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Infrapolitics and the(Non)Subject

On Ethics, Politics, and Radical Alterity

A n d r e w A s c h e r l

The University of NewMexico, Albuquerque

IN HIS RECENT BOOK, LATINAMERICANISM AFTER 9/11, JOHN BEVERLEY OFFERS A

pointed assessment of Alberto Moreiras’s contributions to Latin Americancultural studies over the last decade. Beverley orients his commentary onMoreiras’s recent work by examining it as “both a critique but also a new formof Latinamericanism” that operates primarily as a critical practice bearing astrong resemblance to deconstruction (2011, 43). Beverley identifies Moreirasas part of a loosely-connected group of contemporary scholars who havecome to represent adeconstructive tendencyor intervention intoLatinAmer-ican cultural theory, and hemakes a number of objections to theway inwhichthis collective theoretical intervention has presented its various critical proj-ects (which, for Beverley, are related primarily through their shared debt todeconstruction) as sympathetic to a generalized Leftist or emancipatory po-

CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013, pp. 179–202. ISSN 1532-687X.© 2013 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

! 1 7 9



litical position. Acting as a force for immanent critiquewithin Leftist politicalthought, such deconstructive interventions in Latin American cultural stud-ies have concentrated their critical force on “certain forms of literary andliterary-critical discourse associated with the nationalist or populist left inLatin America, or with positions of ‘solidarity’ with Latin America fromabroad” (Beverley 2011, 44). This has resulted in a generalized suspicion ofregional or national political forms like those thatmake up the recent “turn tothe left” of several Latin American populist governments that some havecalled themarea rosada. According toBeverley, themisgivingsdeconstructiveLatin Americanism has about this political shift to the left—andwhat he seesas an imperfect yet promisingmovement in Latin American politics—contra-dicts Moreiras’s “claim that the work of deconstruction prepares the groundfor a ‘transformative’ politics” (Beverley 2011, 51). In other words, Beverleyviews this critical tendency as counterproductive to the development of thetransformative politics for whichMoreiras seems to indicate his support. ForBeverley, it is precisely because of itsmelancholic attachment to thehistoricalfailures of emancipatory political projects in Latin America that deconstruc-tive tendencies in Latin Americanist theory (like Moreiras’s recent work inparticular) are unable to make good on the promise of adequately preparingthe ground for political transformation. Rather, in its emphasis on “maintain-ing what Moreiras calls the ‘irruptive’ force of thought, as against the possi-bility of its commodification or reification,” the work of Moreiras and hisfellow travelers in Latin Americanist deconstruction cannot shake off a naggingattachment to political failure, thus preventing these theorists from recognizingcontemporary efforts to rebuild transformative political movements in LatinAmerica (Beverly 2011, 53). While it was, once upon a time, the case that decon-struction performed the useful function of freeing Leftist political thought fromthe chains of the type of anachronistic theoretical frameworks that lead to catas-trophe and defeat, nowadays, especially in the wake of themarea rosada, decon-struction itself seems out-of-date in its refusal to abandon a rigorous programofcritique of the Left’s shortcomings. Beverley explains:

To the extent that the defeat of the Left was due to the inadequate or out-

moded character of its discourse—and in particular the inadequacy of that

1 8 0 ! I n f r a p o l i t i c s a n d t h e ( N o n ) S u b j e c t


Santiago Acosta


discourse in the face of globalization and the collapse of communism—then

deconstruction could (and did) serve as a place for revitalization. And to the

extent that deconstruction is by definition a project of radical dedifferentia-

tion, it could be said to be both in its theory and practice “anticipatory” in

some sense of an egalitarian society. But with the resurgence of an actual

political Left in Latin America, whatever its limitationsmight be, deconstruc-

tion can no longer command the strategic role it claimed for itself in the articula-

tion of Latinamericanism, even as a critique of those limitations. (2011, 55)

For Beverley, this inability to maintain itself as a prefigurative or anticipatoryformoftransformativepoliticsmeansMoreiras’sdeconstructiveLatinAmerican-ist theory has become primarily “a critique of political-cultural articulation assuch,” and its immanent political orientation is something along the lines of a“procedural liberalism or ‘republicanism’ (with a lowercase r) in the mode ofHannah Arendt” (2011, 56). And, while Beverley stops short of accusingMoreirasofhavingabandonedthedesire forsomesortof transformativepolitics, readersofLatinamericanism after 9/11 are certainly left with the sense that Moreiras’sown politics, whatever they may actually be, are in serious danger ofslouching toward a political orientation that would be decidedly moreconservative than transformative.

In general, Beverley’s analysis has the virtue of providing an occasion toask what sort of politics could be generated by Moreiras’s critical dispositionand to ask if Beverley’s presentation of the latter as deconstruction is accu-rate. An examination of Moreiras’s work over the last decade reveals that hefrequently looks to Derrida’s philosophy, as well as the work of a number ofother thinkers indebted to deconstruction, to support his arguments, al-though at various points he is cautious to distance his own position from anypretensions to speak “in the name of” deconstruction.1 It is not entirely clear,however, to what extent one can be justified in claiming thatMoreiras’s workis itself deconstruction. It is likewise less than certain thatMoreiras’s politics,whatever they may actually be, are derived from a critical practice that couldbe correctly called deconstruction. At the very least, one can say that Beverleyis correct in locating a certain political impasse within Moreiras’s work re-garding the claim that the sort of negative critique he practices is uniquely

A n d r e w A s c h e r l ! 1 8 1



suited to clear a space for transformative politics to take shape. This impasseconsists mainly in a discernible reluctance to allow any particular formationof a supposedly transformative politics to emerge without subjecting it to aradical, negative, and seemingly irrefutable critique that offers little in thewayof affirmation or constructive suggestion. Moreiras would likely agree withsuch an analysis. In fact, he claims in his response to Beverley’s critique thatwhen political positions become ideologies, they become less political thanimaginary processes of identification, and since this is the case, he would“prefer to leave [his] options open and not to confuse [his] critical interestswith the adoption of an imaginary identity” (Moreiras 2012, 227).

