Alberto Moreiras

HYBRIDITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or ‘essentializations’) of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities ...

Subalternity and affect

from a preoccupation with the culturalisation of the concept of hegemony, a concept that is, in its way, something like ÒhegemonicÓ within cultural criticism and theory. Our preoccupation with the concept, or rather with its extension and culturalisation, soon manifested itself as a dissatisfaction, though perhaps (as some of the essays in this collection also indicate) it continues to be indispensable, if not always in the ways that one tends to assume. The prevalence of the concept of hegemony coincides with an increasingly unreflexive culturalism in mainstream cultural studies; indeed, it coincides with cultural studies becoming mainstream, as its assumptions and its terminology come to constitute Òwhat goes without sayingÓ in much of academia Ð and many places beyond. Thus, for instance, the assertion that the domain of culture extends far beyond what has traditionally been regarded as ÒlegitimateÓ or ÒhighÓ culture is now taken for granted almost everywhere. Likewise, no one now is taken aback by the assertion that power can be seen at work in this expanded realm of culture as much as (if not more than) in the traditional corridors where power was once said to reside. Indeed, it is precisely because the concept of hegemony seems to accord so easily with our ÒnaturalÓ concept of this new, media-driven and globalised world that we might begin to doubt that the concept has much scope left in it for the articulation of a critique (as opposed to a description of the rationality) of that world. Elsewhere, therefore, we have called for a re-examination of the workings of the state and the relation of culture to its institutional outside as a way to think beyond the concept of hegemony. Here, however, we take another tack. Perhaps the most important innovation provided by the South Asian Subaltern Studies group has been their reconceptualisation of the relation between hegemony and subalternity. Whereas for Gramsci (and for cultural studies in the Gramscian tradition Ð which is a great part of cultural studies today), the relation between hegemony and subalternity was positive, for the Subaltern Studies group, that relation is negative. Indeed, it is at best a relation of non-relation. What is perhaps at issue now is the status of that Òat best.Ó Here is where the question of affect, as explored by the essays in this collection, comes into play. But let us explain this in a little more detail. By suggesting that the relation between hegemony and subalternity has usually been understood as a positive relation, we mean that hegemony has been understood as a strategy of incorporation, co-optation, or inclusion whereby the subaltern has been persuaded to lend his or her support to a social order that (objectively) maintains him or her in a position of inferiority. Hegemony is a form of articulation (and this is

A Thinking Relationship: The End of Subalternity—Notes on Hegemony, Contingency, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Is there a thinking relationship in this book? Is it one discussion, or are there three? Are they all reflecting in the wake or withdrawal of one common silent affirmation that eludes them as much as it calls them and ensnares them? Or do we face a series of three, a serialization of thinking that alternately finds and loses intersections whose aleatory character reveals and belies encounter for what it is (not)? The question becomes obsessive. The more unasked it is, the more it haunts the reading of Judith Butler,

Deconstruction: Regional Intellectuals, The Stain in their Eye

The shifts in the world economy which began with the ‘debt crisis’ that opened in the Americas in the 1980s and which were forcefully advanced at the end of that decade by the collapse of communism in Europe meant that, whatever their ideological ambition and rhetorical practice, most Latin American governments in the 1990s were perforce cleaving to policies of capitalist orthodoxy promoted by the USA. ‘Globalization’, then, was far from simply coincidental with the end of the Cold War and the bi-polar form of superpower relations; it was and is intimately connected with that political transformation. We must recognize that the termination of a world of images and reflexes founded upon the existence of an anti-capitalist project has greatly increased the confidence of the managers of liberal economies. Two effects of this are plainly visible: the poor of Latin America received minimal material benefit (beyond the curtailing of inflation) to accompany the disappearance of Cold War politics, and the Latin American political elite found its ideological repertoire sharply constrained as ties with the USA tightened. (pp. 312–313)

SEPARATION AND THE POLITICS OF THEORY

The Marxian concept of ÒseparationÓ would explain or help to explain, for Fredric Jameson, the end of ideology in postmodernism. A tendentially accomplished separation would be instrumental in determining the diminishing function of intellectual life in the perpetuation and reproduction of the socioeconomic system. Jameson associates primitive accumulation with separation in that he defines it as Òthe production of the proletariat in terms of their separation from the means of productionÓ (Postmodernism 399). An ongoing separation in intellectual labor Ð the separation between the intellectual and her or his work, or the production of the intellectual as an (intellectual) wage laborer Ð would be functional in the becoming-optional of any given ideological code. Optionality, or market choice, counters the fictional or ideological necessity of a thoughtÕs embodiment:

Preemptive Manhunt: A New Partisanship

We are familiar with press descriptions of some of the search operations carried out by Task Force 121 and other special forces (including the Pakistani Quick Reaction Force) to track down Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other leaders ofAl-Qaeda, theTaliban, and the Baathist Party.1 All of the aforementioned are, or were, leaders of countries or partisan factions with which the United States is formally at war. Their capture can be thought of as a necessity of war in the traditional sense. But we are less familiar with what, according to Seymour Hersh, Pentagon advisers are calling preemptive manhunting,2 a term they use to characterize a specific kind of operation entrusted to those forces. Manhunt is a term that Donald Rumsfeld apparently uses to

