III Seminario Crítico-Político Transnacional
“Pensamiento y terror social: El archivo hispano”
Cuenca, Spain
July, 2016
“Life During Wartime: Infrapolitics and Posthegemony”
(with a coda of eleven theses on infrapolitics)
It is civil war that, as Giorgio Agamben suggests (though he does not use these terms), functions as the threshold or hinge between infrapolitics and the political. Moreover, Agamben points to the ways in which civil war has become now global, infesting itself in everyday life under the name of terrorism: “Global terrorism is the form that civil war acquires,” he tells us, “when life as such becomes the stake of politics” (18). So there is no point denying civil war, or trying to exclude it from the political order. We need rather to recognize that order’s indebtedness to it, and–as Orwell suggests–pick one of the many sides (who says there should be just two?) that any such conflict opens up. For this is the very paradigm of the political, of the perpetual emergence and dissolution of political activity as such.
eleven theses on infrapolitics
- Infrapolitics is not against politics. It is not apolitical, still less antipolitical.
- There is no politics without infrapolitics.
- It is only by considering infrapolitics that we can better demarcate the terrain of the political per se, understand it, and take it seriously.
- The interface between the infrapolitical and the political cannot be conceived simply in terms of capture.
- Only a fully developed theory of posthegemony can account properly for the relationship between infrapolitics and politics.
- Infrapolitics corresponds to the virtual, and so to habitus and unqualified affect.
- The constitution (and dissolution) of the political always involves civil war.
- Biopolitics is the name for the colonization of the infrapolitical realm by political forces, and so the generalization of civil war.
- But neither politics nor biopolitics have any predetermined valence; biopolitics might also be imagined to be the colonization of the political by the infrapolitical.
- None of these terms–politics, infrapolitics, biopolitics, posthegemony–can have any normative dimension.
- Hitherto, philosophers have only sought to change the world in various ways. The point, however, is to interpret it.