In Beverley’s critique, the political impasse of Moreiras’s work is mostevident in his reluctance to endorse the politics of themarea rosada. Beverleydoes not convincingly explain why one should expect practitioners of literaryand cultural theory to endorse any particular existing political power struc-ture, regardless of its roots in indigenous social movements (such as EvoMorales’sMovimiento al socialismo [MAS] in Bolivia) or its open ties with anoppositional nation-state like Cuba (such as those established by HugoChavez’s regime in Venezuela or by Tabaré Vazquez’s in Uruguay). Nevermind that the so-called left turn in Latin American politics consists largely ofthe coming to power of administrations that aremore often than not centristin their policies (in spite of the leftish rhetoric they sometimes espouse).Moreto the point, if one’s overarching theoretical disposition is that of critique—asit seems fair to sayMoreiras’s is—then it should not be surprising that such atheoreticalmodewould remain suspiciousofmodels or leaders in the realmofpolitics. Second, in Latinamericanism after 9/11, Beverley expresses a desirethat Latin American cultural studies move beyond their preoccupation withsubalternism, a subdisciplinary focuswithwhichMoreiras has demonstrateda strong and abiding interest. While this sort of call to move forward towardnew theoretical paradigms should not be considered unwelcome—for exam-ple, Jon Beasley-Murray’s recent book, Posthegemony: Political Theory andLatin America, departs in productive and provocativeways from themodes ofnegative or permanent critique closely associated with Moreiras’s contribu-tions to Latin American subaltern studies—Beverley’s dismissal of the subal-ternist project tout court is weakened by his insistence that critical methods




that purposefully analyze the expressions and practices of elite power oughtto be rejectednow that certain forms of left-wing politics have recently gainedinfluence in Latin America. This political shift does not provide sufficientjustification for abandoning the project of subaltern studies as a critique ofdomination and the forms of subjectivity it produces. Thus, on the one hand,Beverley finds fault with the way Moreiras’s theoretical practice cleaves to aprinciple of suspicion of any and all self-identified emancipatory politicalprograms. In other words, he criticizes Moreiras for remaining faithful to thevery form of radical critique he has been explicitly developing formore than adecade. On the other hand, Beverley’s call to leave behind investigations intothe problems of subalternity and hegemony seems hasty, to say the least.

The centrality of the concept of the subaltern inMoreiras’s recent work isfairly clear. Moreiras has extensively investigated the notions of subalternityand hegemony in his work, and the question of how to develop a thinking ofLatin American politics and culture that would eschew pretentions to domi-nance remains evident. To that extent, as mentioned above, Beverley’scritique in Latinamericanism after 9/11 is valuable insofar as it draws ourattention to a consideration of the limits of Moreiras’s approach to thinkingthe political, themost recent formulation of which is “infrapolitics,” amethodof political thought that Moreiras develops in Línea de sombra: el no sujeto delo político (2006). Beverley primarily focuses on Moreiras’s 2001 volume, TheExhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies, but heaccurately notes that there exists a continuity of development of key conceptsand arguments from the earlier text to the more recent work. The Exhaustionof Difference captures Moreiras’s assessment of the state of Latin Americanstudies in the aftermath of the disbanding of the Latin American SubalternStudies group (of which both Beverley and Moreiras were members), andLínea de sombra pursues similar themes, the most central of which focus onthe problematic and constitutive liminal spaces between andwithin conceptslike subjectivity and the political. However, thismore recent work expands itsscope beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Latin American studies andseeks to intervene in larger theoretical debates concerning the role of thesubject in politicsmore generally. Given this concernwith the value of subjec-tivitywithin political thought, and the sustained engagementwith an increas-

A n d r e w A s c h e r l ! 1 8 3



ingly radicalized alterity one finds throughout Moreiras’s work, it becomesclearer why the twin lenses of subaltern studies and a rigorous critique of allsupposed totalities cannot be done away with as easily as Beverley suggests.The remainder of this essay will explore the ways in which both a relentlesscritique of subjectivity and an insistence on the continued relevance of theproblem of the subaltern to this critique are central to Moreiras’s consider-ations of the political. This explorationwill concludewith the suggestion thatthe form of political thought that emerges from the particular valences ofMoreiras’s theoretical practice does, in fact, reach an inherent impassethroughwhich emancipatory political thoughtmust pass, but for reasons thathave little to dowith Beverley’s critique of the same facets ofMoreiras’s work.

In a series of major works (Tercer espacio: Duelo y literatura en AméricaLatina [1999], The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin AmericanCultural Studies, and Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo político), Moreiras hasprovided a sustained metacritical argument about the limits of Latin Ameri-canist theory, attempting to think the gaps in its operative theoretical con-cepts. In so doing, Moreiras’s radical critique of the limits of subjectivity inboth literature and in politics have impelled Latin American cultural studiestoward a thorough reconfiguration of its foundational assumptions. For ex-ample, his important early work Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en AméricaLatina set as its task the theorizationof a “third space” towhich thought couldwithdraw in an attempt to challenge the metaphysical ordering of the worldset forth by modern theories of literature. This space outside metaphysicalapproaches to literature forms apreconditional locus for a practice of readingliterature as the

figureof anexternality thatdiscourse cannot internalize asmeaning; thefigureof

absolute difference,marked andmarking a negativity that reflection cannot con-

tainwithin itself; thefigureof the limitof reflexivity, themeasureofnon-sensethat

encloses all sense; thefigureof singularity andof contingency, living in the renun-

ciation and abandonment of the possible . . . But [also] point by point, it is the

figure of its opposite: it incorporates conflict because it is conflict itself, as a

singular andcontingentplaceof an immemorial rupture thatnevertheless condi-

tions allmemory, includingmemory of the future. (Moreiras 1999, 34)2




In other words, Moreiras identifies within thought a fundamental “external-ity” that limits and conditions thought itself, but also opens up new possibil-ities for thought. Through the thinking of difference, Moreiras explains,thought can open up to or even become resistance.

