antonio 210 Mouffe, Chantal 25 Mount Dora 203 Mozambique 130 Muenala, Johnny 265 multiversalism 290 Murphy, Neil 84 Musk, Elon 232 “My European Manifesto” see “Mon Manifeste Européen” Nadu, Tamil 77 NAFTA 278 Nancy, Jean Luc 38, 60, 82 Naples 158 Napoleonic Civil Code 100 Napoleonic expansion 280 nar-cynica 223 nar-cynicism 223 National Health Service 169, 170 National Register of Citizens 77 necro-market 288 necro-state 288 necrophilia 85 necropolitics 264 Negri, Antonio 41, 276 Negrocene 63 Negroponte, Nicholas 246 neo-feudal 268

298 Index

neo-Keynesian policies 261

neoliberal capitalist ideology 223

neoliberal fear 240

neoliberal governmentality 261, 262

neoliberalism 30, 119, 245, 262, 263,

267, 268

neo-Marxist 185

neofascism 247

New Development Bank 274

New Pangea 97

Ni Una Menos (“Not One Less”) 278

Nicaragua 67, 70, 71

Nietzsche, Friedrich 62, 179–81

non-being 255

North American 136

North Korea 203

Northern Ireland 170

nurturing 77

October 2019 National Strike 265

Organization for Economic Co-operation

and Development 107

Orient, the 187, 203

Ortega, Daniel 240

Orwell, George 162

other, the 37, 96, 208, 223, 289

l’Ouverture, Toussaint 11

Oxfam 149

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ 153

Palestine 130

Panama Papers 168

Paraguay 12, 13

parallax gap 164

Paris Commune 243

“parlêtres” 188

Parsifal 182

Patel, Priti 167

pathopolitics 288

patipolitical 230–32

patriarchal 96

Pavón-Cuellar, David 138

Peloponnesian War 179

Peru 244, 247, 281

pharmakon 256

Philanthropic Spectre 5

Philippines 208, 286

Pigafetta, Antonio 210

Pinker, Steven 128, 129

planetary extinction 117

platform capitalism 246

Plato 184, 255, 258

poetics of relation 189

Polanyi, Karl 281

Polo, Rafael 261

Pope Francisco 96

potentia 256

Potosí 237

pre-Columbian indigenous people 280

Profumo, John 169

Profumo scandal 169

Programme for International Student

Assessment 110

Prometheanism 64

Protestant modernity 136

psychoanalysis 78, 221–25, 230–34 psychologists 47

psychology 51

Punjab 76

quantification 110

Quechua 248

Quijano, Aníbal 135, 150, 244

Quito 136

race 245, 280

radical pedagogy 111

Rancière, Jacques 93

Rassemblement national 149

reaction 117

Real, the 166

real subsumption 276, 279

Recalcati, Massimo 223

Red Rebel Brigade 171

Redención de los Malayos (Redemption of

the Malays) 212

Reformist Spectre 5

Reich, Wilhelm 244

religions 50

religious 92

Remain campaign 168

Reverse Psychoanalysis 79

rhizome 189

Rilke, Rainer Maria 162

Rimbaud, Arthur 180, 221

Rizal, José 210–15 Rojava 33

Rome 201

Rossetto, Louis 246

Ruskin, John 202

Russia 135, 273, 281

Russian Revolution 243

Sahlberg, Pasi 107, 108

Salanskis, Jean-Michel 189

Salazar, Zeus 211

San Francisco 246

Sandinista revolution 70, 71

SARS 62

schizophrenic 238

Index 299

Schmitt, Carl 143, 144

Scotland 170, 171

Second World War 135, 179

Serbian 190

Serbo-Croat 190

Settler Colonialism 127

Shakespeare, William 202

Siamese 213

Silicon Valley model 246

Simmel, Georg 93

simplification 108

Singhu 76

singular plural 65

singular universality 39

singularity 36

slavery 275

Slovenia 286

socialism 95, 244

Socrates 91, 93

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 245

Somoza, Anastasio 70

de Soto, Hernando 281

South Africa 135

South America 135, 136

South Asia 207

Southeast Asia 19

Southern Europe 136

Spain 33, 130, 280

Spanish 209

Spitzenkandidat system 142

split subject 221

Split, Croatia 201

Stalin, Joseph 170

standards 110

state, the 194–98

State-Nation scheme 95

Streeck, Wolfgang 142

structure 27

Sturgeon, Nicola 171

Taiwan 42, 43

tax avoidance strategies 168

Taylor, Charles 89

techno-feudalism 288

Thailand 17, 18

Thaksin government 17

thanatopolitics 265, 288

Theravada Buddhism 37–9

Third Communist International 243

Third World 15, 19

third world feminism 154

Thompson, E.P. 129

Tikri 76

Tilly, Charles 268

Titanic the 273

Todorov, Maria 187

touching 59–60

Trần Đức Thảo 215

transversal intersectionality 248

transversality 91

Traverso, Enzo 33

Trump, Donald 15, 18, 274

Truong, Nicolas 83

Tsing, Anna 71

Túpac Amaru II 280

Turing Test 231

Turkey 33

Turkish 159, 160

Turkish Cypriot 159

Turtle Lords 68

ubuntu 97

UK General Election of 2017 143

UK Independence Party 168

uncertainty 92

United Kingdom 76, 160, 164–69, 172

United Nations 17, 19, 42

United Nations International Labor

Organization 276

United States Labor Department 277

United States of America 55, 76, 119, 136,

239, 279, 285

Universal Basic Income 24

universalism 36, 42, 186–90, 286–89

universality 11, 27, 38, 41, 284

universalizing 14, 15, 20

US hegemony 121

use value 245

utopia 241

utopian impulse 93

variability 48

Varoufakis, Yanis 22

Venezuela 286

Victorian age (England) 75

Villa del Lago 68–70

de Vittoria, Francisco 279

volcanic 70

de Vos, Jan 221

Vote Leave campaign 168

Wachowskis, the 161

Wagner, Richard 9, 181, 182

Wales 164, 170, 172–73

Washington consensus 246

Weber, Max 128

Wells, Orson 180

Welsh 171

West Bengal 76

West Sahara 130

300 Index

Westminster 169, 170, 173 Westworld 231, 232 Williams, Alex 21 Willka, Zarate 237 Wired 246 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 90 Woodhouse, Richard 203 Wordsworth, William 202, 203 World Bank 107, 246, 273 World Health Organization 42, 76 world market 122 World Social Forum 120 xenophobia 149

Yugoslavia 190 Zavaleta, Mercado 238, 241 Zedong, Mao 10, 35, 215 #ZeroCovid 28 Zhao, Chloé 159 Žižek, Slavoj 1, 2, 15, 16, 82, 83, 85, 149, 150, 160, 161, 188, 222, 225, 244, 245, 264, 275; Brexit 164–71; Buddhism 35–8, 40, 41; Europe 125–31; Latin America 134–36, 138; manifestos 178–82; state of war 197–203 Zuckerberg, Mark 232, 281 Zweig, Stefan 209