“Life During Wartime: Infrapolitics and Posthegemony”
(with a coda of eleven theses on infrapolitics)
Presented at the III Seminario Crítico-Político Transnacional
“Pensamiento y terror social: El archivo hispano”
Cuenca, Spain
July, 2016
Why stay in college? Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time.
Can’t write a letter, can’t send a postcard.
I can’t write nothing at all.
–The Talking Heads
In what is no doubt the most famous theorist of war’s most famous claim, Carl Von Clausewitz tells us that “war has its root in a political object.” He goes on: “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means. [. . .] War is not merely a political act, but a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means” (119). There is, then, for Clausewitz an essential continuity between war and politics; they share the same rationality and ends. And this notion has in turn led many to think of politics, reciprocally, as a form of warfare. The German theorist Carl Schmitt, for instance, defines politics in suitably martial terms as a clash between “friend” and “enemy”: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (The Concept of the Political 26). Moreover, this invocation of the term “enemy” is scarcely metaphorical. Schmitt argues that “an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (28), and he further qualifies the particular type of enmity involved in political disagreement in terms of classical theories of warfare: the political enemy is a “public enemy,” that is a hostis, as opposed to a “private enemy.” He quotes a Latin lexicon to make his point: “A public enemy (hostis) is one with whom we are at war publicly. [. . .] A private enemy is a person who hates us, whereas a public enemy is a person who fights against us” (29).
Likewise, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci also calls upon the language of warfare to describe political activity, which he classifies in terms of the “war of manoeuvre” by which a political party bids for influence among the institutions of so-called civil society, and the “war of movement” when it is in a position to seek power directly from the state. Indeed, the notion of an essential continuity between armed violence and civil dispute informs Gramsci’s fundamental conception of “hegemony,” which characterizes politics in terms of a combination of coercion and consent, the attempt to win or secure power alternately by means of force or persuasion. War is politics, politics is war: the basic goals and rationale are the same, we are told. It is just the means that are different.
Keep reading… (PDF document)
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.
Posthegemony 