In a similar way, Moreiras argues in The Exhaustion of Difference that “aprecarious, contradictory, and perhaps unmanageable experience of alterity”is indispensable to any attempt to rethink the dominant discourses of LatinAmericanist theory (2001, 135). According toMoreiras, this constitutive alter-ity is crucial to any possibility that Latin Americanist discourse can think itsown heterogeneity from itself. The key is to avoid modes of thought that relyon the specificity of subjectivism or topography, as these are merely expres-sions of identitarianism that appropriate difference and domesticate it, di-vesting otherness of its very alterity. In The Exhaustion of Difference, oneapproach Moreiras develops to thinking such alterity without assimilating itto a substantial notion of place or subject-as-self is somethinghenames “dirtyatopianism.” This formof thinking is characterizedby a refusal to appropriatealterity, by letting reflection be marked by an “untranslative excess” thatforms the horizon of the very need to engage in translation itself. Moreiras,thus, defines dirty atopianism as “the name for a nonprogrammable programof thinking that refuses to find satisfaction in expropriation at the same timethat it refuses to fall into appropriative drives. It is dirty because no thinkingproceeds from disembodiment. And it is atopian because no thinking ex-hausts itself in its conditions of enunciation” (2001, 23–24). Here Moreirasarticulates an ethical proposition that enjoins thought to dwell incessantly onthe limits of expression and translation, simultaneously staving off claims toignore the alterity of that limit-site and refusing to strip alterity from its(non)place by homogenizing it through the inscription of it in a totalizedidentity. The radicalization of differenceMoreiras undertakes in The Exhaus-tion of Difference aims at preventing critical forms of thought in Latin Ameri-canist cultural theory from being coopted by the forces of globalized capitalism,which has repeatedly demonstrated how easily it can accommodate andassimilate difference into market logic. Guiding Moreiras’s effort here is aneffort to preserve the exteriority of anonymous excess and difference, to de-fend its unintelligibility from reincorporation and reinscription into the he-

A n d r e w A s c h e r l ! 1 8 5



gemonic order. At one point, he calls for the development of “an antirepre-sentational, anticonceptual apparatus whose main function would be that ofarresting the tendential progress of epistemic representation toward totalarticulation” (Moreiras 2001, 33). This apparatus,Moreiras continues, wouldwork “not as a machine of epistemic homogenization but potentiallyagainst it as a disruptive force, or a wrench, in the epistemological appara-tus . . . through a radical appeal to an epistemic outside, to an exteriority thatwill not be turned into a mere fold of the imperial self ” (2001, 33). Moreover,there is a tendential political valence of this epistemic apparatus insofar as it“understands itself in epistemic solidaritywith the residual voices, or silences,of Latin American alterity” (Moreiras 2001, 37). But only “under certain con-ditions,” as onemust always keep inmind that globalized capital easily assim-ilates solidarity, thus converting it from a well-intended gesture of politicalsupport of the excluded remainder into further reduction and domination ofthe groups and individuals with which solidarity is claimed. However, theintended upshot of this defensive effort is not simply preservation of alterityitself, but something that would approach the constitution of a new commu-nity founded on an “uncertain possibility of communication whereby theother can break through preconstituted representation and assert somethinglike a new word” (Moreiras 2001, 133). This community is constitutively openin its negative formation, enacting an infinite inclusivity of the infinite fini-tudes populating the world. For Moreiras, the alterity of the other is consti-tutedby a sort ofnegative identitywith anagencyof its own, but anagency thatis suppressed by hegemonic discourses—hence, the indication of the other’spotential to “break through” dominant forms of representation and inventnewdiscourses. This negatively defined alterity is fundamental in that it givesrise to “theunderstanding that itwill notbepossible toabandon the reductionand subordination of radical alterity” (Moreiras 2001, 135). The contradictoryprocess of this new epistemic apparatus rests on an “abyssal grounding” that“is asmuch the source of its critical power as it is its defining limit” (2001, 135).

In Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo políticoMoreiras further refines hisunderstanding of what he previously called “radical alterity” through devel-oping the concept of the “no sujeto” (“non-subject”). This notion of the non-subject emerges fromMoreiras’s intuition “that there is something in us and




beyond us that overwhelmingly exceeds subjectivity, including the subjectiv-ity of the unconscious” (2006, 10). Here, Moreiras’s concern expands beyondthe disciplinary boundaries of Latin Americanist cultural theory that framedthe interventionsof theprevious twobooks. The focusofLíneade sombra is oninterrupting the conceptual foundations of contemporary political thoughtmore generally through a rigorous critique of militant subjectivity. Thus, theformulation of the non-subject emerges for Moreiras out of the need to de-velop a thought of the political that would be entirely divorced from any basiswhatsoever in subjectivism. “Subjectivism,” Moreiras explains, “is just a stepaway from identitarianism, which I have considered since my youth to be themost obvious contemporary conciliation to disreputable nihilism and pioushumanism in all its forms” (2006, 10). The traditional reliance on a (metaphys-ical, humanist) subject for political thought constitutes, inMoreiras’s estima-tion, an ultimately theological form of thought. More precisely, politicalthought that bases itself on the central concept of militant subjectivity isalways the result of a conceptualization of the political as determined by theclosed binary of the friend-enemydistinction theorized byCarl Schmitt inTheNomos of the Earth. In a globalized world, Moreiras writes, “no one is outsidethe nomos—except . . . the inhabitants of bare life,” and the only alternative tobare life in such a scenario is the position of “planetary subjectification, theunique subject of the present, the subject” (2006, 34). Those who inhabit barelife are, itwouldappear, non-subjects, thosewhoare excludedby the regimeofsubjectivity. Moreiras wonders, however, if this “continual reduction of theworld to subjectivity” is not always already a signal of the “tyranny of theOne”(2006, 34). To resist this domination of the One, Moreiras exhorts us toembrace, rather, a heterogeneous “double refusal” of identity, of subjectivity,of subjectification in the false and reductive choice between the friendand theenemy, to seek to dwell beyond the totalization that is the necessary outcomeof subjective political militancy. Moreiras insists that subjectivity, because itis always constituted by that which it excludes, by an unassimilable alterity, isnever anything other than a vain pretense to wholeness that perpetuates thevery exclusion onwhich it relies. Thus, all attempts to decolonize or constructan emancipatory political subjectivity for the abject or oppressed “cannotavoid falling into . . . a cleanliness, anorderliness, a sanity, anda responsibility

