Introduction

For Felipe Foncea,

who dreams of scientists and snow.

It is clear that we are on a post postmodern time, enough is to read again Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne to realize that it says nothing new. Marx was wrong with his 11th thesis, and all the postmodern philosophers fell into the tramp: the relation to language games changed while the empirical reality that those games were trying to interpret was left unchanged (in the best places, worsened everywhere else). Even more, since the Borromean knot of Capital-Nation-State —which corresponds to Lacan’s Real, Symbolic and Imaginary— is supported by the subjective recognition on the triad individuals-discourse-institutions, and since they create each other in a dance that one could easily describe as macabre, interpret the world always meant to change it —something Marx was blind to. (If we follow this line of thought, we understand why psychoanalysis has political consequences: when the subject is devoid of a positive content, the relation towards discourses and institutions —nation and the state— changes dramatically.) This is why to politicize love works against the Borromean knot; this is why knowledge is the only commodity which is in itself revolutionary.

The problem of the new. Derrida touches upon it at the beginning of De la Gramatologie, a foundational text if there was one on the second half of the 20th century: “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.” (Derrida, in his europeaness, is not able to see that one should add to this an “or as a joke,” as Cesar Aira made us realize with his excellent short story Cecil Taylor; the New is a monstrous joke: Mozart, Bacon or Bolaño could be a good example of this.) The new, for be the new, needs to be the Other; the absolute other who comes without me being able to foresee her. And here is again where love is important. For her to appear as the always present and constitutive lack in myself, it is necessary for me to develop the most genial inventiveness to —not invent but— receive, out of undeserved grace, an other who is not called or expected. The arrival of the new and the arrival of the loved one share the same formal procedure of monstrous (and ridiculous) apparition, hence that love colors all the other procedures of truth (see Parallax View, p. 406). Science, art and politics can be seen as procedures of truth where the lack —injustice, ignorance, the old— is affirmed on its negative existence, to use the Hegelian formulation regarding love; in this tarrying with the negative is where subjects bring into being what was not, accomplishing the magical act of creation. Here Karatani almost overlaps with Derrida: “The veritable others whom we cannot anticipate are the ones who live in the future. Or, more accurately, the future is truly the future only insofar as it is of the other; the future we can anticipate is not the veritable future.” (Karatani, Transcritique p. 100) Derrida presents a more clear formulation on his documentary:

In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and “l’avenir.” The future is that which —tomorrow, later, next century— will be. There’s a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it’s l’avenir in that it’s the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.

Back to the Borromean knot. A fully transcendental critic must delineate the boundaries that shape our cognition at the same time from the three aforementioned domains: as individuals, as part of a (national) discourse and as members of institutions. My point is that this can be accomplished by a simultaneous critic of the three domains from where humans must be defined: at the biological level as living beings; at the linguistic level as symbolic beings; and at the social level as beings whose principal function is to exchange (love, commodities, thoughts, etc.). The aim of the critic is, of course, the distanciation of the subject from the three jails that have him prisoner: individuality (to buy what I want), nationality (to fight immigrants I do not like) and citizenship (to punish whom I wish). A successful distanciation from them would imply a radical change on reality; this is our hope and our bet. On the contrary, if it is not done, we obtain what Adorno recognized as the contemporary types,

those in whom any Ego is absent; consequently they do not act unconsciously in the proper meaning of this term, but simply mirror objective features. Together, they participate in this senseless ritual, following the compulsive rhythm of repetition[...] (cited on Zizek’s Metastases p. 19)

This senseless repetition of the same, is life at its worst....

Think outside the knot. Negate today the existence of the individual —the positive content that makes us human, that in ourselves which is really ourselves, independent of what we do in the world— is regarded as nonsense; Badiou’s definition of democratic materialism should be supplemented then as “there is nothing but [individual] bodies and languages.” On the contrary, institutions and nations are presented as mere fictions, fictions which have, of course, a positive existence; it is only the New Age obscurantism who tries to negate this. Take the case of punishment, as Wittgenstein noted (on his Lectures and Conversation on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief p.50):

“Why do we punish criminals? Is it for a desire of revenge? Is it to prevent the repetition of the crime?” And so on. The truth is that there is no one reason. There is the institution of punishing criminals. Different people support this for different reasons, and for different reasons in different cases and at different times. Some people support it out of a desire for revenge, some perhaps out of a desire of justice, some out to prevent the repetition of the crime, and so on. And so punishments are carried out. (Our emphasis.)

The institution of punishment, then, is independent of the subjective involvement of a people; it appears as an objective entity consubstantial to (the symbolic network that makes possible) a person’s identity. The same argument works with nation, so in the best romantic style, it is impossible for an individual to attain universality bypassing (the particular) national identity.

The relation between the particular and the Universal. As Karatani properly points out, for Kant the problem of antinomies was not a merely academic work; it concerned his most intimate struggle, the struggle for meaning that dwells in the core of every real subjectivity. (For real subjects, the world as such is unheimlich, they live in order to make it a proper place to live; I think, of course, of Socrates and Wittgenstein here, amongst others.) In this precise sense, then, one can say that there is an objective way of loving, and it is the one that makes the particular part of the Universal. The senseless repetition of objective features —go on a date, buy a house, make some children— are consequently false, since they do not comply with the objective definition of love: for love to be real it most be Universal, and —it goes without saying— the only form under which the Universal appears is as the New. (This definition of love, of course, changes with each real couple; or to put it in a slightly different way, love retroactively becomes what always already was with each love event.) To put it on more individual terms, one is a person not when one realizes one's own idiosyncrasy —enjoy your life, as they command— but rather when one acts as a human tout court, as a subject. It is for this reason that Kant touches the truth and changes humanity; human subjectivity is not the same after Kant —the same goes for the Copernican turn and all the other events on world’s History, they are always associated to a singular name. Reality as such is modified because an individual, a subject, could not do otherwise. Then, when Zizek says that

we should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while only with Kant and German Idealism is the excess to be fought absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself. (Parallax View p. 22)

We should read it quite literally, and understand this as the proverbial grain of sand that makes the pile: a posteriori, one can say that it was Kant who (magically) changed the core of human subjectivity in one strike and forever. He could accomplish this due to the vital character that his thought has for him, a life-or-death matter; being absolutely particular, Kant was universal; and as such, he changed the world.

To conclude, it is only through this distanciation —from the individual, discourses and institutions— that one can attempt a public use of reason. Reality works making unimaginable today what yesterday used to be possible; our work is to imagine what now is impossible but which tomorrow will be necessary. This is possible only by the public use of reason, a reason that considers the Other, the absolute other from l’avenir, the other who comes and whom I love; this is the only way to approach the Truth, an objective but engaged truth that will never be where we are, since we always arrive too late, making our search endless: wo es war, soll ich werden. We own it to them —to the others who shall— to change the world, as other did before us. The future will be Utopia —Tokio 5,345 AD, for example— or it won’t be.

Photo by Lost in Japan