Alberto Moreiras
Volume 17, 2025
All I want with this paper is to initiate a straightforward, hopefully upright conversation. In all modesty and without pretensions, if such a thing is possible. Obviously I will start from my own situation, from my own place, but in full knowledge of the fact that nobody owns a place, and that any place is always already not just provisional but subject to radical displacement. A place is only ever a place of wandering and errancy. I think it was Nietzsche who said in Ecce Homo that we can never advance beyond our own skin, that we can only ever make explicit what we already have inside us. This is an old theme of philosophy, perhaps going back at least to Plato’s Meno: yes, you already know everything, everything is always already in you, it is just a matter of bringing it out, of making it explicit, of letting it come out of silence, but the status of that “everything” is of course bound by and to a certain nothingness or a certain disavowal: the disavowal that makes us think that there is nothing in the other, that we are always ever the guardians of truth, which is therefore to be understood as our own truth. But then what about other truths, the truths of others? I am not sure the powerful understanding of truth as unconcealment, truth as bringing things out of concealment, is commensurate with what I am trying to say. There is also the truth that comes from exposure, which is an experiential truth obtained in errancy, where what is learned is not the secret of the other, or even the secret of oneself, but rather something else, and in the first place the very place of the secret. This experience of the secret is not to be resolved in digging it up or finding it out, it is not a matter of unconcealing the secret, not even a matter of having the secret revealed. It is only a matter of respecting it. This is perhaps the fundamental insight of what we have been calling infrapolitics, and there I will start.
As you all know, this gathering was convoked under the idea, not yet the promise, of a certain living together in the end-times, if you prefer the near- or quasi-end-times that we have come to name the Anthropocene as the new global dominant or universal predicament. Can decolonials and infrapoliticals, if you will pardon the unforgivable reduction of this naming, ever live together now? As opposed, perhaps, to dying together? Such would be the most vulgar or inauthentic formulation of the question that gathers us. Are there irreconcilable differences that could only be subjected to a postapocalyptic final judgment by a third party, an illeity, never a neutral one? Unless of course the final judgment were to be the apocalypse itself. Another vulgar or inauthentic question might emerge from the first one: is this an issue that affects only decolonials and infrapoliticals? Or is the difference between the two itself only symptomatic of a wider state of affairs that affects contemporary thought, or what goes under that name in the global academy and beyond? Well, both decoloniality and infrapolitics come to us through academic filiation, both modalities of thought are children of the university, even if they are rebellious, or seemingly rebellious, children. Decoloniality of course claims that what it does goes against the grain of the structural Eurocentrism of the university, of its very idea, and infrapolitics claims that what it does or attempts to do is precisely exodic because it is the response to a call that comes from some absolute outside, which would be in the first place the outside of the university.
But I don’t want to be too grandiose, there might be time for that later. Let me for the moment restrict myself to the destiny of thought today, or of academic thought, caught up as I see it between the twin imperatives of technical reproduction and the avoidance of terminal nihilism. I call them twin imperatives because technical reproduction and the avoidance of terminal nihilism may be one and the same thing, maybe those twins are monozygotic and not dizygotic. At least in the misguided but nevertheless dominant understanding of them. In any case, it remains a fact that decoloniality might adopt as its thing the avoidance of terminal nihilism, and infrapolitics as well, but the key question is: are either decoloniality or infrapolitics subject to the imperative of technical reproduction? Do we do what we do because there is a program in place, a university program after all, that we have been called or elected to develop? Can we in fact affirm a subtraction from the program, to such an extent that we could posit either decoloniality or infrapolitics as free decisions of thought?
But the program, any program, is always already a form of maieutics, the framework for maieutics. You know that maieutics comes from the Greek word for midwifery. The maieutic teacher helps students bring forth the understanding that is already latent in their minds. In our case, the university would be the midwife, it teaches us the same way we teach our students: what it teaches is for us to make explicit what is already latent, seeded in our minds as university children. In an essay on Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida explains that Levinas, for one, opposed all maieutics. He says:
This master never separated his teaching from a strange and difficult thought of teaching—a magisterial teaching in the figure of welcoming, a welcoming where ethics interrupts the philosophical tradition of giving birth and foils the ruse of the master who feigns to efface himself behind the figure of the midwife. For the study of which we are speaking cannot be reduced to a maieutics, which would reveal to me only what I am already capable of. (17)
But maieutics teaches nothing, because it does not expose me to any otherness. Maieutics is always more of the same, yes, in the form of power/knowledge, which reaffirms the property of what is proper under the form of some essentiality. But what if we were to renounce maieutics for the sake of exposure to what exceeds and has always exceeded our capacity of return to the self, to the proper self or to the property of the self? One could indeed say that this renunciation of maieutics is the very opening of decoloniality: that decoloniality is, in its full rigor and in the fulfillment of its promise, a radical opening to the other, an endorsement of a messianicity that awaits, without waiting, for the arrival of the other. Perhaps, although the problems, we all know, start there.