A n d r e w A s c h e r l ! 1 8 7



of which the price is a fundamental omission: the omission of the real, of thefundamental disconnect between life and history” (Moreiras 2006, 46).Within this perspective, the notion of an emancipatory political subjectivitycannot help but seem ideological. In its inevitable pretension to complete-ness, it will only perpetuate exclusion, dividing the world into friends andenemies, and ultimately losing any emancipatory capacity.

As an alternative, Moreiras proposes that we instead begin to think thepolitical “as a relationwithout relation . . . to think of a ‘beyond the subject’ asthe condition of possibility of the abyssal relation of the subject with itself”(2006, 57). To think this “beyond” is to formulate an “enigmatic remainder”that “occupies thenon-place of thenon-friend—that space orfieldwhichdoesnot enter into the sovereign relation but in relation to which any sovereignrelation becomes possible” (2006, 58). Moreiras identifies this non-place asthe locus of subalternity itself: “that is, that which can only experience thehegemonic articulation as domination, and which is therefore beyond hege-mony” (2006, 58). This is the non-subject that prevents the closure of everytheory of subjectivity and exposes it to its limit. Within a Schmittian concep-tion of the political, every theory of subjectivity declares thatwhich is externalto it to be an enemy. But,Moreiras’s non-subject both exceeds the subject andgrounds it. The hope and the promise of this reconfiguration of the political asa relationless relation is, for Moreiras, “that of restoring the political againstthe political understood as the contemporary dispensation of sovereignty”(2006, 58). This contemporary configuration of the political “is the very nameof oppression, first self-oppression, and then that of others” which we shouldresist instead of offering it “as a remedy or defense against really existingantagonisms” (2006, 73). This “non-place” or space “beyond the subject”—theplace of the non-subject—appears to be very similar to the locus of what, inThe Politics of Friendship, Derrida calls “the antithesis of the political [that]dwells within and politicizes the political” (Derrida 1997, 138). However,whereas Derrida’s theorization of the necessarily heteronomous domain ofthe political is concerned to provide a rigorous description of the conditionsof possibility for any politics whatsoever, Moreiras’s proposal to rethink thepolitical exhibits a normative tendency that differentiates it from a morestrictly Derridean approach to deconstruction.




According toMoreiras, thenon-subject of thepolitical is not just thefigureof externality of any given political system, but also “principally, the condi-tionless condition of every systemand thus the effective ground of all politics”(2006, 81). Without explaining precisely how a “conditionless condition”could ever provide a ground for anything, let alone politics, Moreiras ex-presses that the anonymous figure of the non-subject is necessary to anypolitical thought that would attempt to overcome partisanship, which “isinsufficient to capture the contemporary specificity of the political” (2006,82). Moreiras’s politics of the non-subject is intended to move politicalthought beyond the partisan politics of friendship, which is also the politics ofhegemony, toward “a political act” that would eschew all notions of commu-nity, of friendship, of enmity, and into “the regionofnon-militancy fromwhichall militancy and all partisanship emerges” (2006, 82). Moreiras insists thatsuch a nonmilitant political act would be carried out neither in the name ofneutrality nor of pacifism, but against all partisanship based on the friend-enemy distinction. In other words, the politics of the non-subject is not apolitics for any particular position; rather, the most that can be said about itsorientation is that it is against all subjective (which is to say, partisan and,thus, necessarily theological) politics. This politics of non-belonging is whatMoreiras calls “infrapolitics,” a form of thought that would point toward “theradical possibility of a de-theologized theory of the political” (2006, 132). Thiswork of de-theologization requires a theory of thatwhich inhabits and consti-tutes the very concept of the subject itself. This is Moreiras’s non-subject: apermanent and inherent resistance within the subject that “the subject mustconstantly subtract in a kind of self-foundation carried out through virtue (avirtue that, not coincidentally, the catechism names or named ‘theological’:faith, charity, hope are all necessary and sufficient conditions of the absolutesubject of political life, which is also the absolute subject of spiritual life)”(2006, 131). Thus, according to Moreiras, a subject-based politics does notsufficiently address the demands of the non-subjectivity that dwells withinand defines it, precisely because of this constant subtraction of its inherentand resistant non-subjectivity. Moreiras takes pains to establish that the non-subject is notmerely an inversion of the subject, or anything that could be delim-ited inanostensiblepositivityor incarnated inanysortofobjectiveway—todoso

A n d r e w A s c h e r l ! 1 8 9



would just render it anotherhypostatized subject-identity thatwouldnecessarilybe founded on that which it excludes. To the contrary, the non-subject is veryliterally a nonentity, a strictly undecidable interruption of any thought of thesubject, the very purpose of which is to trouble and undermine all subjectivizedpolitics. It does not “form a new subject of the political, but it is the site for theappearanceof thatwhichdwells in theunthoughtofmodern subjectivity. It is thepromise of another constitution of the political” (Moreiras 2009, 182). It is clearenough howMoreiras proposes to rethink or focus a new lens on the politicalthrough the unthought remainder of the subject, but it is more difficult to seehow such a new perspective—one that is explicitly opposed to any form ofsubjectivization—can lead to a nonpartisan political act, which is to say: if thenon-subject is in essence no more than a “site” or a “promise” of a newconstitution of the political, how can it act, politically or otherwise?