Spanish reactionary thinking: an introduction

Y no me digas que no quieres combatir, porque en el instante mismo en que me lo dices estás combatiendo; ni que ignoras a qué lado inclinarte, porque en el momento mismo en que eso dices ya te inclinaste a un lado; ni me afirmes que quieres ser neutral, porque cuando piensas serlo, ya no lo eres; ni me asegures que permanecerás indiferente, porque me burlaré de ti, como quiera que al pronunciar esa palabra ya tomaste tu partido. No te canses en buscar asilo seguro contra los azares de la guerra, porque te cansas vanamente; esa guerra se dilata tanto como el espacio y se prolonga tanto como el tiempo. Sólo en la eternidad, patria de los justos, puedes encontrar descanso; porque sólo allı́ no hay combate; no presumas, empero, que se abran para ti las puertas de la eternidad, si no muestras antes las cicatrices que llevas; aquellas puertas no se abren sino para los que combatieron aquı́ los combates del Señor gloriosamente, y para los que van, como el Señor, crucificados. Donoso Cortés, Ensayo 79

A beggaring description: The republican secret in Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo El Supremo, Together With some comments on symbolic production and radical evil

Carlo Galli, Roberto Esposito, and in general the group of thinkers associated with the Italian journal Filosofia politica have made the claim many times that our contemporary world is through with the conceptuality of modern politics, that most if not all of the productive concepts of political modernity have come to the end of their productivity and now lie in ruins.1 Perhaps it is time to suggest, merely hypothetically and provided Galli, Esposito, and the others are right, that the ruin of political modernity cannot but affect symbolic production in a serious way. If so, then we would be living in a time when we can only have literature without concept, nonconceptual artistic production in general, as we await the only ever potential arrival of the new. The conceptual ruin of political action would have come to meet the nonconceptuality of symbolic production, or vice versa. ¡La primera República del Sur convertida en Reino del Terror! ¿No les consta acaso que ha sido, por el contrario, la más justa, la más pacífica, la más noble, la de más completo bienestar y felicidad, la época de máximo esplendor disfrutada por el pueblo paraguayo en su conjunto y totalidad, a lo largo de su desdichada historia? (Dr. Francias words, in Roa Bastos, Yo el Supremo 303).

SPANISH GUERRILLAS AGAINST NAPOLEON: POLITICAL INTENSITY AND THE WORLD SPIRIT

At the basis of Carl Schmitt’s Partisan Theory. Intervention on the Concept of the Political (1963, but first presented at the Estudio General de Navarra in 1962) we find the partisan as a touchstone of the primary political division between friend and enemy. ‘‘The partisan problem . . . provides a touchstone. The various kinds of partisan war might multiply and aggregate so much in the practice of modern warfare while remaining so various in their fundamental assumptions that the criterion of the friend/ enemy binary represents a test for them’’ (Schmitt 23). For Schmitt, ‘‘the partisan becomes the true hero of the war where the opponents are criminalized as a whole, as in civil war pitting class enemies against one another, or where the main goal is the disposition of the regime of the enemy state. The criminalization of the enemy is a revolutionary blast that works in his favor. He fulfills the death sentence against the criminal and risks being considered a criminal or pest in his turn. Such is the logic of a war of just cause in the absence of recognition of a just enemy. The revolutionary partisan becomes the central figure of war in such cases’’ (22). In what follows I will point out three regimes of reading regarding the Spanish guerrilla: the instrumental reading, the control reading, and the nomic reading. To them I would like to add a fourth regime, which I call transcendental or rather quasitranscendental. The latter refers to the materiality of an affect for which I will retain Schmitt’s expression, ‘‘political intensity’’ (15). In the last instance political intensity must be opposed to the Hegelian notion of ‘‘world spirit’’*a notion that can only be meaningful in the context of a grand philosophy of history that, as such, and from the point of view of political intensity, is always already a practice of counterinsurgency. In First As Tragedy, Then As Farce Slavoj Žižek mentions right and left Hegelianisms as the decisive philosophies that will articulate the future of our world. If right Hegelianism will continue to found the evolution of the national state toward state capitalism, left Hegelianism will remain forever linked to the Hegelian defense of the Haitian revolution. ‘‘The future will be Hegelian*and much more radically than Fukuyama thinks. The only true alternative that awaits us*the alternative between socialism and communism*is the alternative between the two Hegels’’ (Zizek 148). But it seems to me Hegel never really defended the Haitian revolution as such. His idea was rather to give an account of it by absorbing it into his own brand of counterinsurgency. Hegelian counter-insurgency is of course specific, not to be confused with nationalist historiography or liberal or neo-liberal capture. But it remains counterinsurgency as it seeks to capture and appropriate political intensity at the service of a specific rendering of world history. Schmitt’s partisan theory already depends upon a nomic or hegemonic articulation of the partisan’s presence*in other words, for Schmitt’s theory to hold, the recognition of the partisan as a figure of the Hegelian world spirit remains a

El imperialismo hispano en tiempos de Carlos V

El objeto polemico de este libro es la idea de un imperialismo especificamente hispano, ya formada, pareceria, hacia el comienzo del siglo dieciseis. Espana habria tenido en si una potencialidad imperial solo en espera de su actualizacion. Desde su desembarco en La Coruna en 1520, Carlos habria adoptado un imaginario imperialista disponible en tierras espanolas cuya dimension esencial era una proyeccion benevolente de la catolicidad paneuropea o de hecho universal. Asi se hispanizaba la mision imperial. Solo quedaba su conversion en acto politico-militar. La meta era la Pax Catholica Hispana.