What are we to do with the arrival of the other, provided that it is the other who comes, and not the inverted figure of ourselves in a concave mirror? Concesso non dato: it is not so easy to abandon maieutics, it is not so easy to abandon the program. The decolonial researcher, going in all good faith towards an encounter with the other, meets only himself in an inverted form—another way of saying, certainly, that the risk of decolonization is an insidious return of coloniality, now disavowed. I want to be particularly careful now when I say, trembling, that if the goal presiding over a possible arrival of the other, if the teleology of the arrival of the other in messianic decoloniality is restitution, partial or full, there is always the damning possibility of a wayward restitution, of a restitution that would only restitute the goal of the researcher, colonizing as such even if we call it liberation or emancipation. Of course it can and should be said that the very possibility of a wayward or thwarted restitution is to be affirmed not denied; that without establishing wayward restitution as a condition of possibility for proper restitution there could be no restitution whatsoever. Things can always go wrong, which is the very ground for thinking that things could also go well. If they go well, what, then? What would have been accomplished? True restitution? That would amount to saying that, at the end of the decolonial endeavor, the decolonized subject would have been re-established in its proper place, some purity of archaic identity would be ready to be assumed. I do not think it is useful for me to point out that this notion of true restitution is fraught with all kinds of problems, beyond the obvious ones of anachronicity and de-spatialization, but let me suggest that true restitution is also the absolute dream of the master of Western metaphysics, as indicated by one of its founding words, namely, the old Parmenides fragment that tells us that thinking and being are the same: in true restitution the identity of thinking and being would have been accomplished, through the midwifery of the decolonial academic—a thought that introduces the specter of full metaphysical recolonization in the midst of the decolonial enterprise.
But this can be countered. It would seem to be enough to say that decolonization can never be accomplished, that it remains an infinite task, that it is only a regulatory idea or ideal: the decolonial researcher retains the position of a teaching midwife, in a perverse or perverted manner: what it teaches is not the full equation of thinking and being for the colonial subject but rather only ever the impossible obstacles that stand in the way of such an equation; and that the teaching of the impossible obstacles interrupts or perverts midwifery by opening it up to a fundamental and fundamentally critical activity, which is in the first place an activity of self-critique—the decolonial researcher critiques herself through the very focus on the infinite destruction of Western and imperialist presuppositions. The decolonial researcher knows that she risks infinitely her own inverted return in a concave mirror, a distorted speculative image, and her brand of maieutics is precisely the destruction, endless, ceaseless, of her own presuppositions, in order to open the way for the unconditional arrival of the other. That way the decolonial researcher exposes herself, and what she teaches, and learns, beyond maieutics, is respect for the secret of the other. It is a work of hospitality. Decoloniality, under this guise, is infinite and unconditional hospitality. This is the way in which decoloniality could perhaps avoid the charge of engaging in merely technical reproduction of university discourse—after all, since the Enlightenment, liberation and emancipation have been the explicit goals of university discourse–, with one caveat: not if infinite decolonization thinks of itself as only ever approaching, without ever finally reaching, the conditions of possibility for full restitution. There can be no restitution without a reengagement of maieutic metaphysics, in the same way that there can be no equality of thinking and being except in death. The ideal of restitution must be drastically abandoned, also because it remains an ideal—a teleological or providential projection that is very much part and parcel of the archaic origins of the West but sustained until today, which is the epoch of a new global dominant that ruins in advance all theodicy.