Moreiras contends that “the very notion of a non-subject of the political isperhaps a performative contradiction” for thought that may be obliged torefer to the non-subject as alterity (2006, 276). However,

alterity signifies that the non-subject is never the object—the alterity of the

non-subject radically exceeds objectivity because the object is always an

object for a subject. The non-subject is never at hand, never accessible. The

non-subject is not the object, and is likewise never the self, precisely in so

far as, on the one hand, it must be articulated in discourse, and on the

other, it must fail in its articulation. As unavailable, as an instance always

in retreat, the non-subject cannot be articulated. (Moreiras 2006, 276)

Indeed, this is because subjectivity itself canbe thoughtof as the verymeansofarticulation, necessarily barring the non-subject from any attempt at articu-lating it. To think the non-subject of the political is a performative contradic-tion, because this thought “formalizes a betrayal” (276). Moreover, this politicalbetrayal is the only possibility available for the thought of the non-subject ofthe political. Following a formulation from Adorno and Horkheimer’s TheDialectic of theEnlightenment,Moreiras posits that suchbetrayal is an indexortrace of utopia. The sign of utopia is the performative contradiction that is thethought of the non-subject of the political itself:




But this trace of utopia—the eternal promise of the dialectic, including nega-

tive dialectics, from Plato to Adorno himself—is precarious from the point of

view of reason, and its epistemic content is perhaps of the order of a kind of

faith.Whocansay tous that the self-fulfillmentof thought, even the fulfillment

beyond absolute self-fulfillment, inevitably leads to the end of distortion, to

the apotheosis of truth, and that this truth will be less or more than absolute

cruelty? If one thinks that such an affirmation can be made, then thought is

inevitably modeled on the fantasy of divine thought, and it sets out from the

postulation that self-transparency is accessible. To arrive at self-transparency

at the end of the road of thought via infinite mediation is the promise or the

hope of the dialectic, but it always remains a promise or a hope. (Moreiras

2006, 278–79)

Thus, in Moreiras’s consideration of political thought, any reliance on mili-tant subjectivity as the central category of the political is ultimatelymetaphys-ical and theological. The militant subject both emerges from and generates as itsremainder a non-subjectivizable remnant that Moreiras once referred to as“subalternity,” but has now renominated (without eschewing the subaltern asa concept) “the non-subject of the political.” The non-subject is, in this sense,amore resistant form of the subaltern. It cannot be appropriated, nor is thereanything proper to it. In Línea de sombra, Moreiras calls for a critique ofmilitant (subjective) politics, but not in the name of reactionary values. Thatsaid, beyond performing a consistent critique and condemnation of radicalpolitical militancy that is “the culmination of the Enlightenment in its cruelsense and is thus the strict counterpart of thebiopolitical powerof the State asthe total administration of life” (2006, 295), it is unclear that infrapolitics canadequately constitute a practice that would bring forth a new, emancipatorypolitics, in spite of Moreiras’s suggestion that it can.

For example, in a recent study of Héctor Aguilar Camín’s novels, Moreirasprovocatively suggests that the narrative genre known as the “thriller” can bedefined as “the literary treatment of murder, which seeks to unveil it, not justto express it” (2007, 147). Moreover, the thriller is “the dominant and perhapseven normative narrative structure of our time,” and this narrative form isalways “an ethical estheticization of politics” that “renders the political in a

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narrative form, and it does so fromaprimarily ethical stance” (Moreiras 2007,147). As “an ethical practice of right in literary terms . . . the thriller is not ameans to an end, but an affirmation of the end as ethical end” (Moreiras 2007,150). According to Moreiras, the thriller effectuates an ethico-political chias-mus compatible with the infrapolitical project: the ethical and political struc-ture of the thriller enables it to perform a particular way of thinking thepolitical insofar as it is “an ethical form for thinking the political that is also apolitical form for thinking the ethical” (2007, 151). Indeed, Moreiras explicitlyconnects this chiasmatic literary mode of the thriller to the concept of the“infrapolitical,” that he defines here as “an interruption of the ethical by thepolitical andof thepolitical by the ethical” (2007, 151). Aswehave already seen,infrapolitics grounds a non- or anti-subjective thinking of politics that ismeant to stave off the ontotheological traps of subjective political militancy,which always both produces and excludes a fundamental otherness.Moreirasgoes on to assert the capability of infrapolitics to ward off “every possiblemoralism” as well as to confront and critique “the moralistic residue in con-temporary philosophical positions whose appeal to weak definitions of theethical seem to empower them to occupy some kind of self-assigned highground” (2007, 166). For example, Moreiras objects to the “ethics withoutothers” of Alain Badiou’s subject-oriented politics, detecting in it amoralisticremainder that is evinced by its “rejection of recognition [and] stubbornrefusal to negotiate the political encounter with beings for whom the event oftruth might be differentially interpreted, or for whom there has been nopolitical truth-event, and thus no political constitution of subjectivity” (2007,168). This obstinacy “runs the risk of turning Badiouian political practice intoalways already Jacobinist, and way too impersonal” (Moreiras 2007, 168).Moreiras objects that the Badiouian subject of truth (i.e., the body that be-comes a subject in and through its recognition of the truth of an event andpursuit of the consequences of that truth in the wake of the event) creates adifferential of power between those who are seized by the truth issuing froman event, and consequently pursue further knowledge about that truth, andthose who do not. Against this seemingly decisionist politics, Moreiras pro-motes instead a thinking of politics based on the fundamental ethical priorityof the rights of the other—of the subaltern non-subject that is external to any




subject-based truthprocedure. In response to the charge that this ethics of theother perpetuates a passive attitude toward political change and underminesthe assertion of universal equality throughdeferral to the other,Moreiras saysthat such “passivity is nothing but the recognition that the demand for uni-versal equality is empty if it is not accompanied by the transcendental priorityof the rights of others over my own rights” (2007, 169). In Moreiras’s estima-tion, in crime fiction’s attempt to “unconceal the secret” inscribed in a mur-der, “crime literature looks at theworld from an ethical perspective” preciselybecause “everymurder is an ethical breach, an ethical fault . . . Everymurder isa relation to the other, and it is essentially a relation to the other” (2007, 169).Moreover, deploying an infrapolitical reading of crime literature against apolitical ethics of subjective militancy (such as that found in Badiou’s philos-ophy), Moreiras claims “there can be no murder if the ‘ethical predicationbasedupon recognition of the other [is] purely and simply abandoned’” (2007,169). Further establishing the ethical stakes of the crime thriller, Moreirascontinues:

Literature, in the case of crime literature, or of the thriller, when it makes of

any murder, or of any crime, its focus of investigation, becomes a political

apparatus that seeks to give response to an ethical suspension. Murder is

ethical, insofar as it is primarily anegationor suspensionof the ethical. But the

need to investigate murder, the need to understand it, and the need to articu-

late that comprehension in language, is no longer primarily an ethical obliga-

tion. It seeks to intervene in ethics, to restitute ethics, to correct, even if

symbolically, an interruption or a suspension of ethics, But it is already im-

properly ethical, because the attempt itself, the need and the expression of the

need to investigate, to understand, can only be determined out of its own

distance from the ethical. (2007, 170)

Thus, Moreiras assigns to the narrative form of the thriller a powerful andhighly specialized ethical task, one that, in its infrapolitical mode, seeks todevelop a political response to ethical suspension (in particular, that of mur-der) and “enters an ethico-political relationwith the suspension of ethics, notjust an ethical relation . . . Because literature is language, and the language of

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a community, its ethical impropriety expresses itself necessarily in a politicaldimension” (2007, 170). This political dimension of the crime thriller, accord-ing toMoreiras, is necessarily democratic. Indeed, because it is characterizedby ethical universalism, crime fiction, which is “the reflexive intersection ofliterature and crime, heteronomically marked by the political need to inter-rupt the suspension of the ethical and by the ethical need to interrupt thesuspension of the political, is democratic literature” (2007, 173).

Moreiras’s infrapolitical conceptualization of literature as capable of eth-ical labor relies on an infrapolitical ethics of alterity that prioritizes the rightof the other over all other considerations. In Moreiras’s view, this prioritiza-tion is what allows crime literature to disrupt any teleological, integral (e.g.,national) narrative that would illegitimately conceal “the suspension of theradical priority of the other, and hence [conceal] the process of subalterniza-tion and sacrifice” (2007, 173). For Moreiras, it follows that the only adequatedefense against such national or identitarian concealment is democracy, orrather, literary democracy—literature understooddemocratically, that, in theinfrapolitical orientation, is “Literature’s impropriety, literature’s ethical het-eronomy” and the determination of literature by (infrapolitical) ethics, whichserves as “the democratic mark at the heart of the literary endeavor” (2007,173).

Throughout his sustained elaboration of the infrapolitical project,Moreiras shows how other conceptions of political practice are ethicallyinadequate when viewed through the infrapolitical lens, but any descriptionof what an infrapolitical practicemight look like is somewhat difficult to find.What infrapolitics, as a thinking of politics that opposes any formofmilitancyinsofar as this latter is necessarily founded on a constitutive exclusion,amounts to is a “politics of the passive decision” that “will have displacedontotheology, and its political translation as a theory of sovereignty, from thehorizon of the political” (Moreiras 2006, 271, 268–69). The “passive decision”Moreirasmentions here as a central characteristic of infrapolitics ismeant toresonate with Derrida’s discussion of the decision as an aporia that alwaystakes place against the unconditional, and a priori repudiation of full sover-eignty that forms the basis for the essential corruptibility of all supposedlysovereign decisions (and, by extension, all supposedly self-identical subjectiv-




ity).3 Thus, against a subject-based politics, that is, according to Moreiras,always a politics of sovereignty, a politics of the self-identical ability to decide,and therefore, a politics of exclusion and domination, Moreiras offers us thealternative of infrapolitics: a “practical politics of the new order of the politi-cal,” that is, “a non-ontotheological politics”which is notmerely anopening tothe arrival of the other as the groundless ground of all sovereign or subjectivedecision; it is also “fundamentally a critique of subjective militancy” (2006,272).

A problem arises here. Derrida’s elaboration of the notion of the “passivedecision” (foundprimarily inThePolitics of Friendship,Rogues, and “TheForceof Law”) does not indicate that any particular political practice can be derivedfrom it. Even thoughDerrida points out that the passive decision is at bottom“a rendingdecisionof. . . . [T]he absolute other inme, the other as the absolutethat decides on me in me” (1997, 68), thus interrupting the ability of anysubject to account fully for any decision she makes, he nevertheless empha-sizes that this heteronomy inherent to the decision is the condition of anydecisionwhatsoever, nomatterhowapparently “active” or “passive” itmaybe.The passivity Derrida has in mind here results in a peculiar helplessness thatis constitutive of any decision, “where I decide what I cannot fail to decide,freely, necessarily” (69). However, in contrast to Moreiras’s intention to ele-vate the notion of passivity into an ethico-political practice, Derrida regardsthe necessary passivity of decision as another expression of the structuralvulnerability, exposure, and corruptibility of all sovereignty and subjectivity.In other words, Derrida’s approach is fundamentally descriptive, rather thannormative. Moreiras moves beyond the rigorous description of the passivitythat inheres in all decisions found in Derridean deconstruction and convertsit into the basis for an ethical practice of politics, prescribing passivity, as itwere, as a key to a political practice of nondomination.