Infrapolitics, on the other hand, entertains no business with restitution. It has always been known that there is no adequation of thinking and being, and that thinking and being can only meet at the moment of the impossible possibility of death, by which time it is too late. Infrapolitics opens itself to the arrival of the other in the absolute recognition and respect for the secret of the other as such—a secret that infrapolitics does not want to unconceal, does not want to reveal. Infrapolitics is a practice of the silent secret, which is therefore essentially outside every maieutics, outside every ventriloquist articulation of the voice of the other. Infrapolitics lets the secret be, or dwell, outside any temptation of ventriloquism, including self-ventriloquism, an impossible trope, I know. But there is also a bad infrapolitics, just as there is a bad decoloniality. If bad decoloniality is the decolonial practice that aims at the restitution of the full identity of the other, which is a disavowed endeavor of interested recolonization, then bad infrapolitics is the infrapolitical practice of imposing its renunciation of restitution on political or juridical affairs. Infrapolitics is not a politics, it is only the condition of possibility for any politics worthy of the name of democracy. But infrapolitics can exceed itself into politics in the attempt to dictate restrictions for political or juridical affairs. If infrapolitics thinks of a state of affairs situated beyond power and impotence, then infrapolitics must restrain itself from projecting itself into power, which might in fact result in further impotence. Bad infrapolitics results from a crossing of the line that separates absolutely existence from politics, thus contaminating both terminally, and accessing the impracticable and interminable night where all the cows are black. We may indeed call it the night of the Anthropocene. Which is not to say that politics are forbidden to infrapolitics: politics are wide open, but always ever under another name that remains to be decided or invented.
Around the same years in which the very notion of the Anthropocene came to obscure light, Elizabeth Roudinesco interviewed Jacques Derrida on the subject of psychoanalysis. At the beginning of the conversation Derrida makes reference to the fact that, at present, that is, in that very moment, the secret of psychoanalysis “calls . . . for another ethics, another right, another politics. In short, another law (a law of the other, of course, another heteronomy)” (168). The same could be said about the secret of infrapolitics. Derrida refers to Freudian analysis, in spite of its problems and metaphysical or ontotheological hangups, as liberating a force that “always involves the reaffirmation of a reason ‘without alibi,’ whether theological or metaphysical” (172). No theological or humanist alibi: I am not sure that could be said of the decolonial option, but such could be my hope, the hope that would make it possible, from my neck of the woods, to consider the possibility of “living together.” I want to close this paper by quoting and glossing a couple of paragraphs from that interview that I find particularly pertinent for our discussion at this meeting. Derrida says:
Globalization is Europeanization. And yet, Europe is withdrawing; it is being fissured and transformed. What is exported, in a European language, immediately sees itself called into question again in the name of what was potentially at work in this European legacy itself, in the name of a possible auto-hetero-deconstruction. Or even, I would say, of autoimmunity. (178)
Notice how the withdrawal of the European legacy is understood as a thwarted maieutics: what is potentially in the legacy operates the deconstruction of the legacy. A fidelity to the legacy implies the betrayal of the legacy no doubt for the stake of another ethics, another right, another politics. But nothing is guaranteed in the process. Derrida continues:
The non-European ‘cultural zones’ . . . while developing a powerful and indisputable contestation of Eurocentrism, are in the process of letting themselves be Europeanized far beyond the imperialist or colonialist forms we know. We are therefore witnessing, we are participating in—whether we like it or not—this double movement: globalization of Europeanness and contestation of Eurocentrism. (178)
It is a double solicitation where I think both decoloniality and infrapolitics are drastically implicated, perhaps even on opposite sides from the point of view of some of their basic assumptions, but there is a peculiarity to this: those opposed sides are aiming for the same thing, which is a free decision for thought. Looking for it, looking for its very possibility in the dark night of the Anthropocene is indeed the avoidance of nihilism and the contestation of merely technical reproduction of university discourse. The stakes are very high, and they are the stakes of a necessary revolution, for which we can only engage in a sort of non-passive wait. We cannot influence machination, it would be naïve to think we can. So—let us at least not cooperate with it. As another French thinker, Jean Vioulac, puts it, citing Epicurus on lathe biosas kai me politeuesthai (live hidden and don’t play politics), in the understanding that today’s politics is machination itself, “the thinker must not have the naiveté . . . to believe himself capable of in any way influencing the sovereign power of machination. His only responsibility is to think, and the thinker’s solitude is the abstention that gives him the distance and the freedom to think: that is, to think the event that defines our epoch, to try to unconceal what in it is capable of working off the threat, and to wait for it” (65).
Isn’t that non-passive wait the common trait to both infrapolitics and decoloniality in their best figures? If so, we can indeed live together, or at least survive, or at least look for the possibility of survival, in necessary separation, since the very arrival of the other presupposes it.
Wellborn, Texas, October 2024
Works Cited
- Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Transl. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
- —. and Elizabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue. Transl. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
- Vioulac, Jean. Apocalypse of Truth. Heideggerian Meditations. Transl. Matthew Peterson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2021.
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