In Moreiras’s efforts to rethink the politics of nondomination, the non-subject is a figure of alterity defined by a difference that cannot be subsumedby existing regimes of knowledge. This resistant figure of alterity potentiallyleads to an emancipatory form of thinking that would avoid legitimizing anytheorizationof a supposedly self-identical subject that constitutively excludesthe other. Such alterity cannot ever be reduced to a specific object or form of

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representation. Thus, for Moreiras the alterity that is the non-subject is un-derstood as a limit of theworld of signification that enables us to examine theconceptual basis of the world and our knowledge of it. However, such ananalysis does not by itself provide the theoretical tools for a renewed politicsof emancipation or nondomination. As necessary as it may be to maintainnegative critique as a perpetual guardian of the enigmatic and excludedremainder within political thought and practice, such guardianship cannotproduce on its ownanew theory of practical politics. Toproduce anew theoryof political practice, Moreiras almost imperceptibly endows the radical alter-ity of the non-subject with a minimal agency or substance. An unavoidablepolitical impasse thus arises from Moreiras’s practice of negative critiquefrom what seems to be a surreptitious hypostatization of alterity. Further-more, this hypostatized notion of alterity is conceptualized as perpetuallyunder the threat of annihilation by instances of subjectivity, and therefore itsprotection is elevated to the status of a primary ethical imperative. It seems,then, that the logical outcome of such a position is that every alterity must bepreserved at all costs to prevent the emergence of a supposedly fully presentsubject that unavoidably acts as a privileged signifier over an infinity ofsubordinate(d) differences. This sort of prescriptive negative critique oper-ates under a seemingly unassailable ethical injunction to critique and under-mine all would-be presence and to sustain an infinite circulation around,defense of, and deference to the space of alterity, thus cutting off in advanceany effort to produce a fundamental change that is not essentially defensive oreternally (only) resistant. At its best, a negative critique like infrapolitics is amode of theoretical practice that is valuable for maintaining vigilanceagainst the seductions of totalization and the fantasy of the incorruptiblefullness of identity. However, this rigorous form of critique is structurallylimited in its ability to develop a thought of the sort of new and transfor-mative politics for which it unflaggingly clears space. For a political prac-tice to emerge, it is necessary to retain a theory of the subject, even if thissubjectmust be theorized as always divided, always corruptible. Neverthe-less, a subjective act of passing through impasses such as those identifiedby various forms of negative critique is essential to any effort to transforma political situation. Consequently, the primary shortcoming of infrapoli-




tics resides in its (paradoxically militant) resistance to theories of subjec-tivity and its opposition to any attempts to theorize an affirmative, ifalways necessarily violent and corruptible, approach to the thought ofemancipatory politics.

In theoretical considerations of alterity—suchas infrapolitics—therenec-essarily exists a remainder that breaks up the totalities it takes as targets of itscritique. In preventing totalization, this remainder indicates the constitutiveincompleteness and limits of, for example, sovereignty or subjective ap-proaches to thinking the political. A negative critique such as Moreiras’sinfrapolitics, however, comes up short in that its hypostatization of alterityinevitably appears, to borrow a formulation fromAlenkaZupancic, “preciselyas the closure of that which is said to resist any closure” (2008, 51). The intentof the infrapolitical prohibition against deploying a militant subjectivity asthe key to transformative politics is ostensibly to ward off any pretensions tothe totalization of thought, precisely because such totalization is always andby definition a violent exclusion of alterity. DespiteMoreiras’s insistence thatinfrapolitics is a form of thought that remains open to difference and alterityagainst pretensions to totalization and self-presence, it ends up paradoxicallyclosing itself off from any attempt to develop a thought of political invention.Even while such philosophical prophylaxis may successfully defend againsttotalization or dogmatism, it does not within its own theoretical parameters,allow for the development of an alternative thought of emancipatory politics.Nor is there any sort of logical necessity that the vigilant defense mechanismof infrapoliticswill ever precipitate anemancipatorypolitics. This is not to saythat the deployment of this consciousness of alterity could not potentially befollowed by amore affirmative orientation toward thinking emancipation. Allthe same, the danger to be avoided is that in which thought would remaintrapped by an understanding of the constitutive finitude of all politicalthought and practice as a prohibition on conscious, active political decision-making, which always presumes some sort of sovereignty, some sort of iden-tity, some sort of subjectivity—even if it is ultimately corruptible. In otherwords, what should be avoided is the slippage from an argument for a greaterattunement to alterity as the inherent corruptibility and instability of anypolitical position (no matter how committed to nondominance it is) to an

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ethical argument that emphasizes deferral to and prioritization of the rightsof a hypostatized alterity produced and excluded by subjectivization.

The conflation of descriptive critique with a normative ethics of alteritycan only result in a limited and ultimately quietistic orientation toward polit-ical transformation. This is a criticism of which Moreiras is not unaware. Forinstance, defending his conceptualization of infrapolitics against the chargethat the infrapolitical emphasis on prioritizing the rights of the other overone’s own leads to a generalized political acquiescence, Moreiras asserts:

If I affirm my own truth to be universal and valid for all, and refuse to let my

neighbor disagree for his own good, the fundamental problem is not intoler-

ance: it is rather the fact that I become structurally incapable of engaging in

the ethical adjudication of any possible ethicopolitical conflict. . . . [which re-

sults in] a moralism that will not listen to the untruth of the other. (2007, 169)

Moreiras’s intention here is to demonstrate that the constitutive heteronomyof political thought entails the necessary corruption of any subjective mili-tancy, and that the latter must be superseded by an ethical practice of rightthat includes everyone, even—especially—those who disagree with whateverpolitics are at stake. This is the sense inwhichMoreiras identifies infrapoliticsas “the radically democratic republicanism of the last man and of the lastwoman” (2007, 150). In other words, the exposure of political thought to thelimits placed on it by an inherent alterity that limits it and opens it to corrup-tion is not simply a structural law, but also an ethical injunction. What thismeans, then, is that in its effort to maintain a maximum aperture for newpossibilities for emancipatory change by staving off any attempts at the clo-sure of thought, the ground ofMoreiras’s infrapolitics shifts froman accurate,if severe, descriptive discourse on human existence to become an ethicalprescription on the impossibility of ever carrying out attempts at change,precisely because of its guiding imperative about what is possible. Zupancicdescribes this substitution of the ethical for the structural as “the passagefrom ‘We are limited, divided, exposed beings’ to ‘Be limited, divided, ex-posed!’ (that is to say, youmust accept this)” (2008, 51). Moreiras’s claim that“the adjudication of any possible ethicopolitical conflict” is rendered impos-




sible by the refusal of subjective militancy to promote an ethics based on thedeferral of subjective decision in favor of prioritizing the rights of the other isbased on a conflation of alterity as an unavoidable, structural given thatconditions all experience (i.e., Derridean deconstruction), with alterity as ahypostatized entity that demands ethical priority. In other words, Moreirasdeploys a radically descriptive discourse as if it were instead the frameworkfor a radically democratic ethico-political position.

Additionally, Moreiras’s infrapolitical approach refuses to conceive ofantagonism as constitutive of social life. That is, it assumes that antagonismemerges only when extreme activity usurps the “neutral” (which, currentlywould be undeniably liberal) balance of the marketplace of ideas and posi-tions. Consequently, in his prioritization of the ethics of the other, Moreirasfurther assumesaneutral spaceof the law (inMoreiras’sKantian formulation,a “radically democratic republicanism of the last man and the last woman”[2007, 150]) that allows one’s “neighbor [to] disagree for his own good”—necessary, in Moreiras’s view, because it is the only approach that allows oneto participate “in the ethical adjudication of any possible ethicopolitical con-flict” (2007, 169). The ethical injunction of infrapolitics demands that allpolitical actors retain an unimpeachable respect for the “unthinkability of thesecret” of the other, of that which is inaccessible and unknowable to oneself toprevent theemergenceofadominatingsubject thatwouldviolentlydetermineordecide the status of the otherwhen it should instead remain undecidable.

Protected from the dangers of ontotheological subjectivism, which fromMoreiras’s perspective can only ever produce and exclude enemies in thename of its own self-constitution, infrapolitics decides for a philosophicalpurity that takes the formof political passivity. Because infrapolitics prohibitsthe thinking of political subjectivity, it disallows any ethical prescription thatwould wager on a postcritical affirmation, and thus it cannot adequatelytheorize change—at leastnot fromwithin its ownethical parameters. Further-more, because infrapolitics is structurally prohibited from thinking new forms ofconcrete, transformative politics, and in fact explicitly constitutes itself as a formof resistance to any affirmative thinking of newpossibilities, the crucial questionbecomes: How can thought move beyond theoretical models which confinethemselves to the negative labor of permanent critique?

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The task would seem to be the construction of a materialism that incor-porates and maintains the analytical power of negative critique, which is tosay, one that does not simply return to old (and justifiably criticized)modern-ist ideals of teleology and meta-narrative—such would in fact be closure andtotalization—but also does not succumb to the paralysis of inaction that canemergewhenone recognizes the inherent risk of corruptibility in anydecisionto act, politically or otherwise. From this fear andparalysis, no transformativepolitics can emerge, only permanent negation. If it is true that there is noclosure, that the social and theoretical space is always open to critique, thenwhat is “universally” true is thatwhat is—that is, thematter of our existence—is “not-all,” that any given conjuncture (socially, politically, and theoretically)always includes gaps in which exist the possibility of the new and the unde-termined, although they do not present themselves to us in that way, butrather as totalized and totalizing. The slippage from a critical lens of rigorousdescription to ethical normativity one finds in the infrapolitical elevation ofalterity over and above any political deployment of subjective militancy is asymptomofwhatmust be addressed in any new conceptualization of politics.Instead of abandoning the subject, wemust strive to think it anew. In refusingto abandon a project of and for a revolutionary future, we need to movebeyond ethics and toward anewconceptualization of politics. The key to sucha new thought of politics resides in the reconfiguration of the subject.

N O T E S

1. See, for example, Moreiras’s response to Beverley’s criticisms (2012).2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Spanish to English are my own.3. See Derrida (1997, 68–69).

R E F E R E N C E S

Beverley, John. 2011. Latinamericanism after 9/11. 2011. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Derrida, Jacques. 1997. The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso.Moreiras, Alberto. 1999. Tercer espacio: Duelo y literatura en América Latina. Santiago, Chile:

ARCIS/LOM Ediciones.




. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.. 2006. Línea de sombra: El no-sujeto de lo politico. Santiago, Chile: Palinodia.. 2007. Infrapolitics and the Thriller: A Prolegomenon to Every Possible Form ofAntimoralist Literary Criticism. On Héctor Aguilar Camín’s La guerra de Galio andMorir en el golfo. In The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism, ed. Erin Graff Zivin,147–79. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.. 2009. The Last God: María Zambrano’s Life Without Texture. In A Leftist Ontology:Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, ed. Carsten Strathausen, 170–84. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.. 2012. The Fatality of (My) Subalternism: A Response to John Beverley. The NewCentennial Review 12, no. 2: 217–46.

Zupancic, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In: On Comedy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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